Zimzum Issue 1

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5 WAR AND FASCISM IT WAS MY FIRST VISIT HERE, I HAVE IN BETWEEN THE FAMILY HOMES. WAS WALKING THROUGH THE SITES, ABANDONED AND FORGOTTEN FALL/WINTER 2015 ISSUE OF WAS BUILT TO ADMIT. TUNNEL. SITES, TUNNELS, SOUTH AS A STATE AROUND THE SAME THE MAIN SITE WHAT AFFECTED ETC. OVER A OF MIND, THE TIME, THE RISE I ALSO HAVE TO IS THE TUNNEL ME THE MOST WAS PERIOD OF YEARS. PUBLICATION THAT OF THE RIGHT- ADMIT THAT, IN THE NEARBY NOT ALL OF THE BECAUSE IF SO, ACCOMPANIED THE WING PARTY FPÖ UNTIL THEN, I MOUNTAINS. INFORMATION, ALL I WAS AND I AM INSTALLATION OF BEGAN, WITH HAD NEVER BEEN IT WAS MEANT AS OF THE PICTURES STILL WONDERING: DOCUMENTA14. JÖRG HAIDER AS TO A KZ BEFORE. A REPLACEMENT OF MASS GRAVES IS THIS THEIR LEADER, EBENSEE WAS FOR PEENEMÜNDE AND STARVED TRANSFORMATION? THERE HAS TO BE CULMINATING IN THE FIRST I EVER AFTER THEY BODIES, BUT MY A LANDSCAPE THE COALITION VISITED. ABANDONED THE REACTION. THEN I CERTAINLY FOR WANDERING GOVERNMENT WITH THE ÖVP IN 2000, CONTINUING UNTIL NOW, WITH THE REPATRIATION OF THE TERM AND CONCEPT HEIMAT. HERE, IT ALWAYS WAS A STORY OF HIDING AND FORGETTING. MOST OF THE ORIGINAL CAMP NO LONGER EXISTS; INSTEAD, THERE ARE DETACHED HOUSES WITH SITE IN 1943. THE PLAN WAS TO CONTINUE THE DEVELOPMENT AND RESEARCH OF THE V-2 ROCKETS UNDERGROUND AND IN STECRET. WHEN THE US 80TH INFANTRY DIVISION ARRIVED AT THE CAMP SITE ON 6TH MAY 1945, I WASN'T SHAKEN. I SIMPLY ACKNOWLEDGED THE FACTS AND THE PICTURES I WAS LOOKING AT. DON'T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE IT. THERE IS THIS OPENING VERSE OF A POEM THAT I KEEP CIRCLING AROUND AND I REMEMBER A TIME WHEN THIS WAS DIFFERENT. IN PLACE. I LIKE THE PICTURE OF A LANDSCAPE, ANY LANDSCAPE, THAT CAUSES MOTION, MOVEMENT. MOTION, MOVEMENT OF BODY AND, OF COURSE, OF MIND IT DEPENDS FENCES AROUND THE DEATH TOLL I REMEMBER A COMING BACK TO ON HOW I AM NOT ONE OF THEIR GARDENS. WAS AROUND 8500 TIME WHEN I AGAIN AND AGAIN WANDERING EMPHASISING IT. WHAT THEY PEOPLE. COULDN'T SHAKE EVER SINCE I THROUGH A THIS IS EBENSEE, DID LEAVE AS OFF THE ANGER, STARTED WRITING LANDSCAPE AND LOOKING NORTH A REMINDER IS THEY CALLED IT THE DESPAIR, YOU THIS LETTER. WHERE I AM TOWARDS LAKE THE ORIGINAL PROJEKT ZEMENT. WHILE STANDING GOING TO. TRAUNSEE. ENTRANCE, FOR IN FRONT OF IT'S A VERSE I JUST RECENTLY EXAMPLE, THAT I READ ALL OF A VARIETY OF BY BRANDON VISITED THE TOWN. NOW SPANS A SMALL STREET THE INFORMATION ABOVE WHILE I MONUMENTS, REMEMBRANCE SHIMODA THAT I FOUND IN THE Christoph Szalay, writer, curator, and commissioner for literature at Forum Stadtpark Graz. LETTER FROM BERLIN REMEMBRANCE CLUTURE IN KREMS Max Czollek Reinhard Resch Liebe Hadas, bei dem Abendessen bei einem gemeinsamen Freund im Friedrichshain hattest du mir ja gesagt, dass du ein paar Polemiken von mir zugespielt haben möchtest. Und weil dieser Beitrag für ein österreichisches Publikum gedacht ist, fällt mir eine Diskussion ein, die ich mit Stefan