On June 22^nd of this year, in the city of Wroclaw, a lecture by Zygmunt Bauman was aggressively disrupted by a group of neo-fascists. When I first read about this, I was concerned, but not overly so. The extreme right has a persistent, visible, but ultimately, marginal presence on the Polish political scene, I assured myself. As a video of the event reveals, there is the other, apparently more significant, Poland that invited and wanted to listen to the distinguished social theorist speak, and cheered when the motley crew of ultra-nationalists and soccer hooligans were escorted from the lecture hall. While xenophobia and neo-fascism are threats in Eastern and Central Europe, I was pretty confident that in Poland, they were being held at bay.

But, after a recent visit to Wroclaw, I realize that I may have been wrong. While there last month, I had the occasion to talk about the “Bauman Affair” with some friends and colleagues. A highlight was around a dinner, though not a kitchen table. I am now deeply concerned not only about the event itself, but also about the political and cultural direction of Poland.

We had a lovely dinner at Hana Cervinkova and Lotar Rasinki’s home. Among the other quests were my colleagues at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute, Elzbieta Matynia, Susan Yelavich, Dick Bernstein and Carol Bernstein, and Juliet Golden, a Wroclaw resident and superb observer of the material life of the city, and her husband, a distinguished craftsman, restorer of among other things of the Jewish cemetery in Wroclaw. The Wroclaw Solidarność hero, Władysław Frasyniuk, and his wife joined us, as did Sylvie Kauffmann, the former editor of Le Monde, who reported extensively around the old Soviet bloc in the 80s and 90s, and now returns as the wife of the French ambassador. The dinner followed a public discussion between him and her. Also joining us was Adam Chmielewski, who as the Chair of the Department of Social and Political Philosophy of the University of Wrocław, was one of the co-sponsors of the Bauman lecture.

All were concerned about the Bauman affair, and understood that at issue was not only the talk of a challenging professor. Adam and I had a particularly interesting exchange. I present my side of this discussion today (with which Chmielewski told me he broadly agreed). In our next posts, I will publish his two-part in depth analysis.

My concern is rather straightforward. It has less to do with the quality of the extreme right, reprehensible as it is, more to do with its relationship with the less extremist mainstream. While extremists are indeed at the margins of Polish public opinion, they are becoming more and more effective in making themselves visible to the general public and becoming more acceptable. Politicians are coming to accept the extremists’ definition of controversies and trying to take advantage of their impact, and the media, many public intellectuals and academics are following their framing of events, or at least not forcefully opposing these frames.

Thus, Bauman’s lecture was framed as a scandalous talk by a Stalinist, rather than as a presentation by a distinguished, highly creative social theorist. The disruption was considered as a problem of the legacies of communism and not as a problem concerning the fate of academic freedom in an open society.

Should a Stalinist speak became the question. The quality of Bauman’s work, the importance of his diagnoses of the problems of our times, was put aside. The debate became how the politics of a young man, of a Jewish communist, should be judged, and whether its purported influence needed to be controlled. The fact that Bauman was hounded out of Poland in the wake of an anti-Zionist wave (in that case purported anti-Zionism was really a thin guise for anti-Semitism) was not discussed. The problem of the attempt to silence a critical opinion was not the issue. Rather, the occasion of Bauman’s lecture and its disruption was used to call for the long delayed lustration, a cleansing of communist influence from Polish public life.

There was a smell of anti-Semitism in the air. It seemed that at issue is as well to rid Polish public life of Jewish influence. But perhaps that is my paranoia.

The major opposition party, PiS (Law and Justice) seems to be supportive of the actions of the extreme right, while the ruling party, PO (Civic Platform), seems to be reluctant to too forcefully denounce the right. And intellectuals and professors, even those who privately find the attacks on academic freedom repugnant, are reluctant to speak up. PiS accepts the extremists definition of the situation. PO is reluctant to oppose it, as are many others.

Indeed, PiS seriously entertains wild conspiracy theories concerning the plane crash in Smolensk, in which Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, along with 94 others, including major public figures and civic leaders, were killed. The political paranoia that animates the extreme right is shared by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the PiS leader, the former president’s identical twin brother, and former prime minister, who demonizes the current government as somehow implicated in “the assassination,” purportedly orchestrated by the Russians. Kaczynski has supported the “patriotic protests,” such as the one directed against Bauman, as Chmielewski reveals in his post.

My judgment: PiS seems to me to be quite extremist, though more polite than those who violently chanted against Bauman. Perhaps, Polish fascism with a human face? Probably too strong, but not by much.

Elsewhere, there is not much active direct support of neo-fascists, I trust even among many in PiS. Yet, indirect support and the absence of strong opposition is a serious problem. Thus, Chmielewski’s critique of PO in his post is especially important. He shows how the ruling party unintentionally has supported its far right critics through an apparently benign politics of bread and circuses, and how and why it is not forcefully counterattacking.

I have a playful unprofessional theory about extremism in contemporary politics. Somewhere around 20% of the citizens of just about all contemporary democracies support extreme anti-democratic, xenophobic and racist politics. If these people had their way, democracy would be fundamentally challenged. (Close to home I think of the Tea Party or at least the birthers and the clear Obama haters) The fate of democracy lies in what is done with this margin of the population. Encourage, tolerate or collaborate with this fringe, and a decent democratic politics is undermined or even lost. This is now happening in Hungary. It may happen in Poland.

A major party is in bed with the extremists. The ruling party is not forcefully opposing them. And there does not seem to be a broad civic response against this situation. It is the silence of the centrists, of the “moderates” that I find deafening. I believe, but I may be mistaken, that those on the left are speaking up, but I am not sure that they are being heard, isolated, as they are.

To end on an oblique note of deep concern: I think I see a kind of post-communist treason of intellectuals. It is particularly disturbing, and uncharacteristic of what I have long admired in Polish cultural life. While in Poland, I heard about the calculations of academics surrounding the Bauman affair. There is ambivalence about one of the most distinguished men of Polish letters, supporting him may be dangerous: to do so might compromise one’s career or lead to a weakening institutional support.  Suffice it to say that I admire and support my Polish friends who invited, listened and critically and deliberately considered Bauman’s talk, whether or not they agree with him (as by the way, I don’t on many issues of form and substance). I am disturbed by the problems my friends and colleagues face. There is a clear and present danger, and it is not the specter of communism.

12. In the sixteenth century, Lublin was a hub of anti-war and anti-feudal religious group Socinians who – exiled to Transylvania and the Netherlands – influenced the political philosophy of John Locke. In the Renaissance, this city attracted dissenters; in modernism: the avant-garde; and in the 1970s and 80s: conceptual artists and alternative theatre. Today it boasts young artists: Robert Kusmirowski (featured in the recent Liverpool Biennial), Urszula Pieregonczuk (who queers Dostoevsky and war history) Mariusz Tarkawian (whose drawings will be on show at the Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh Museum in January: ) and Piotr Brozek who has authored the FB profile of a Jewish child murdered in the Holocaust, Henio Zytomirski. Brozek updated the profile with newsfeeds in the first-person, using the present tense. Invitations to add Henio as a friend read: “I would like to tell you the story of one life.” Internet users befriended Henio, and sent him messages, comments and even gifts. Mariusz Tarkawian drew a monumental panorama of bloodshed throughout human history in Lublin’s Biala Gallery. The Holocaust was presented, as was the Armenian genocide (the artist’s ancestors were Armenian, who had for centuries been living in Poland). Tarkawian also graffitied a house with the lyrics to a Yiddish song in order to commemorate Jewish Lublin. Such artistic-social initiatives are necessary in Poland, where mourning  for the victims of the Holocaust is lacking. Unmourned millions, unmourned life.

