Reconstructing Memory: The Holocaust in Polish Public Debates

ISBN-13: 9783631623657 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 287 str.

Piotr Forecki

Opis

The book aims to reconstruct and analyze the disputes over the Polish-Jewish past and memory in public debates in Poland between 1985 and 2012, from the discussions about Claude Lanzmann s Shoah, Jan Blonski s essay The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto, Jan Tomasz Gross books Neighbours, Fear and Golden Harvest, to the controversies surrounding the premiere of Wladyslaw Pasikowski s The Aftermath. The analysis includes the course and dynamics of the debates and, most importantly, the panorama of opinions revealed in the process. It embraces the debates held across the entire spectrum of the national press. The selection of press was not limited by the level of circulation or a subjective opinion of their value. The main intention was to reconstruct the widest possible variety of opinions that were revealed during the debates. Broad symbolic elites participated in the debates: people who exercised control over publicly accessible knowledge, legitimacy of beliefs and the content of public discourse."

Spis treści

Contents: Public Discourse - Collective Memory and Collective Forgetting - Collective Forgetting of the Holocaust - The Holocaust - Anti-Semitism - Difficult Past - Jan Tomasz Gross' Neighbours - Crime in Jedwabne - Claude Lanzmann's Shoah - Jan Blonski's essay The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto - Hate Speech - Political Transition - Symbolic Elites.

O autorze

Piotr Forecki, PhD, is Assistant Professor of the Section of Political Culture at the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznán (Poland). He is a member of the Jewish Historical Institute Association. His academic research concerns the Polish memory of the Holocaust, the representation of the Holocaust in feature films, anti-Semitism and hate speech in public discourse.