Schmitzer nach der Montagsbühne in Graz begonnen habe. Dabei ging es um den letzten Zyklus aus den Jubeljahren, meinem zweiten Lyrikband, wo ein lyrisches Ich auf den Kabbalisten Isaak Luria trifft, dessen Ursprungsort, Safed, sich nunmehr in Galizien befindet. Der Titel des Textes ist auf Hebräisch, in dem Zyklus wimmelt es von Referenzen. Schmitzer ging es daher - wenig überraschend - um zweierlei: die Frage nach der Exklusivität des Textes für ein bestimmtes Publikum und die Frage, ob das Aufgreifen theologischer Referenzen nicht an sich problematisch sein könnte. Keine Ahnung, was genau er mit letzterem Punkt meinte, vielleicht ist Schmitzer ja radikaler Atheist, was ich respektiere, aber irgendwie ineffektiv finde. Wenn du einen Gläubigen angreifst, dann musst du es auf der Ebene des Glaubens tun, sonst verpufft das Ganze und am Ende redet man völlig aneinander vorbei. Zur Frage nach dem Verständnis und Grenzen des Verstehens ist für mich seit den Jubeljahren an unterschiedlichen Stellen immer wieder aufgetaucht. Denn es ist doch so: wenn man in Deutschland von den Juden spricht, dann hören die Deutschen (Kritiker, Lyriker) immer nur Auschwitz, Antisemitismus oder Israel. Es ist nahezu egal, was ich sage, der normale Jude kommt aus dem Stetl, ist aus Auschwitz befreit worden und dann zumindest teilweise nach Israel ausgewandert. Ein Jude ohne Familie in Israel? - undenkbar! Keine gute Geschichte zum Antisemitismus auf Lager? - langweilig! Keine Shoahgeschichte? - Enttäuschtes Murmeln, Themenwechsel. Der normale Jude ist der Überlebende. Da im öffentlichen Feuilleton und in der Lyrikszene fast nur Deutsche sprechen, bestimmt das auch die Position, die ich als Autor öffentlich einnehmen kann: is halt Judenlyrik, entweder lieb, oder böse, oder mit Chuzpe oder Witz. Wenn ich also öffentlich immer "Judenlyrik" schreibe no-matter-what, dann muss die Gegenseite auch sichtbar werden als das, was sie offensichtlich ist: Kartoffellyrik. Da wird dann nichts mehr erklärt, da wird einfach nur noch geschrieben, fuck Kunstkritik bzw. wir müssen ganz woanders anfangen, uns unseren eigenen Rezeptionsrahmen zu basteln. (Denn wo wären die Verhandlung deutsch-jüdischer Identität im deutschsprachigen Raum heute diskutierbar oder rezipierbar, ohne dass sie gleichzeitig im Kontext eines deutschen Begehrens nach den Juden stünde?!) Ein Bekannter von mir wies mal darauf hin, dass wir, wenn wir als Referenzrahmen eine Art allgemein geteiltes Wissen ansetzen, eigentlich nur Kunst produzieren können, die für einen 9-Klässler geeignet ist. Da kommt dann natürlich nichts Gescheites bei raus. Stattdessen plädiere ich für die produktive Überforderung. Denn die Grenzen des Wissens sind zugleich politische Grenzen, in denen sich das Verdrängte ebenso spiegelt wie das, was eine Gesellschaft für relevant hält. Wenn meine LeserInnen über das Judentum nicht mehr wissen, als dass es vernichtet wurde und schwarze Hüte trägt, dann ist der Rückgriff auf jüdische Traditionen zugleich eine