13. In a book Jewish Lublin: A Cultural Monograph, published by the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and the Centre for Jewish Studies, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, the Jewish Mexican sociologist Adina Cimet writes, “What had been home became hell and much was severed: lives, culture, faith, hope, and humanity. The Majdanek extermination camp, just a bus ride away from the city, remains one of the tombstones of that destruction.”

Author of educational projects at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York Adina Cimet adds on Lublin,

“I encountered young people that were struggling with the past they had inherited: the city they were left with and the silence they were handed. These young pioneers – as I see them – were working to imagine the obliterated past; they struggled to conceive and recognize the Jewish contribution to their history in order to be able to understand ‘their’ past. Some ached from the slaughter that was staged in those streets. But their work revealed to me that, out of that past, they sought to imagine a future for themselves. They dreamt of rebuilding their world based on values of decency, respect to others, and the recognition of Jewish memory.”

14. Among these pioneers are the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and the Centre for Jewish Studies, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University as well as NGOs: Homo Faber and The Well of Memory (Studnia pamieci). Intercultural Lublin is presented in and fostered by the photo campaign Open-create Lublin! O-tworz Lublin!, initiated by Barbara Wybacz. The tradition of this Jewish city is researched into by Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Robert Kuwalek and Dariusz Libionka whose car was sprayed with swastikas .

15. We need even more grassroots art activism and opposition to the wave of ultra-nationalism which has gripped Hungary, Russia and Poland. Contemporary art is repressed here, as it explores the traumas of the past and of the present (Pussy Riot, layoffs of curators, Orban’s takeover of art institutions). East European societies are polarized economically and politically:  the moneyed few vs. precariousness of the transition; far-right militias on the rampage vs. socially engaged (Marcusian-Kristevan-Rancierian, albeit always local!) aesthetics .

16. Lublin itself has also been home to groundbreaking thinkers: the philosophers of science Emile Meyerson and Ludwik Fleck, the specialist on Bergson, Romuald Jakub Weksler Waszkinel, who serving as a Catholic priest discovered that he was Jewish (a Holocaust survivor who had been handed over to a Polish family by his mother). This city is exceptional through outstanding women and LGBT personalities: the lesbian writer Narcyza Zmichowska (whose Gothic novel The Heathen Woman was translated into English by Ursula Phillips), The Bund leader Bela Shapira, the novelist Malwina Meyerson and her daughter poetess Franciszka Arnsztajnowa whose friendship with this city’s avant-garde gay poet Jozef Czechowicz is depicted by Hanna Krall in her reportages. The Grodzka City Centre-NN Theatre is presenting Czechowicz’s photographs of Jewish Lublin, as well as the life and work of Krystyna Modrzewska, a transgender Jewish doctor, scientist and writer, forced out of Poland when anti-Semitism reached its climax in 1968.

17. This month the cultural historian Marina Warner lectured fascinatingly on iconoclasms; in fact, iconoclasms against art are taking place in the streets of Lublin. Culture wars are being waged which pit a camp for openness against jingoists and pseudo-religious crusaders when Poland, Hungary and Russia have transitioned from false Communism to false Christianity. We need an eastern Europe that holds true to Transeuropa’s belief in “democracy, equality, culture beyond the nation state,” when we deplore the punishment of Pussy Rioters, the destruction of art in Lublin and Fidesz’s witch hunt of outstanding philosophers such as Agnes Heller:

18. The ambivalence of Lublin and Eastern Europe can be defined through the Derridean neologism of hostipitalité. Hostility and hospitality blend here: on the one hand, art activism is effervescent; on the other, censorship is crushing it. The Bakhtinian Pussy Rioters and Femen perform human rights, whilst extreme right ideas are employed by the political class.  The hunger for profit (ubiquitous privatizations) and classism are intensifying.

19. The Polish word for hospitality (goscinność) embraces otherness (inność). This linguistic phenomenon indicates that hospitality hosts alterity as hospital-alterity. Drawing on the Hebrew Bible, Lublin should become an open city (ville franche) or refuge city (ville refuge). The philosophers Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney define this city as a space where “migrants may seek sanctuary from the pressures of persecution, intimidation, and exile.” The feminist thinker Hélène Cixous also employs this idea of hospitality in her extraordinary plays and other texts. At his Lublin Labirynt Gallery lecture, the art historian Piotr Piotrowski elaborated on his concept of the critical museum as a place which could be paralleled by a “critical, self-critical city”; a self-critical, open-refuge city is of the utmost importance in our here and now. How can we enhance our common humanity — shared with refugees dying at the borders of the EU, and with women, migrants-turned-slaves, Jews, Roma, the homeless, the unemployed and the LGBT communities?

20. The destruction of the Lublin tickets has revealed social fissures. Artistic freedom has been jeopardized by controlling and vandalizing public artworks. It is our duty to reclaim the right to Lublin. We are following the activist and academic Ewa Majewska who has critiqued the evictions of both ordinary residents in Warsaw and Poznan and artistic venues (Warsaw’s Museum for Modern Art); similarly, in The Art Newspaper Julia Michalska has analysed anti-Romany hostilities in Hungary and political pressure to evict the Roma Parliament in Budapest.

21. We dream of Lublin becoming a hub of participatory democracy where minorities and majorities enjoy equal rights, are visible and decide together on the affairs of our polis. This city should cultivate hospitality, a truth Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us of. The commitment to opening Lublin to otherness depends on all of us.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Europe has gone through unprecedented changes. Two decades later, there are still conflicting ideas about what Europe means and who belongs or should belong. Moreover, there still is a long shadow cast by the Holocaust, with distinct differences in how to live under the shadow. While there seems to be a tacit understanding in Western Europe of the importance of the Holocaust in twentieth century Europe, there is a rising focus on national suffering in many east European countries that marginalizes the European genocide. Memory and history are in tension, weakening understanding of national pasts and challenging the connection between the east and the west of Europe, weakening European unity.

In the former Soviet country of Estonia, for example, where I have lived for the past decade, the Holocaust is viewed as marginal to the central narrative of Estonian victimhood at the hands of two occupations: Nazi and Communist. There is a lack of knowledge, coupled with the sense that even if there had been Jews murdered on the territory of Estonia, Estonians had nothing to do with them. The problems of collaboration and anti-Semitism in Estonia are not generally addressed. Instead, the Holocaust is externalized, and treated as a German and Jewish issue that is foreign to Estonian national history. Tony Judt’s distinction between memory and history in his posthumous book, Thinking the Twentieth Century (written with Timothy Snyder) highlights the problem.

I profoundly believe in the difference between history and memory; to allow memory to replace history is dangerous. Whereas history of necessity takes the form of a record, endlessly rewritten and re-tested against old and new evidence, memory is keyed to public, non-scholarly purposes: a theme park, a memorial, a museum, a building, a television program, an event, a day, a flag. (Judt 2012: 277)

Judt’s point is important because when memories of certain key events are lifted out of time, they are all too easily raised to the level of myth. Particularly in narratives of national suffering, there is less room for the suffering of others. As Judt cautions: “Without history, memory is open to abuse. But if history comes first, then memory has a template and a guide against which it can work and be assessed.” (Ibid., 278)

While new monuments and museums to the crimes of National Socialism and Communism indicate a steady interest in representing the past in stone, less emphasis might be placed on the memorization and memorialization of past crimes; and more on a common understanding of the past. As it is now, in the building of monuments to the past, old patterns of intolerance and hostility are still present.

