Exposing Poland’s shameful past: legacies of perpetration and dirty memory in Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath

Abstract

ABSTRACT Employing concepts of traumatic memory, post-memory, and dirty memory, this article analyzes the narrative of Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012) to shed light on broader processes of (non-)engagement with the traumatic, culturally mediated past connected with the tangled legacies of the Holocaust in Poland. Analysis of the film’s narrative and attention to its reception in Poland can help to diagnose the condition of collective memory of the Shoah prevailing in contemporary Polish society. Adopting a new materialist lens, the article complicates the issue of contested legacies of violence, considering also the perpetrators’ trauma inherited by representatives of the second generation, situating both in the context of the dominant mnemonic strategies circulating in Polish culture since the end of World War II. It argues that the same interpretative tropes still shape ways of negotiating legacies of violence, silencing undesired narratives of collaboration in and responsibility for crimes committed against Polish Jewry during World War II.