Archäologie, die verschüttete Perspektiven wieder ausgräbt und in ihrer Relevanz für die Gegenwart befragt. Diese Strategie des Neuansetzens habe ich im Konzept der Desintegration zu bündeln versucht. Der gleichnamige Kongress Anfang Mai am Gorki Theater Berlin war einer Umsetzung dieses Konzeptes gewidmet. Dabei ging es mir letztendlich um die Erzeugung einer öffentlichen Diskursposition: Diese (desintegrierten) Juden sind nicht mehr verfügbar für ein deutsches Begehren nach den „Juden“, für die Konstruktion der eigenen Identität oder dieses ewige narzistische, unwürdig geheiligte und hochgradig clichierte Gerede über die Shoah. Denn das ganze Gedächtnistheater läuft doch letztlich auf eins hinaus: die Normalisierung der deutschjüdischen Verkeilung. An dieser Verkeilung ist nun aber nichts normal. Und wenn es nach mir geht, wird das auch so bleiben. Darum Rache als Topos der Selbstermächtigung (A.H.A.S.V.E.R, Verlagshaus Berlin 2016), darum das paranoische Schreiben als Gegenwartsbewältigung der deutschen Sprache (ebd.) oder eben die Erkundung der jüd. Theologie / Theodizee als Ressource und Mittel der Differenzerzeugung. Alles lyrische Modi, Versuche „auf einem untergehenden Schiff aus der eigenen Haut zu entkommen“ (Brasch). Für den eingangs erwähnten Zyklus zu Isaak Luria könnte man Gershom Sholems Überlegungen zur Lurianischen Kabbalah lesen und ihre historische Einbettung in die Exilerfahrung. Das Konzept der ZimZum als freiwilliges Exil Gottes, was darauf hinauslaufen könnte, dass wir zwar nicht Schuld haben am Zustand der Welt, wohl aber, wenn sie einfach so bleibt. Das mag nahezu kitschig klingen, historisch ist es aber zugleich eine katastrophale Aussage, da sie den Opfern eine partielle Verantwortung zuweist an ihrer eigenen Verfolgung. Hätten sie eben mehr und härter beten sollen. Bestimmte Dinge liegen außerhalb der eigenen Einflussnahme. In der Gegenwart ist die Normalität ist eines dieser Konzepte, von denen wir uns dringend verabschieden sollten. Jude zu sein bedeutet, Unruhe zu stiften. Ich glaube, darauf sollten wir stolz sein! Mit herzlichen Grüßen aus Berlin, Max Max Czollek is a German poet, member of the G13 collective of authors, and curator of Babelsprech International Reinhard Resch, Mayor of the city of Krems. Why is it important to recondition this dark chapter of our city’s history? Because we should never forget. Shakespeare once called memories the „Guardians of the Brain“ and this is why remembrance is so important. We need to stay vigilant to avoid such repetition of processes. After the war, there was a lot of suppression and fading out. But as time came, events came back to light and people started to engage in processing the past. In the last years Krems developed a commemorative culture, starting from written thesis by students, annual memorial services or books about Krems between 1934 and 1945. As Primo Levi, a surviver of Auschwitz said: „It happened, and therefore it can happen again. There lies the core of what we have to say.