More historical research into both the crimes of Communism and the Holocaust in Europe is needed to provide a balanced understanding of what has happened on the continent since 1933. Indeed, as Tony Judt observed, in his epilogue to Postwar: “Europe might be united, but European memory remained deeply asymmetrical.” (Judt 2005: 826) Given the enormity of Europe’s past, belonging to Europe entails bearing collective responsibility for the history not only of one’s individual nation, but also for Europe as a whole.

I couldn’t sleep last night, haunted by a world gone crazy.

I dreamt that a purported Israeli, with the support of one hundred rich American Jews, pretended to make a feature length film aggressively mocking the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims in general – Islamophobia and anti-Semitism combined!

The faux film producer uploaded a mock trailer to YouTube. Along with thousands of other clips, it was ignored. But then when the film was dubbed into Arabic, the demagogues of the world all played their roles – the clash of civilizations as mediated performance art.

Radical Islamic clerics worked as film distributors (monstrous monstrators as my Daniel Dayan might put it), bringing the clip to the attention of the mass media and the masses. Islamist and anti-Islamist ideologues worked up their followers, happily supporting each other in their parts. Feckless diplomats in embassies tried to assure the public that hate-speech isn’t official American policy. Analysts identified root causes.

The clash of civilizations was confirmed. All the players needed each other, supported each other, depended on each other. A marvelous demonstration of social construction: W.I. Thomas would be proud of the power of his insight. Social actors defined the clash of civilizations as real, and it is real in its consequences.

A reality confirmed with a jolt when I awoke, knowing full well about the global attacks on American embassies and symbols, and the tragic death of a man who was determined to go beyond clashing clichés, the heroic American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. The American right, including the marvelous Mitt Romney and Fox News talking heads, denounced President Obama’s purported support of the attacks and failure to stand up for American values, including the freedom of speech — this from people who worry about the war on Christmas. It’s a surreal reality this morning.

And this morning, wide-awake, I am savoring Marvelous Mitt’s recent video performance: right-wing newspeak de-constructed. At last, class warfare in America has been given a full public airing. In pitching his candidacy with his fellow fat-cats, Romney revealed his definition of job producers, the nature of dependency and the work ethic. He also showed himself to be a true student of Ayn Rand. Really, all who depend on government vote for Obama and the Democrats? No wonder he selected Paul Ryan. Identifying those who don’t pay federal income taxes with votes for Democrats is amazingly poor sociology, bordering on comedy, a point made beautifully in a letter to the editor in today’s New York Times.

To the Editor:

I woke up early this morning and drove my daughter several miles on a government-built road, all the way to a government-operated school.

I came back to my home — for which I receive a government-sanctioned mortgage-interest deduction — and called my parents, who both receive Social Security and Medicare from the government. Then I signed on to the Internet, which was developed by government-sponsored researchers.

So Mitt Romney is right, on two counts. I am “dependent upon government.” And I’m not voting for him.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
New York, Sept. 18, 2012

I have no doubt that the works of Jan Gross, and the writing of many Polish journalists, historians and sociologists, contribute to the foundation of democracy in Poland.  They advance the project of freedom for Poles and for other nations, to echo the famous slogan of Polish patriots of the 19^th Century.  They address the Jewish question; for me, they address my mother’s question, with their dignity.  There has been an extended debate, an official apology by the President of Poland and an official inquiry and correction of the public record.  All of this has been noted and admired abroad, even as it sparks controversy.

On the other hand, there was much that was said and written in response to the revelations about Jedwabne, that brought me back to my Polish American compatriot’s “Jew down” remark, as reported in my first “Why Poland?” post, and much worse.  It has been very hard for me to read the primitive, but also the more refined, anti-Semitism, which is now very much a part of Polish public discourse.  I realize now that my travels in Poland back in the seventies, and my intensive work with the democratic opposition and underground Solidarność, though extensive and long enduring, were in important ways limited.  I knew how Jews and anti-Semitism were symbolically central to modern Polish identity, but I thought there had been a significant collective learning process that had put its more pernicious aspects into the past.  Now, I am not as sure of this as I once was.  Apparently there were broad segments of popular opinion that I did not perceive.

I wonder now whether I really understood the nature of the problem then, whether I really understand it now.  Did I really confront Polish complicity in the Holocaust?  Clearly, I didn’t.  Only after reading Gross do I begin to understand the dimensions of the problem.  Did I really understand the meaning of the Kielce pogrom?  Perhaps I did, but it is so much clearer after reading Gross’s latest book, Fear. I suspect that my learning was not that different than that of many of you in this audience, although we may have started from a different place.

I have not been easy on Poles, or Europeans in general, when it comes to anti-Semitism.  I have had few illusions about my European roots.  I, as a Jew, represent the other in the European tradition: vilified through the dominant interpretation of Christian doctrine, at least until Vatican II, and the subject of folk beliefs that are horrific, fantastical and ominous. And it was not just a matter of simple folk who knew no better, great works of European literature as well are saturated with anti Semitic assertions and allusions. I understand that some pretty articulate anti-Semites opposed genocide, some openly, some secretly.  I know that there is a significant distance between the traditional anti-Semite and the genocidal killer, but I understand, as well, that the former in some way is a precondition for the latter.  I am not sure how much different Polish Christians were from other Europeans.  But that does not absolve either group.  I understand the wisdom of my grandparents’ flight from Europe.  I owe my life to it.

But apart from such melodramatic reflection and accusation, how do we, Poles and Jews, get beyond this?  I think I saw people of good will trying to do so in 1995, as they commemorated the memory of the liberation of Auschwitz.  But, finally, they failed.  There were obvious problems, which have become clearer in the debates over Jedwabne, and in revelations and accusations about Kielce.

I must start with the most obvious, something I have been guilty of until this point in my presentation: the very idea of Poles and Jews.  The language makes sense, Polish memory as distinct from Jewish memory.  I think the greatest contribution of Gross is to show how this common sense and usage, which implies that there is a distinct separation between the Polish Jewish and the Polish Catholic experience, is not only ethically problematic but also historically misleading.  Polish Catholics and Polish Jews cannot really understand their pasts without confronting their very mixed up connections.  Thus it is highly problematic that there were separate ceremonies at the Auschwitz memorials in 1995.

I find this all so depressing. My years as a Poland watcher taught me to expect more, although my recognition of the wisdom of my mother’s “Why Poland?” question should have prepared me.  Permit me to reflect back and forth between what gives me hope to what disgusts, from what angers to what puzzles, to what gives me hope again.

The official ceremony honoring the victims of the Jedwabne atrocity, unlike the commemoration of Auschwitz, was a noble affair.  Every effort was made to do the right thing, to correct the official record, to honor the victims and the righteous.  Not everyone supported the memorial.  Some notably chose not to be there, but those at the event made significant progress in transcending the problem of Polish versus Jewish memory.

As I was preparing this presentation, I spoke to an Israeli sociologist, Natan Sznaider, who happened to be at the event.  His father in law was the Israeli Ambassador to Poland at the time.  He remembers the grace of President Kwasniewski in his impeccable address:

We know with certainty that among the persecutors and perpetrators there were Poles.  We cannot have any doubt that here in Jedwabne, citizens of the Polish Republic perished at the hands of other citizens of the Republic.  People prepared this fate for people, neighbors for neighbors…We express our pain and shame; we give expression of our determination in seeking to learn the truth, our courage in overcoming an evil past, our unbending understanding and harmony.  Because of this crime we should beg the shadows of the dead and their families for forgiveness.  Therefore, today, as a citizen and as the president of the Polish Republic, I apologize.  I apologize in the name of those Poles whose conscience is moved by that crime.  In the name of those who believe that we cannot be proud of the magnificence of Polish history without at the same time feeling pain and shame for the wrongs that Poles have done to others.

