Polish debates on the Holocaust, from 1946 to the present (abgesagt)

Anyone interested in Holocaust remembrance must have been concerned by the news coming from Poland in last years, including attempts at legal restrictions on relevant publications and harassment of historians. This lecture will put the recent events in a longer perspective of the history of Polish debates on the Shoah. They begun soon after the war, if not earlier, and after being suppressed under the communist regime, they reemerged to culminate in early 2000s. Since late 1980s, Polish historians and the public at large have engaged in several major debates about the Holocaust. The national media, historians and columnists, philosophers and celebrities, political and religious leaders, as well as many ordinary men and women, have felt obliged to speak up and write, often at length and emotionally, about the dramatic events under the German occupation many decades ago. The debates contributed to the development of relevant research, changes in the perceptions of the Polish-Jewish past, and important artistic productions such as the drama Nasza klasa by Tadeusz Słobodzianek and Paweł Pawlikowski’s film Ida, but produced also a backlash, which has intensified under the present populist government.