Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek

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Chapter One Mount of Remembrance

      Radio: And then the Germans marched into Warsaw and said that Poland wasn’t Poland anymore, and Warsaw wasn’t its capital but a rubble-filled hole in the ground …

      Little Metal Girl: Dead right, a hole! A shithole. I hate this city. The tube, wrrr, the trams, bruu, stinking buses, and wherever you’re headed, you go over dead bodies, dead bodies, dead bodies!

Dorota Masłowska: Między nami dobrze jest¹

Aleksandra Ubertowska argues that the above passage from Dorota Masłowska’s play is an affirmation of posthistoricity in the sense of “the atrophy of ‘grand narratives’ […] which lay claim to imposing order on the magma-like, amorphous reality, to forcing it into a coherent shape and meaning.”²

Ubertowska is right, but her remark deserves some elaboration. The point is that the words of the Little Metal Girl reverberate with the summa of contemporary Polish socio-national projects, whose implementation is far from successful. The methodology of parochial, nationalistically-coloured patriotism has apparently failed, along with the concept of ethical-aesthetic education, if aims and destinations are only reached “over dead bodies” and in the rhythm of Julian Tuwim’s celebrated “Locomotive.”³ As “dead bodies, dead bodies, dead bodies” ←11 | 12→replace the poem’s original devices: the rhythmic “rail track, rail track, rail track” and the onomatopoeic “clickety, clickety, clickety click,” we are witnessing a cultural change of the guard and a concomitant revision of several paradigms which have been institutionally inculcated into the consciousness of the young generation.⁴

The components of any memory-centred project change in parallel to ideological, political and aesthetic transformations. Consequently, “Project Memory” should primarily be examined in terms of the generation, i.e. of the community as well as of the agendas and roles of institutions which cast the past in desirable moulds. Such pursuits result in fostering postmemory, as proposed by Marianne Hirsch, who pointedly distinguishes between the memory of those who experienced certain events (the Holocaust in this case) and the memory of those who were born later and thus had no such direct experiences. Postmemory makes up not only the space of a given generational community⁵ or a locus of the constant negotiation of meanings, but also a site of oppression by institutions that develop strategies of remembering. Because of its specific flexibility, postmemory, which is distributed over multiple postmemorial narratives ascribed to various generations, becomes an “interpretation of the narrated events, a cultural representation which is taking shape here and now.”⁶

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      Given this, examining the postmemorial representations of the Holocaust in literature for a young readership is expedient not only in order to catalogue the images of the Holocaust but also, primarily perhaps, in order