The Pre-History of the Holocaust? TheSonderwegandHistorikerstreitDebates and the Abject Colonial Past

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew P. Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Self ◽  
Adolf Hitler ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of

In chapter eleven ofMein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, having constructed aneal type “culture-bearing” Aryan race,1came to elucidate his views on the history of Jews within Germany. Until the time of Frederick the Great, he argued, “it still entered no one's head to regard the Jews as anything else but a ‘foreign’ people.”2Thereafter, he asserted, came a period of transition wherein Jews had “the effrontery to turn Germanic.”3The rest of the chapter, for Hitler, was an attempt to reverse this putative historical mistake, and presents the reader with a vitriolic casting out of Jews, described as “parasites” and a “noxious bacillus,” from the German body politic.4The aim of this textual expulsion, Hitler explained, was to ensure that the Germans would not be destroyed from within, as had “all great cultures of the past.”5To Hitler, Jews were what Julia Kristeva has called “the abject”6—that which is simultaneously part of the self but radically rejected by the self. In seeking to expel the “Germanic Jews” from theVolkskörper, Hitler sought to expel that part of the German self that, in his view, was a source of weakness and taint.7

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

scholarly journals Mnemonic Populism: The Polish Holocaust Law and its Afterlife

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kornelia Kończal
Keyword(s):  
Significant Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Foundations ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

In early 2018, the Polish parliament adopted controversial legislation criminalising assertions regarding the complicity of the ‘Polish Nation’ and the ‘Polish State’ in the Holocaust. The so-called Polish Holocaust Law provoked not only a heated debate in Poland, but also serious international tensions. As a result, it was amended only five months after its adoption. The reason why it is worth taking a closer look at the socio-cultural foundations and political functions of the short-lived legislation is twofold. Empirically, the short history of the Law reveals a great deal about the long-term role of Jews in the Polish collective memory as an unmatched Significant Other. Conceptually, the short life of the Law, along with its afterlife, helps capture poll-driven, manifestly moralistic and anti-pluralist imaginings of the past, which I refer to as ‘mnemonic populism’. By exploring the relationship between popular and political images of the past in contemporary Poland, this article argues for joining memory and populism studies in order to better understand what can happen to history in illiberal surroundings.

scholarly journals Restoration of the Self through History and Myth in Lina Kostenko’s “Marusia Churai”

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-45
Author(s):  
Myroslava Tomorug-Znaienko
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Unique Individual

The paper analyzes Lina Kostenko’s historical novel in verse portraying the life of the 17th century  Ukrainian minstrel poet Marusia Churai, condemned to death for poisoning her faithless lover. This work, which grows out of Kostenko’s individualized mythical perception of Marusia Churai legend, represents a unique individual construct in which the heroines’ quest for self-realization is kept in tune with the same yearning of the poetess herself; the author’s attitude towards the myth resembles the heroine’s relations with history. The narrative mode of the novel functions mainly in three aspects; these are the heroine’s confrontation with the carnivalized reality of her trial; her subjective journey inward, into the  ruined self, when her execution was pending; and her objective pilgrimage outward, into the history of her ruined land, after getting pardon. The paper touches upon various aspects of the heroine’s perception of history. The main character is depicted as a witness of contemporary events and a bearer of the Word who keeps harmony with the sacred truth of the past. The Hetman’s ‘pardon’ allows Marusia to move freely through history in order to achieve a deeper understanding of her ruined land and seize its spirit. In the experience of the heroine the historical reality appears as versatile and polyphonic, at the same time remaining integral and inseparable from her personality. Kostenko asserts the rights of poets to create their own epochs, to recreate the past or present from within their own mythical experience, becoming thus not only myth-bearers but also mythmakers.

Gendering the Holocaust gallery in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-260
Author(s):  
Karolina Krasuska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The Self ◽  
Gender Perspective ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polish Jews

Even though a gender perspective, in reference to various aspects of museums and their exhibits, permeates the reflection on museums, gender is not explicitly taken up as a category of knowledge within the self-reflective narratives about the core exhibition or the conceptualization of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewish, which opened in Warsaw, Poland in 2014. Building upon the research gendering the memory of the Holocaust, especially with regard to historical exhibitions, and using a cultural studies framework to the study of representation, this article asks how femininities are framed by the representation of masculinities and how museum technologies work to produce gendered meanings. It concludes that most of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN problematically instrumentalizes gender relations to underpin a chronological historical narrative. In a dialogue with queer research on temporality, underscoring the coincidence of normative gender/sexuality and linear progressive narrative, it analyses this strategy as gender chronotechnology.

scholarly journals Pamięć religijna społeczności lokalnych — przykład Jedwabnego

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-184
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Bogumił
Keyword(s):  
Social Function ◽  
Local Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Monument ◽  
The People ◽  
Parish Community ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Monuments And Memorials

This article looks on Jedwabne and the debate on Polish involvement in the Holocaust from the perspective of the Jedwabians. The author shows that until the erection of the national monument to the murdered Jews in Jedwabne in 2001, the Jedwabians’ memory of their Jewish neighbors was a part of local memory. Jedwabians commemorated the Jews in accordance with their frames of memory. The point is that the people in Jedwabne are first of all a members of parish community, so their memory is religious in nature. This has a profound effect on their relationship to the past and their perception of the role of monuments and memorials. By reconstructing the history of the erection of selected monuments in Jedwabne, the author shows which events of the past Jedwabians want to commemorate and what social function is played by memory of the commemorated events. She also considers to what degree memory of the group’s past lies at the base of the Jedwabians’ contemporary identity.