But as you know, better than I do, this was only one response to the Jedwabne revelations.

I read an interview with Cardinal Glemp by the Catholic News Agency (KAI). It astonished me, dripping with anti-Semitism.  He is so unreflective about this, like my Polish American colleague so many years ago, that I doubt he even realizes it, as she didn’t.  Polish Jewish conflicts in the thirties had no religious basis, according to the Cardinal.  Asked if he thought that Jews experienced a rise in attacks during Holy Week because of accusations of God-killing, he expresses astonishment.  “This statement strikes me as improbable.  The first time I ever heard of this rise in anti-Jewish feeling was in Mr. Gross’s book.  Clearly the book was written ‘on commission’ for someone.”

What could he be referring to?  Is Gross in the pay of the Zionists, or the international Jewish conspiracy, or is it the Jewish lobby, or perhaps even “The Elders of Zion?”  Near Churches, it has been reported, literature about all of this has become available in democratic Poland. A radio station makes its niche on the listening dial with this kind of stuff.  The Cardinal goes on: “Polish-Jewish conflicts did occur in those times, but they had an economic basis.  Jews were cleverer, and they knew how to take advantage of Poles.”  In American English: they could “Jew them down,” I guess.   He does qualify this point. I think realizing that it was not quite politically correct, adding: “In any case, that was the perception.”  Why was the church commemorating the atrocities on May 27^th and not July 10^th?  The 10th was not convenient.  The major lesson of Gross’s inquiry is lost on Glemp.  He and many others were not open to learning.  Arguing for the exhumation of the site of the atrocities, contrary to a request by Jews to honor religious law and refrain from desecrating the graves, he defends his position by asserting “Jewish law is not binding in Poland.” As if that were the issue, not realizing that it is a matter of honoring and respecting customs other than your own, so that you may honor and respect people who you don’t consider to be of your own.  Poles versus Jews, yet again.  He wants to do this “because it is important to know the number of victims.”

I know that this is an issue that Glemp and many respected Polish academics and scholars think is central.  As a matter of principle, I am in favor of trying to understand the truth in the details. I’ve dedicated my life to this.  It is a major theme of my recent work on “the politics of small things”.  But that the number of victims is an issue, with great moral and political importance, escapes me.  Does it change the moral challenge if “only” 400 people, “Jews,” were brutally murdered by their neighbors, “Poles,” instead of 1600?  Glemp goes on and on, wondering why Jews slander Poland, “when Jews had it relatively the best with us, here in Poland.” And further: “We wonder whether Jews should not acknowledge that they have a burden of responsibility in regard to Poles, in particular for the period of close cooperation with the Bolsheviks, for complicity in deportations to Siberia, for sending Poles to jails, for the degradation of many of their fellow citizens, etc.”  In his reflections on Jewish cleverness, there are the Jewish banker and lawyer, the capitalists.  In his reflections on the Soviet occupation, there are the Jewish communists.

The leader of the Church in Poland does not stand alone, clearly.  In the Church there are strong and articulate alternative voices, I know.  I read a moving piece by Rev. Stanislaw Musial just after I read the Glemp interview.

But in the reaction to the Jedwabne revelations, there is also much that is worse than is revealed in the Cardinal’s interview, with vile and more aggressive anti-Semitism.  And, it seems to me, these are given support by the manifestly less pernicious and refined refusal to face the legacies of the past.  They open a space for refined and vulgar anti-Semitism. There are those who worry about the numbers, who think the evidence of the murder is still not in. There are those who ask “Is the hubbub surrounding Jedwabne intended to eclipse the responsibility of Jews for communism and the Soviet occupation of Poland?” And there are those who question Gross’s approach to survivors’ testimony: i.e. take them to be truthful unless proven otherwise.

Gross wisely makes this recommendation because of the profound and systematic ignorance of Polish complicity in the murder of their Jewish compatriots when the more normal alternative skeptical approach prevails.  He is suggesting a way of restructuring historical practice so that it encourages a systematic examination of dark corners in the national past, instead of systematically ignoring them.  Prominent historians defend their professional ethics and accomplishments.  Gross and his supporters question how it is possible that they have for so long overlooked the anti-Semitic atrocities both during and after the war.

I find myself engaging the debates, moved and heartened by some contributions, dismayed by others.  Reading anxiously Gross’s next book, Fear, I realize how radical is his challenge and am convinced by his careful analysis of the post war pogroms and individual murders of Jewish survivors after Auschwitz.  Some of his explanation for how this happened I find persuasive: the legacies of totalitarianism and the continuities between Nazi and Communist practices, the brutalization of the population, the normalization of stealing from and the murder of Jews that was part of the landscape during the Nazi occupation and for some time afterward.  I am not convinced by his arguments completely.  The projection argument, his thesis that Poles couldn’t face the survivors because of their own complicity, I am not sure about.

I have read others who make a significant contribution to my understanding of my mother’s Polish question, the Polish Jewish question, and their relationships.  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Jerzy Jedlicki, Hanna Swida–Ziemba, Jerzy Slawomir Mac, Marta Kurkowska Budzan, among others. The depth and seriousness of their reflections on the cruel facts of Jedwabne mark a noble confrontation with the past.

In light of all of this, the noble and the base, I am deeply ambivalent.  Let me be honest, the ascendance of anti-Semitism in Poland after the fall of Communism has been a great disappointment to me, revealing the limits of what I called at the beginning of this presentation “the wisdom of youth.”  If I had kept in mind the experiences of my grandparents and parents a little bit more, I may have been less surprised, less disappointed.  But on the other hand, the seriousness of the Polish debate about the legacies of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, I know, is very impressive.  A Polish president distinguished himself and honored the memory of my ancestors in a way that would have astonished my grandfather who had very bitter memories as a soldier in a Polish army unit in the First World War.  I am not sure that this would happen today, that the present Polish president would have so astonished my grandfather, but it did happen.  The debate in Poland has negative voices, but very importantly they are being confronted.  In sum, the three parts of this presentation add up to democratic or at least liberal progress.  There is more free discussion and open debate, and Polish Catholics and Polish Jews, and the international Jewish community benefit, as the weaknesses of the demos are revealed.

Yet, I must conclude with a note of concern.  As I have been writing and rewriting this lecture, I have wondered how you will receive my observations.  I wonder whether I have breached the boundaries of the politically correct or polite.  I made some of my observations with some reluctance.  Are my critical comments unnecessarily provocative, or are they just obvious?  Did I go too far, or not far enough?  Should I have expressed my concerns about the Church authority as bluntly and personally as I did?  I have thought about these questions not because I am afraid to reveal to you what I take to be the truth, but because I am well aware that in dealing with difficult problems with the other, the embodiment of discourse is important.  It is not just about words, but who says them, when and where.  I thus deeply appreciate Kwasniewski’s words.  It really depends who says what to whom.

In this light, I understand that I have an obligation here to express my appreciation of the great and often heroic efforts of my Polish friends and colleagues, some with Catholic background, some with Jewish background, some with both, in addressing the continuing problems of anti-Semitism in Polish political culture.  And I express my criticism of the limits of the address with reluctance.  But I must go a bit further, having to do with the limits of democracy in the appraisal of these events by many of the most sympathetic observers.

They advise that the most rabid anti-Semitism is a marginal phenomenon.  I want to believe them, but I am struck how it keeps on coming up, and how significant cultural and religious authorities, and political leaders, some with ascendant power, keep on using anti-Semitism, including members of today’s governing coalition. (Remember this lecture was given in 2007. This is no longer the case) It is so central that it persists for decades even with the absence of Jews and even with open democratic discussion about that embarrassing fact.  I think this is at the center of the most provocative of Jan Gross’s contributions to the consideration of Polish-Jewish relationships in Jedwabne.