7 NORMALISATION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE THIRD POST-WAR GENERATION The case of Poland Jagoda Budzik G eneration - a term that inherently refers to elapsed time: seems to also provide an opportunity to look inside the internal dynamics of the normalisation processes and the attempts to disrupt them. However, before we use the phrase “third generation” more generally, to refer not only to Israel or Germany, but also to other countries, particularly to Poland, it seems essential to pose the question about the very possibility of speaking about “Polish third generation” and the reasons why such a term hardly exists in Polish memory discourse, contrary to Israel and Germany. This intriguing fact may serve as a good starting point for a reflection on how Polish society in the post-war decades was dealing, or rather was avoiding having to deal with its past, and how - with time - the repressed facts started to come to the surface, breaking society’s efforts to maintain the state of normalisation. The latter process can be traced in various works created by a younger generation of artists. Moreover, it is worth emphasising the fact that they very often pick the genres and use motifs formerly not connected to the topic of the memory of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Polish-Jewish relations. The examples I am going to present here are only a small part of the huge post-war memory boom that began to occur in Polish contemporary art and culture as early as the 1990s, but - for reasons I will discuss later on - became particularly noticeable in the 2000s. Polish spaces, from which traces of war history have been erased, in contemporary works are often shown to be haunted by the past. Having thus far been treated as inviolate, they began to reveal what Martin Pollack calls their actual “contamination”, arguing that landscapes of such countries as Austria, Slovenia, Romania, Ukraine, Czech Republic, and - above all - Poland will forever remain marked by the events of the Second World War. The motif of contamination of Polish soil with war crimes in general, and the Shoah in particular, has become discernible in the works of artists belonging to the third generation. It is entangled, however, with some significant issues that demand to be mentioned here. First of them is the fact of Poland’s exclusion from the contemporary reconciliation process, which has been described by Karolina Przewrocka in her widely commented-on essay published in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. I am not going to analyse the whole article, where the author discusses extensively both the reasons and the consequences of this lack of Polish voice in Israeli-German memory discourse. Instead, I would like to focus on just one fragment where Przewrocka defines in precise terms one of the main problems of Polish memory: The Jewish cemeteries scattered throughout Poland, together with the remains of the death camps, ghettos and synagogues, are with us every day. We wake up to them in the morning, pass them on our way to work and go to sleep at night in cities whose names evoke fear in Israelis, including Oswiecim, Lodz and Kielce. She adds: When Israeli Jews visit Poland’s Holocaust sites, they return to Israel with a sense of relief. We, in contrast, must find a way to continue to live alongside these places, unable to exorcise this dybbuk. The situation of struggle with the past Przewrocka describes is, however, quite a new phenomenon. In the first post-war decades, what prevailed in Poland was the atmosphere of silence and repression of the traumatic event’s memory. The rising consciousness of this situation started to appear more frequently in art and in literature only at the end of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the most meaningful turning point in that process of breaking the normalisation of the spaces came in 2000, together with publication of Sąsiedzi (“The Neighbours”), a book written by the Polish sociologist and historian Jan Tomasz Gross, in which he describes the history of one of the pogroms on Jewish inhabitants of the town Jedwabne, planned and carried out by their Polish neighbours. Although the crime has been already depicted in a magnificent documentary movie … Where My Elder Son Kain (1999), directed by Agnieszka Arnold (who in 2001 also released a second documentary on the pogrom, entitled Sąsiedzi, from which the book in fact borrowed its title), the film did not get much attention, and it was the Gross essay that dramatically changed the shape of the discourse on Polish-Jewish relations in Poland. The debate launched by this publication constituted a precedent in the history of Polish afterwar narrative of Polish-Jewish relations, and cracked the façade of silence which had been kept up for decades with regard to Polish attitudes towards the Jews before, during, and after the Second World War. The book not only revealed the truth about what has been the most strongly repressed thread of this story, namely, Polish complicity in murders committed on the Jews, but also allowed to highlight the question of Jewish absence, its reasons and consequences - both in the public debate and in art or literature, particularly in works of young artists belonging mostly to the third postwar generation. The persistent lack of former Jewish citizens of Poland and the places they used to live in seems to be one the central motifs in works that have been created in recent years and might be perceived as connected to the third generation’s experience. The first work I would like to discuss is Yael Bartana’s project And Europe will be stunned from 2009. The work consists of three parts and presents a vision of a Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland that calls three milions Jews to come back. Although the motif of the void left after the murder of over three milions of Polish Jews is present in all parts, it is the first section, entitled “Mary koszmary” (“Nightmares”), that presents it in the most apparent way. In the first