scholarly journals Badacz i jego perspektywy interpretacyjne w studiach nad dziejami nauki

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-23
Author(s):  
Jaromir Jeszke
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
The Self ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Specialist Knowledge ◽  
Self Knowledge

The Researcher and Their Interpretative Perspectives in the Studies on the History of Science A historian (also of medicine) should accept the values and canons of the studied culture, including medical ones, as their own. As Florian Znaniecki pointed out in his works, they should be the researcher’s highest authority. This means that the researcher should deviate from evaluating the ideas and practices of the studied culture from their own perspective. The category of minimal cultural imputation developed by Wojciech Wrzosek shows that it is not an easy process. However, the application of the subjective-rational perspective to the interpretation has already become an obvious approach. An open and much less obvious problem is the role of the historian of science when they venture to make comparisons between past and present scientific cultures. By doing so, do they still remain a historian, or – by undertaking such comparisons and evaluations – do they abandon the role, assuming the position of, for example, methodologist? The author of the article outlines the possibilities of separating these roles, presenting the attitude of a ‘methodologist’ who searches in the past for the roots and theoretical justifications for contemporary paradigms of their discipline, using the latter to evaluate the past. However, the possibility of a non-evaluative dialogue between the cognizing culture and the cognized culture is also shown, where the former also includes the specialist knowledge of a contemporary researcher interested in the past of their discipline. The historiography of a given science appears here as a record of the self-knowledge of a given generation of researchers – as their self-reflection. As Jan Pomorski calls it, a researcher assuming such a role appears as homo metahistoricus in their field of study.

scholarly journals ‘Living So Far from Words’: Intertextuality, Trauma and the Post-Shoah World in Medbh McGuckian’s Blaris Moor

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-35
Author(s):  
Shane Alcobia-Murphy
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust

Throughout Medbh McGuckian’s latest collection, Blaris Moor, the poet attempts to depict trauma (and its effects) by mimicking the dislocation of the self and the recurrence of the past in the present through quotations, and the sources themselves are about this very process. The collection presents, through its form and content, a profound rejoinder to those who argue that the Holocaust should not (or cannot) be represented in literature.

scholarly journals Religion and Reason in the Grasp of Basic Models

2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Klapwijk
Keyword(s):  
Religious Faith ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Religious Motivation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Considerations ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

How do religious faith and human understanding relate to each other? On this question there is no consensus, nor has there ever been in the past. The history of Western philosophy confronts us with a complex diversity of views that grew into more or less indisputable standard positions. These positions are not the strict result of theoretical reflection. Their acceptance is largely based on pre-theoretical considerations, the self-evidence of a spiritual intuition or religious motivation. The different views of the realtionship of religion and reason can be grouped into a limited number of basic models or motifs. This essay will discuss seven of them as they arose in the Christian tradition. I will name them as follows: identification, conflict, subordination, complementarity, foundation, authenticity and transformation. For the sake of brevity the text focuses on the origins and first manifestations of these models. But we will add again and again fragments of further developments to make clear how resilient these models are. They continue to assert themselves even in new periods of time. Their diversity keeps on challenging us, up to the present day, to reconsider the self-evidence of our own position in the debate on religion and reason.

scholarly journals Japanese Philosopher Seiichi Hatano (1877–1950) on the Problems of Time

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-56
Author(s):  
Liubov B. Karelova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Western Intellectual

The name of Seiichi Hatano (1877–1950) is still not so widely known outside of Japan. At the same time, he belongs to those outstanding Japanese thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, who not only introduced to their compatriots the history of Western philosophy, but also acted as generators of original concepts created on the basis of deep critical understanding of the Western intellectual heritage. The article deals with the reconstruction of Seiichi Hatano’s theory of time, formulated in his monograph “Time and Eternity” (1943), which crowned his creative career. The starting point of Hatano’s philosophy of time were studies of the basic human experience, which he interpreted in terms of the flow of life and the interaction of the Self and the Other. The subject of the Japanese thinker’s special interest was the problem of overcoming temporality. Hatano’s original contribution to the theory of time was the creation of the three-fold scheme of temporality, considered on the main levels of life – natural, cultural, and religious, conclusions about the divergence of time at the natural and cultural levels, and the idea that the past in history is governed by the perspective of the future.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Future ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of

The introduction presents the book’s core argument that twentieth-century Jewish archives were not just about the past but also about the future: We can look to a process whereby Jews turned increasingly toward archives as anchors of memory in a rapidly changing world. Jews in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine all sought to gather the files of the past in order to represent their place in Jewish life and articulate a vision of the future. It situates these projects in the history of community-based archiving and archival theory and methodology, as well as Jewish history at large. It also dives into the ways we can see archive making as a metaphor for the broader patterns in modern Jewish history, as Jews sought to gather the sources and resources of their culture both before the Holocaust and especially in its aftermath.

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