Toward the end of his book, reflecting on the two memorials then in Jedwabne, he notes that one propagates the lie that the Nazis killed the 1600 Jews of the town. The other reads “‘To the memory of about 180 people including 2 priests who were murdered in the territory of the Jedwabne district in the years 1939-1956 by the NKVD, by the Nazis and the secret police [UB].’ Signed ‘Society’ [spoleczenstwo].”   He observes that Jews were killed not by Nazis, Soviets, or Polish Stalinists, but by that same “society.”   And the number 180, apparently does not count Jews as people.   The controversy has been about his blaming of society, apparently the accusation of collective guilt.  Yet, it is clear that the first memorial was a political lie, and that the second reveals a deeply problematic common sense definition of humanity.

Objecting to collective guilt has been an important part of my answer to my mother’s question.  But I think that Gross is onto something beyond such accusation.  Anti-Semitism is not in the mother’s milk of Poles (this is a vulgar, an obscene accusation) but it is in a kind of cultural code of Polish society.  Those who are critically appraising the role of Polish anti-Semitism during and after the Holocaust, and also after the fall of the Communist regime, are making significant contributions to transforming the code.  Those who deny the strong tradition of Polish anti-Semitism and its tragic consequences, or approach historical and sociological questions doubting its significance, are helping to reproduce the code.  Speaking as if Poles and Jews are mutually exclusive categories, thinking about Polish and Jewish history as being apart, nurturing collective memory as distinct, bracketing my mother’s question while studying the development of the democratic opposition (my little contribution), all help to reproduce the code.

Two components of democratization of the Polish Jewish question must confront each other.  The post communist inclusion of anti-Semitism into Polish political life, as the conviction of a portion of the population, must be subjected to open and forceful democratic critique and democratic persuasion, with an honest appreciation of the dimensions of the appeal of anti-Semitism.  The outcome is not a foregone conclusion.  The positive result would mean that the symbol of the Jew would come to be less important in Polish political culture, and anti-Semitism won’t be continually reproduced.  I sincerely hope that some day it will be possible, indeed normal, to be a Polish patriot or a Polish liberal without using the symbol of the Jew.  The pious patriotic Catholic would enact patriotism and religiosity without reference to Jews.  And Polish liberals also would be able to reveal their positions on all other issues without Jews somehow playing a central symbolic role in constituting their identity.

I enjoy reading Adam Michnik on such things.  He moves the Polish audience away from the clear categories, as he challenges the Jewish audience abroad.  His mixed up identity, self identified as a Pole primarily, Jewish secondarily, identified by others, not so gallantly, as a Jew, lends a special quality to his observations on the debate.  In the U.S., he had a notable exchange with Leon Wieseltier, the book review editor of The New Republic. I was very much in Adam’s corner, but there was something to Wieseltier’s critical thrust.  There is something overly exquisite about the opening of the debate about Jedwabne in the elite media of your country and mine.  History is corrected.  Public discourse is enriched and is much wiser.  But something is missing.

As Karolina Smagalska has observed, common sense, in the understanding of Clifford Geertz, for far too many people, has not been subverted – that anti Semitic common sense that has a long and deep tradition in Poland and in Europe. Somehow the democratic public discussion has not undermined the anti-Semitic common sense, the cultural code that could either act on its own, or be incited by the Nazis in Jedwabne, that was manipulated by the Communist party or was the work of indigenous Kielce locals.  The communist period helped fortify this common sense with its cynical use of anti-Semitic sentiment, and its ideological ignorance of the Holocaust.  It is the common sense of every day practices that has deep and enduring effects.  It comes in relatively benign forms.  One can “Jew down” people after all without being directly implicated in the Holocaust.  But if you do “Jew people down” in your daily life, if you are without awareness that Jews perhaps didn’t have it so great here, you cannot yourself be free, let alone understand history and constitute a collective memory that supports democracy and decency.

Now my final words, concerning my continuing project of answering my mother’s question.  I confirm the truth of what I had assumed as a young man.  Simplistic unitary characterizations of a people or a culture are not acceptable. Human groupings are too heterogeneous.  And in the case of Poland, the heterogeneity is not just accidental.  Along with the tragic history of my people on these grounds, there are broad humane currents in the culture, recently epitomized by the work of Jan Gross and the many people who have informed his work and have been informed by it, and those who add insights beyond it.  The fresh attempts to address the problem is what I choose to focus on, the work of honorable Poles seeking alternatives in the details of their interactions, what I now call the politics of small things.  And so focused, I recognize that the alternative project is incomplete.

This is my third “Why Poland?” post. In the first, I addressed the question as it was posed by my mother most directly. I reflected upon my experience as a Jew in communist Poland in the seventies, as I observed the official anti-Semitism and the official silence about the experience of my ancestors in that land. In the second post, I consider how that silence made it difficult for people, Poles and Jews, of good will to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and how they somehow managed to join together, even as their collective memories in significant ways did not overlap. Here, I report and reflect on a debate in Poland which confronted the gaps in collective memory, a debate stimulated by the publication of a book, Jan Gross’s Neighbors, which tells the story of Polish Catholics killing Polish Jews, their neighbors, in the small town of Jedwabne during the war.

The book sparked a ferocious debate in Poland: denounced by extreme nationalists, but also the leader of the Polish Catholic Church, Cardinal Glemp, and many scholars and public figures. On the other hand, the book had many appreciative readers including citizens,officials, scholars, intellectuals and Church leaders. My report on the debate speaks for itself. My conclusion is that the debate has been difficult, but indicates that at long last there is responsible collective memory about the Shoah in Poland, which is a very positive sign, even as it reveals very negative attitudes and beliefs.

The first two parts of my “Why Poland?” reflections were written in the mid nineties, soon after the Auschwitz ceremony. This last part was added as I presented my thoughts to an audience in Lublin in 2007. I post here my address, with a few minor edits, that I presented in Lublin.

I worried about the reaction of my audience to the very critical things I had to say. I wondered if I would be taken to be too critical of the church or of Poland, or too soft. I struggled to get my tone exactly right, wanting to advance discussion not silence it. What surprised me was the relative calm of the response. I was asked one or two interesting questions, notes of appreciation were offered, but the talk did not generate much heat. I was particularly surprised and concerned that for the young people in the audience the talk seemed not to be of any special concern. It was almost as if I were talking to a group of German young people who have been through intensive instruction about the Holocaust for sixty years. But the Poles, like others in post- Communist  Europe haven’t had such instruction. Thus, I do have a concern that there is a kind of premature Holocaust fatigue, enabling  the rise of a rabid anti-Semitism, as can be observed in Hungary today.

To read “Why Poland? Part 3: Thinking about Jedwabne, Addressing Premature Holocaust Fatigue,” click here.

Upon boarding the flight back last Wednesday night from NY to Berlin I picked up the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), finding on its first page a picture of Guenter Grass, holding a pipe. The headline read “Ein Aufschrei” (An outcry): Guenter Grass warns of a war against Iran: “the literature Nobel Prize Laureate’s claims that Germany should not provide Israel with Submarines.”

I did not read the poem, “What Must Be Said” on the flight (being busy with two young children and recurring attempts to sleep), but thought that, from that headline, I would support an outcry against attacking Iran. I like poetry making the first pages of centrist (left-leaning) newspapers, and as for the pipe and the submarines, they are signs of older times, part of performing memory in Germany around Grass who is identified with the pipe, the 68’ers and Germany’s underwater adventures, and its declared commitment to Israel’s security. So be it. But now I have my concerns about the not very good poem and about the controversies surrounding it.