part of the trilogy, Sławomir Sierakowski, leader of “Krytyka Polityczna”, stands in the empty Decennial Stadium in Warsaw and calls the Jews to come back to their country. In his charismatic speech, which on the one hand may be likened to propaganda films from the Third Reich (particularly Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will), but on the other hand, is set in a space that is highly charged with symbolic meaning, Sierakowski urges: Jews! Fellow Countrymen! People! Peeeople! You think the old woman who still sleeps under Ryfke’s quilt doesn’t want to see you? That she forgot about you? You are wrong! She dreams about you every night. Dreams and POLISH SOCIETY IN THE POST-WAR DECADES WAS DEALING, OR RATHER WAS AVOIDING HAVING TO DEAL WITH ITS PAST, AND HOW - WITH TIME - THE REPRESSED FACTS STARTED TO COME TO THE SURFACE, BREAKING THE SOCIETY’S EFFORTS TO TO MAINTAIN THE STATE OF NORMALISATION. trembles with fear. Since the night you were gone and her mother reached your quilt, she has had nightmares. Bad dreams. Only you can chase them away. Let the three million Jews that Poland has missed stand by her bed and finally chase away the demons. Return to Poland, to your country! (...). This potential situation of Jews returning to Poland has in fact more than just one possible interpretation. The mechanism whereby the repressed return leads in two directions. On the one hand, it illustrates how deeply rooted the normative Polish silence about the former Jewish neighbours is; on the other hand, it refers to the issue of Jewish settlement in former Palestine, which has often been described in terms of “coming back to the historical homeland”. Seen from the Polish perspective, hovewer, Bartana’s work not only refers to the fact that memory of three and a half million Jews who lived in Poland before the war has been repressed from collective consciousness, but also points towards the dread the Poles are filled with owing to the recollection of property grabbed from their Jewish neighbours, or the remembrance of many Polish crimes committed during the Shoah. Therefore, the void left after the genocide of Jewish inhabitants gains more specific form. A significant shift occurred, therefore, at the time when the representatives of the third postwar generation took the floor: the motif of Jewish absence and a thread of an active role played by Poles in the process of forgetting have entered the cultural mainstream. The consequences of these phenomena have also gradually started to be more visible in Polish texts from the field of popular culture, whose authors try to deal with the issue of Polish history. The subject of forgotten Jewish victims of the Second World War appears, for example, in two Polish movies that reached the wider public: Pokłosie (“Aftermath”) by Władysław Pasikowski and Demon by Marcin Wrona. Both of them - although in different ways - present the outcome of post-war silence concealing the traces left after the Holocaust victims. Both films, similar because they adopt the form of popular thrillers, show that what preserves the memory repressed by the Polish people is precisely the space. In each case, the protagonist familiarises himself with the surroundings and suddenly discovers the truth about what happened before and during the war, only to learn that the inhabitants are still very eager to keep their dark secrets. In both cases, the attempt at normalisation fails at some point, for the long-hidden facts come to light. However, it offers neither a sense of catharsis, nor an opportunity to settle with the past, for it remains unreachable owing to Polish reluctance to do so as well as still-vivid anti-Semitism, which is underlined in both movies in a very critical way. Another, and probably one of the most literal and radical uses of the motif of such a comeback of the past, comes from the field of literature. In Noc żywych Żydów (“The Night of the Living Jews”), Igor Ostachowicz tells the story of Jewish zombies rising from the basements of Warsaw. In his rather lowbrow novel, the zombies become an obvious pop-cultural symbol of unwanted memory. Although it follows the pattern of a popular novel, Noc żywych Żydów in fact reflects the Polish struggle for normalisation and eagerness to repress the memory of what happened in spaces of contemporary everyday life (one of the novel’s most important locales is “Arkadia”, an enormously large shopping centre built on the premises of the former Warsaw ghetto), at the same time becoming a testament of their failure. However, Ostachowicz’s novel is also unable to offer a sense of catharsis. It is rather a report on Polish unreadiness for a confrontation with the memory of the Jews who used to inhabit the same well-known places we live in today. From this perspective, the general experience of the Polish third generation is strongly connected to space, which on the one hand remains a place where the European Jewry was exterminated, and on the other hand is the space of today’s Polish life. At the same time, after many years of silence, members of the third generation are those who experience - probably most strongly - the return of the repressed, return of the forgotten Jewish history. The central role in this process is played by places which over the decades have been strenuously adjusted to avoid any kind of suffering as a result of a guilty conscience or traumatic memories. For some time, however, the ghosts of the past have haunted them, showing that Polish society - even though it is still reluctant - will eventually be forced to face its fears and confront the past. Jagoda Budzik is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She has degrees in Hebrew Studies and Theatre Studies from the same university. Her research interests focus on issues of collective memory, Israeli literature, theatre and visual arts in the light of the Holocaust discourse. Her work combines elements drawn from three major disciplines: literature, memory studies and cultural studies.
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