Narrative- and Space-Making in the City on the Example of Lublin

Abstract

This paper discusses the literary, artistic, scientific, and educational narratives that are (re)created to facilitate the city’s recovery of memory in the wake of the Holocaust.This is the case with Lublin.The story of the complete destruction of its Jewish quarter in the Second World War is a tragically familiar one in Central Europe, even though it had been silenced and forgotten for decades during the communist period. I would like to analyze an essayistic project that searches for a new language about a place left empty. How could one fill the void by making it mean something to new people, becoming their own narrative, and preserving the presence of the city’s former inhabitants? How is it possible to create a new mythology of a place? I assume that such questions must have been the starting point for essays on Lublin byWładysław Panas (1947–2005), related to the commemoration in the context of urban space. My text comes in four parts. I begin with general information and historical background, as well as an introduction to the analysis of Panas’s essay Oko Cadyka (The Eye of the Tzaddik) − the main subject of my paper − which exemplifies the reflection on the creation of narrative and urban space in contemporary humanities. In the second part, I focus on and contextualize the relationship between text and city that the essay postulates. The third part deals with theoretical approaches to interpretation. The fourth part underlines the scientific and critical aspects of Panas’s text, which questions the language of science − the humanities, historiography, and theory in general. I end with a look at some artistic projects inspired by his images.