In the taxi ride back home, we heard discussions in all news channels (as the driver browsed from one to the next) about Grass’s anti-Semitism, which perplexed me. We read the poem at home and were underwhelmed. Thomas Steinfeld noted in the SZ on Wednesday night, it is not Grass’s first poem. Actually, the first published one made him join group 47 in 1955, and his poetry has always been full of exaggerations. Exaggerations are part of the poetic form, we are reminded, and Grass went wrong here, as he erred about, for instance, “trying to save the collapsing GDR from the German Federal Republic.”

I would like to focus a bit on the language of the lyrical prose, preserving and highlighting parts of it that have been overlooked, like the discussion of comparable moral standing and silence, and the performance of national memory narrative.

In the German (and Israeli) discussion following Grass’s poem, the focus has been on the attack on Israeli atomic policy, on Israel’s moral superiority in the Middle East and on Grass’s statement that Israel is a threat to world peace. Since we are dealing with a poem, we ought to also consider the form and language of the poem. Silence (Schweigen) is repeated five times, concealment (Verschweigen) twice, and the formulation “what must be said” and speech (Rede) three more times. Barring or forbidding (Untersage) once. “Outspoken truth” once. Mr. Grass here liberates himself from a long, allegedly nationally imposed, silence about Israel. This silence, he maintains, is due to the threat of being called an anti-Semite, which he is ending now because “tomorrow might be too late.” But here I focus on the performance of national narratives by Grass, about the discourse of silence. It resembles the opening of Foucault’s History of Sexuality about the repressive hypothesis that creates and marks more discursive mechanisms affording speech and control of speech about sex.

What is the role of writing about breaking the silence? How can a Grass poem stir such discussion? Stephen Evens wrote for the BBC:

“In the years after the war, Guenter Grass’s writing gave him a status of Conscience of the Nation, and in a nation which takes its soul-searching very seriously indeed […] For more than 60 years after the war, he showed a zeal and what seemed like a searing honesty in the way he berated those who refused to admit their own dark pasts. But this reputation was dented when it emerged in 2006 that he had kept quiet about his own past as a member of the Waffen-SS (a branch of the military under the direct control of the Nazi party). Even then, he was not universally discredited. Some took this as evidence of the complexity of the psyche of the man (and by implication of the nation).”

With this reputation it is easier to understand the context of the discussion in the German press and how easy it was for the Israeli press to also pick up on the stained, repressed past of Grass as a Waffen SS member.

Concerning the content and form of talking about silence, Grass is actually onto something quite disturbing here, as Michael Naumann, the former culture minister under the Red-Green coalition of Schroeder, recognized in an article on Monday in the Tagesspiegel. Namely a way of speaking, which I heard time and again in reaction to the Holocaust Memorial, often from right-wing radicals, but also from other Memorial visitors: they are not allowed to say what they think about Israel. Israel stands, at least for these actors, for the Jews. Naumann declares the “Poem” (quotation marks in the original) a moral and political scandal. He asks: what motivates Grass? What speaks through him? And he answers:

“…once, just once, to have a vacation from the German ‘responsibility history’; once, just once, to shout at the Jews that they can also be perpetrators; once, just once, like Martin Walser did, to withdraw from the memory the photos, handed down to us, of the concentration camps […] but this exactly we have already heard. What, for the sake of God, speaks there in Guenter Grass?”

Who picked up on the poem’s language? The AJC (American Jewish Committee) condemned using the verb “Verbrechen” or “perpetrator” to describe Israel’s security policy. Westerwelle, the German Foreign Minister wrote yesterday in the popular Bild that positioning Israel and Iran on the same moral level is absurd.

The Left party, historically connected to the SED (the former ruling party in the GDR), supported Grass, providing the only outspoken supporter of his views.

As for German Jewish symbolism and the timing of the poem’s publication, Haaretz reports:

“Emmanuel Nahshon, a diplomat at the Israeli embassy in Berlin, said the allegation – just before the Jewish feast of Passover – that Israel wanted to wipe out the Iranian people belonged to a European anti-Semitic tradition of accusing Jews of ‘ritual murder.’ ”

Meanwhile, a cartoon in Haaretz shows two young men on a roof with their garden of marijuana plants, and one guy is saying to the other “I thought Grass was already banned.” Haaretz’s editorial reacted to Yishai’s declaration of Grass as persona non grata by stating that he “just wrote a poem” and people are free to express their views. What I find interesting about the drama following the publication is the talk about formerly understood taboos: “What Must be Said” is Grass’s reaction to his compulsion to stay silent because of Germany’s responsibility toward Israel after the Holocaust.

All in all, it must be seen as something positive that so much attention and interest has come to light from the publication of a poem, however weak in content and form. At the same time, it is worthwhile to mention and recall just how weak it in fact is. Perhaps the most important lesson in this episode, however, has not to do with the poem itself so much as the way we (in speaking about it, or in neglecting to do so) extend underlying narratives about the political significance of silence and speech, about certain subjects (the Holocaust, Israel, nuclear power and weaponry), in certain places. Or, indeed, anywhere.

This in-depth post is the first in a series on the question: Why Poland? To skip this introduction, click here.

A few years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in Lublin, Poland. I was promised that the lectures would be translated and published as a book. It was a promise, never fulfilled. But preparing and giving the lectures was a very interesting exercise, nonetheless. It gave me an opportunity to start reflecting on how my research and public activities in Poland before the fall of communism could inform public life there “after the fall.”

I prepared and presented three extended lectures. The first was on media and the politics of small things, a topic that I have focused on in recent years. The other two lectures were on topics I haven’t explored further, but I think may be of interest to readers of Deliberately Considered. I will reproduce the lectures in the coming weeks. Today’s in-depth post: the first of three posts addressing a simple question I have often been asked, “Why Poland?” Later, my second lecture, another frequently asked question: “Why Theater?”

Why Poland? It was a question first posed to me by my mother. She wanted to understand why it was that I had chosen to do research in the country from where her parents fled. It was a question motivated by the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews. It is a topic that I have not spent much time addressing professionally, though I have had to deal with it personally. The lecture I gave in Poland was one of the rare times that I publicly addressed the topic, making the personal professional.

The lecture made three distinct moves, responding to the issue of the relationship between Jews and Poles from three different vantage points: the first, today’s post, was the most personal, built upon reflections on my personal experiences as a researcher in Poland in 1973-4. The second post builds upon my thoughts as an observer of Polish democratization of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz. The third post, which is the part of the lecture written specifically with my Lublin audience in mind, is an analysis of the Polish response to Jan Gross’s Neighbors, a book in which Gross documents the fact of the active Polish participation of the Shoah in a small town in Eastern Poland, Jedwabne.

The first post is the most personal. It is formed by a cultural sensibility, “the wisdom of youth,” which I think requires serious and systematic deliberation. This is what got me to go where my mother wouldn’t. It is also that which told my son, in 2004, that Barack Obama would soon be President of the United States, and I think it is something to think about when we consider the promise of the new “new social movements” that have developed in recent years, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. Once one begins there is so much to think about.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis of “Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism,”click here.

My answer to my mother’s question was filled with the naiveté and the self-centeredness of youth.  I was looking for adven­ture.  I wanted to visit Europe after I had completed my stud­ies.  I had a good disser­ta­tion proposal to study theater in Poland, and a major founda­tion was willing to pay for a year’s prepara­tion and language study and a year or more of research and living expenses in Europe.  This was a great oppor­tunity, both personal and profes­sional.  For me, the pain of my people and my family were things of the past, to be remembered and under­stood, but not some­thing that should restrict my ambitions and plans.  In retro­spect, mine was “the wisdom of youth.”

