Ausgewählte Probleme der polnischen und tschechischen Holocaustliteratur und -kultur

Abstract

Reinhard Ibler, ed. Ausgewahlte Probleme der polnischen und tschechischen Holocaustliteratur und-kultur. Materialen des Internationalen Workshops in Glessen, 27- 28 May 2010. Munchen and Berlin: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2012. 160 pp. euro28.00, paper.The words and may sound incompatible. is the generally accepted non-Hebraic word (in Hebrew the word is Shoa) for the extermination of the Jewish people. The reference in the title of this German-language book cannot mean that the as such is culture. The wording signals that we are concerned with the effect of the cultural turn in the humanities, with scholarly analyses of the commemoration of the by way of memorials and monuments and as a subject in literature, theatre, and film. Thus the wording Holocaust culture indicates that the is a subspecies of our culture.The theme of the in Czech and Polish literature, in Polish theatre, and in Czech (and one Slovak) film was the subject of four workshops in 2010-2012 in a co- operative project of the universities of Glessen in Hesse, Lodz in Poland, and Prague in the Czech Republic. The volume under review contains some of the papers presented in the initial workshop in 2010. The project offers an ingenious solution to the perennial controversy concerning the putative uniqueness of the Holocaust. The argument of the project is simple: the must not be erased from European historical consciousness and thus must be preserved as a subject matter according to the constitutive rules of different media and genres. The extreme case is absence, i.e., the as a void but anyhow visible (!) through and in innumerable traces.The core problem in this volume is the representation of the in the fine arts, film included. The articles are directed at a specifically knowledgeable audience. All the Polish and Czech texts that are analyzed are rendered both in the original language and in translation to German. It helps if the reader knows the three languages, because the endeavour, to a large degree, concerns not only the problem of how to represent the but also the problem of how, with the original semantics intact, to translate into another language tales about the unspeakable. Two essays deserve special attention.Adam Jarosz shows how the theme of idyll can be used to transmit the experience of being a survivor of or a witness to the Holocaust. His examples are from Polish literature in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, i.e., avant le nom, before the concept. Tadeusz Borowski was a survivor from a concentration camp. In 1947 he wrote the poem Sielanka [Idyll], which portrays how in a meadow that covers the ashes of victims, people collect wild flowers. There are no graves around, nota bene. The Nobel Laureate (1980) Czeslaw Mitosz in 1945 wrote the poem W Warszawie [In Warsaw]. It recalls Antigone's lament, counterpoising this with the setting I will sing about the garden parties (festyny), and closes with the declaration that, in the end, two words remain as a homage to the victims: truth and justice (prawda i sprawiedliwosc). …