Abstract
This article analyses the function and symbolic currency of Poland’s recent literary and artistic motif of the returning Jew, which brings the nation’s Jewish Holocaust victims back to their homes as ghosts, spectres and reanimated corpses. It explores the ability of this trope—the defining feature of what I call ‘Polish Holocaust horror’—to cultivate the memory of complicitous and collaborative Polish behaviour during the Holocaust years, and to promote renewed Polish-Jewish relations based upon a working-through of this difficult history. In the article I explore Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 film Aftermath as a self-reflexive product of this experimental genre, which has been considered ethically ambiguous for its necropolitical treatment of Jews and politically controversial for its depiction of Poles as perpetrators. My analysis examines haunting as central to these popular cultural constructions of Holocaust memory—a device that has been used within the genre to mourn but also expel guilt for the previously forgotten or supressed dispossession and murder of Jews by some of their Polish neighbours.
Highlights
During the 2010 performance of the first quasi-fictional1 International Congress of the JewishRenaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), held at Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer performance space, Israeli director and artist Yael Bartana issued a ‘manifesto’ pertaining to the group’s hypothetical mission.Seeming to speak on behalf of a displaced yet returning Jewish population that once thrived in Poland, the manifesto stated: ‘We plan no invasion
Rather we shall arrive like a procession of the ghosts of your old neighbours, the ones haunting you in your dreams, the neighbours you never had the chance to meet’ (Bartana 2010)
Victimisation and the fact that he ripped up 328 Polish Jewish gravestones reinforcing an old road
Summary
During the 2010 performance of the first quasi-fictional International Congress of the Jewish. Rather we shall arrive like a procession of the ghosts of your old neighbours, the ones haunting you in your dreams, the neighbours you never had the chance to meet’ (Bartana 2010) These lines self-reflexively tap into a highly emotive national Polish rhetoric of healing and haunting, of wounds and scars, and, perhaps most significantly, of neighbours—the title of Polish historian Jan T. Słobodzianek and director Paweł Pawlikowski, the genre’s simulated intergenerational Polish-Jewish encounters constitute an opportunity for Poland to confront the uncomfortable reality of Jewish murder and dispossession during the Holocaust years. They threaten to provide closure in relation to such anti-Jewish violence, which is re-enacted via the permanent suspension of the genre’s. This article exposes the ethical ambivalence of the Jewish return in its necropolitical exploitation of the lived—a form of violence in and of itself that can be traced in various antisemitic tropes and mythologies, from the medieval to contemporary period
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