Because I was not restrict­ed by the very recent past, which seemed not so recent to me, I could attempt to develop the capacity to remem­ber and to understand, as would never have been the case had I been constrained by my mother’s memories of her parents.  But the insight of my mother’s question persists.  It sheds light on many of the problems I have faced in the course of my research and experiences in East and Central Europe, and it may help us under­stand the prob­lems of clashing collec­tive memories in the post-­totalitarian shadows.

In this paper, I reflect upon how Poles and Jews confront each other through their contrasting memories.  I attempt to show that there is endur­ing wisdom in my mother’s question, as a question, both because it raises a signif­icant issue and it does not dogmatical­ly declare an an­swer.  Back in 1970, dogma may have come in the form of a parental prohibi­tion concerning the plans of a respectful son: “you can’t go to the place my parents fled from.”  Here, in a more public domain, dogma comes in the form of contrasting truisms which shape conflicting memories, from “Poles are hope­lessly anti-Semit­ic,” to “Jews minimize the suffer­ing of others and do not understand the causes and respon­sibili­ties of their own suffer­ings.”  Here, I am presenting reflections based upon a paper written in response to controversies surrounding ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp.  I am extending those reflections to include the controversies about the massacre in Jedwabne in 1941, the continuing controversies about Kielce in 1946, and the advance in my on going search for answers to my mother’s question.  The search started in the early 1970s, and it continues to this day.  Thus I present my thoughts in three parts: 1. Before the End of Communism, 2. Commemorating Auschwitz, and 3. Debating Jedwabne.  To anticipate my conclusion, I see these parts as revealing the development of a democratic Poland, with enduring and new problems.

Before the Fall of Communism

During my year and a half in Poland in 1973 and 1974, the “Why Poland?” question periodically became pressing.  I had to play memory games to make it less so.  This started soon after I ar­rived.  My first summer here was spent at a Polish language insti­tute.  Most of my fellow students were Polish Americans, trying to learn the lan­guage of their grand­parents.  We spent six weeks studying in Poznan and then two weeks on a bus tour all around Poland.  We visited Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Gdynia, Wroclaw, Zakopane, and Oswiecim (Au­schwitz).  The stops in Auschwitz, Zakopane and Krakow proved to be especially meaningful.  They serve as a prelude to later controver­sies over commemo­ration and memory.

Going to Auschwitz, I expected to be overwhelmed with grief, bewildered, appalled, and confused.  I experienced all this and much more.  My capacity to describe falls short of my aspirations to explain.  Yet, my most meaningful experience, from the point of view of our discussion today, was not in the field of my expec­ta­tions, and it is easily ex­plainable.  I was very angry.  My anger was not immediately directed at the Nazis, the German totalitarians, but at the Polish totalitarians: the Polish communists, who seemed to belittle the special suffer­ing of the Jews on the grounds of what is in fact the largest Jewish cemetery in the world.  At that time, it was hardly even noticeable that Jews were among the victims.  The sign at the entrance to the museum at the camp noted the suffer­ing of many nations, from the Russians to the French, from the Dutch to the Czechs; Jews were not specifically mentioned.  This was repeat­ed in the written materi­als on sale at the museum store.

To make matters worse, the pattern was repeat­ed in the old German barracks where there were special exhibits on the nations who suffered at the camp.  The barracks used to memori­alize the Polish nation were particu­larly disturbing.  One camp photo after another, with the names of murdered inmates, was dis­played. There were no Jewish names.  This was my most dramatic lesson in understand­ing that the categories of Jew and Pole commonly were mutually exclusive for Poles, even for Polish communists.  Our guide did not note such matters, nor did he point out that the Jewish exhibit had been “closed for renova­tion” since 1968, the year of the “anti-Zionist” purge.  We just passed the building housing the exhibit in silence.  As a rela­tively recent stu­dent of Polish culture and poli­tics, I was bewildered.  I later learned how silence replaced open anti-Semitism as official Party policy.

One way and another, since the war, there had been no open critical confron­tation with the Holo­caust, and the Polish relation to it, beyond the clichés of official Marxist ideology and Polish privately trans­mitted common knowledge.  The limits of the former were obscenely evident in my trip to Auschwitz.  The museum presentation of Auschwitz erased Jewish experience, memory and suffering, and replaced it with the stale clichés of official Marxism.  In such a way, the Holo­caust was avoided from war’s end to 1968.  The closing of the Jewish exhib­it, which would have been likely an exhibi­tion of such official clichés, substituted racist aggres­sion for the igno­rance of ideology.  The silence, which fol­lowed, further undermined the possi­bil­i­ty of real delib­era­tion­­.

The limits of the common knowledge of Poles as it has been transmitted privately were sug­gest­ed to me by one of my fellow stu­dents in the Polish language program soon after we left the camp.  These limits were then revealed during numer­ous encoun­ters I had while re­search­ing Polish Theater in 1973 and 1974. When I read the discussions about Jedwabne, I heard echoes of the little relatively benign story I will now tell.

Our next stop, on our tour was Zakopane, a popular mountain resort town.  A few hours after our trip to Ausch­witz, one of Polish American students was shopping for souvenirs for friends back home.  After her shopping adventure, she related her experi­ence at a shop­ping stall to one of our fellow stu­dents.  On our bus returning to our lodgings, she ex­press­ed con­ster­na­tion that she was not able to “Jew down” the sales­person on the price of some trinket.  I overheard the conver­sation and object­ed, especially in light of what we had experi­enced together at our previous stop.  What surprised me was not so much her anti-Semitic expression, but her subsequent defense of it as being meaningless: just an expres­sion, having nothing to do with Jews.  Everyone she knows uses it, she ex­plained.  It has no malicious intent and nothing to do with Jews or the Holo­caust, as far as she could see.

This is more an American than a Polish anecdote.   While anti-Semitism certainly does exist in Poland, the expres­sion: “to Jew down,” meaning to bargain, is English, and not Polish, I’m told.  Yet, the story stayed with me during my Polish so­journ for what it said about xenophobia and its persis­tence, about xenophobia and the mechanism of collective memory.  This young woman came from a lower middle class district in Brooklyn.  In her world, Jews were more symbols and linguistic expressions than flesh and blood people.  This has been even more the case in Poland and much of East and Central Europe after the Nazi occupation.  In such a world of symbols, intents need not be malicious for them to be insen­sitive and malignant.  The absence of the other, who in inter­action challenges foolishness and insensitivi­ty, as I attempted to do, makes for the unintentional transmis­sion of hatred.  This transmission is not even disrupted when the immen­si­ty of hate’s conse­quences is revealed, as it was despite all the problems of presentation on the grounds of Auschwitz.

The expres­sion “to Jew down” builds upon the lie that Jews are particularly expert with money and have their ways of getting the best from Gentiles.  The way to succeed in money matters is to act like a Jew, be greedy, heart­less, focused on the monetary and not the moral.  Even if one does not think of real Jews in this way, if one has good feelings toward Jewish friends and acquain­tances or does not think much about Jews at all, to use the phrase is to keep the stereotype alive.  And when a significant part of a cultural identity is built upon such expressive stereo­types of the other, as it is in Poland, then mutual under­stand­ing and respect becomes ex­tremely diffi­cult, if not impossi­ble.

Soon after our visit to Auschwitz and just before my wife and I said goodbye to our American friends, we, as a group, visited the city of Krakow.  While our colleagues stayed on the official tour, we went, on our own, off the formal itinerary to visit Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter and ghetto.

In 1973, Kazimierz was not the gentrifying district that it is today.  Our official tour ignored the district completely.  It was a slum, empty and decaying, some synagogues being used as warehouses and the others closed to visitors.  The oldest one had been converted into a state museum, which was apparently continuously closed for renovations since 1968.  We did manage to see the ancient Jewish cemetery and the adjacent synagogue (Remuh) where an elderly man noticed us looking around.  He introduced himself as the caretak­er of the grounds.  We spoke in our only common lan­guage, Polish, he with a strong Yiddish accent.  Yet, he insisted that he was a Polish Catholic.  The visit was extremely disturbing.

It then became clear to me that if I were to spend the next year in this country, exploring the attempt by indepen­dent minded Poles to inject cre­ativity and critique into Polish public culture through theater, I had to do so as Ameri­can and not as Jew.  The Jewish ques­tion clearly remained, even if without Jews, but I would have to put it aside, along with my mother’s, if I were not to be consumed by them.  The needed Polish – Jewish dialogue was too difficult for me to take part in at that time.  And, what was true for me was also true for the few remaining Jews in post-sixty eight Poland, and for Poles of good will as well.  There were too many more pressing problems, both political and personal, to confront the question of Jews in Poland.  The “aliens,” who were one third of the population of Warsaw before the war and who were one tenth of the population of the nation, had been eradicated.  Hitler and his collaborators (both Germans and from other nations) had succeeded and no one had time to talk about it, includ­ing me.

Of course, I am being too harsh on Poles of good will and on myself.  The “Why Poland?” question, the question that assumes the existence of intractable problems in Polish – Jewish rela­tions, but confronts them, could be addressed and tentative answers could be dis­cussed, even within the Communist system.  A key for such address and discus­sion is memory, memory of a time and a place when such relations robustly existed.  The starting point is the everyday memory of Polish – Jewish relations current in Polish society.  The start­ing point inevitably begins with cemeteries, including Ausch­witz.  This became clear to me as I traveled around Poland studying student theater.

When I began talking with my interviewees, invariably the fact that I am Jewish became evident.  Either this would be evident from my name or my physical appearance, or it would come up in conversation.

The response took on a predictable pattern.  First, there would be a personal note.  I would be told of the Jewish cemetery near the homes of just about every person with whom I spoke.  Next there would be long discussions with my new friends about the events of 1968 [a time of official anti-Semitism in Poland) and more deeply about Polish Jewish history.  The young Poles revealed a great deal about themselves and their nation in these discus­sions.  Since I was primar­i­ly talking to Polish liberals, aspiring cosmopolitan artists who looked to the West for inspiration and community, who were themselves involved directly or indirectly in the student revolt of ’68, the discussants tended to be unam­big­u­ous­ly critical of the anti-Semitism of the regime and those who responded positively to such anti-Semitic maneuvers.

The depth of their criticism became evident when we spoke about long term Polish – Jewish relations.  There were those who emphasized Polish liberalism, who pointed out that Jews were welcomed in Poland in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centu­ries, when they were treated as pariahs in the kingdoms further East and West.  They would point out that it was not an accident that so many Jews had lived in Poland.  On the other hand, there were those who emphasized the continuity of anti-Semitic troubles among Poles.  Their comments would focus on the last one hundred years, the years of the greatest troubles in Polish – Jewish relations, and espe­cial­ly on the post war period, the years of their lived experience.

I came to realize that those who most emphat­ically “taught” me about the long history of friendship between Poles and Jews tended to be anti-Semitic, and those who forth­rightly spoke about Polish anti-Semitism tended to be tolerant, truly liberal, respectful.  I did not intend to explore these discussions system­at­i­cal­ly.  I had made the decision to avoid them in order to stay focused on an understanding of the politics of the alternative culture.  I was committed to the decision I made in Krakow that my personal con­cerns and prob­lems with the region should not take prece­dence over my specific intellectual reasons for being in Poland.  The histor­i­cal memory of anti-Semitism seemed to be quite periph­eral to my pressing project.  Yet, the symbolism of anti-Semitism was not.  It became apparent that definitions of Polish identity are con­nect­ed with such symbolism, and these have since become increas­ing­ly impor­tant in the config­uration of Polish political life.

Towards the end of my first Polish adventure, I was reminded of my grandparents’ experience.  An American friend, Jeffrey Geronimo, was visiting us, and my wife and I and our close Polish friend, Elzbieta Matynia, were on a little tour with him of the Polish countryside.  In an isolat­ed village in the Kielce region, we chanced upon an elderly man, apparently well into his nineties.  He was the picture postcard vision of a Slavic gentleman, walking with a cane, with a long angular nose and flowing white moustache.  We started a conversation, talk­ing about the usual tourist fare, all of which now escapes me.  When saying our farewells, Elzbieta challenged the gentleman to guess where my wife and I came from.  By this time we were speak­ing Polish rela­tive­ly well.  He guessed Warsaw.  When we indicat­ed New York, he did not believe us.  And after some joking around, he declared he did not know who we were or where we were from, for sure, but one thing he was certain of was that we were not Jews.

Here was the Poland my grandparents fled from – the Poland in which the Jew is the definition of the other that negatively invokes common identi­ty, even humanity.

At the time, the incident seemed to be more about the past than about the present or the future.  I have since learned that this was not so.  Both the elderly gentle­man’s statement and our Polish friend’s response to it, her extreme embarrassment and consternation, tell us a great deal about the post-communist political culture of Poland.  For, in an important sense, the problem of anti-Semitism in today’s Poland and much of East and Central Europe, the anti-Semitism without Jews, has little to do with Jews and a lot more to do with the nations states of Europe, which live in the midst of Jewish graves.  This has become most appar­ent after the fall of commu­nism, during such symbolic events as the commemoration of the liberation of a concentration camp, and such pressing practical events as the political ascendancy of overt anti-Semites, and now the debates over Jedwebne and Polish complicity in the Holocaust.  The problem has to do with the way anti-Semitism is knitted into Polish common sense, but more about that after we closely consider the problems of commemoration in Auschwitz and in Jedwabne.

Why should we care? Because some of us love the music. Some of us even commit that chauvinist crime of saying: “He’s the greatest Jewish composer” as if there were a contest out there. (He was reviled with anti-Semitism in Vienna during his lifetime, especially around his directorship of the Vienna Court Opera). But two of the most progressive conductor’s, Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas (both Jewish), both of whom regarded Mahler as central to their lives, are just full of the usual clichés about him. Oh, like: that those wonderful and suggestive, disintegrating endings to his final works are “about death” or about his death. Well, maybe they are, but HE never said that.

The latest slew of these interpretations came in a visually elegant public television program conceived by Tilson Thomas called “Keeping Score.” I won’t list instances here, maybe some other time. Actually the best one-liners came from the first clarinetist, Corey Bell, of the SF Symphony (featured in the film). He spoke about the “skin-of-your-teeth tonalities” in the Scherzo of the 7th Symphony, and of the “corners to hide out in.”

Thomas does get off one perceptive analysis: tracing the use of the musical “turn” from Mahler’s first work, “Songs of a Wayfarer” to the final movements of his last two completed works. And the importance of the tone A in that early work and then in the climax of the first movement of his 10th Symphony.

A final shot of Thomas at Mahler’s grave in Grinzing, a suburb of Vienna, shows without comment, stones placed in the traditional Jewish manner on top of the gravestone. Mahler’s remains were not allowed to be buried in the same cemetery as Beethoven and Schubert. “Those who love me will find me,” he said.