Impulses for Europe
Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry
Berlin (2008)
Page 47 - 60


Remembrance between Scylla and Charybdis
The Public and Scholarly Treatment of Eastern Europe’s Jewish Heritage

Knowledge about the life of the East European Jews and the Shoah has grown in past decades. But the appropriate transmission of East European Jewish history and culture is highly demanding. Sometimes, there is a danger of remembrance of the Holocaust’s victims sliding into commercialism and kitsch, and because Jewish life is often treated as a museum artefact, its renaissance ends up forgotten. Delphine Bechtel, Michael Brenner, Frank Golczewski, Rachel Heuberger, François Guesnet, Cilly Kugelmann, and Anna Lipphardt explain what kind of conclusions they have drawn from this balancing act for their work in museums, libraries, classrooms, and archives.



OSTEUROPA: For decades, the Jews of Eastern Europe have been viewed through the prism of the Holocaust. What kind of consequences does this have for the way Jewish life in Eastern Europe is perceived? Is this starting to change?

Cilly Kugelmann: After 1945, there were hardly any Jews left in Eastern Europe who could not be associated with the genocide. The image of the East European Jews before National Socialism is highly differentiated, depending on whether one focuses on the history of the Jews in the Baltic states, Poland, or the Soviet Union. It ranges from the romanticisation of the shtetl, the study and portrayal of its less appealing reality, to the engagement of Jews on behalf of Socialist revolution in Communist parties, and their membership in the nomenclature of Soviet governments and institutions.

Michael Brenner: Given the almost total eradication of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, it is wholly understandable that the Shoah dominates our contemporary view of Jewish history. Unlike in Germany, where a polar perpetrator-victim relationship shapes the way history is viewed, the situation in Eastern Europe is more complex. In the wake of the German occupation of large areas of Eastern Europe, a competition of victims was established, which during the Communist era often resulted in the failure to acknowledge the specific suffering of the Jews. To this day, for example, some segments of Polish society refuse to recognise Auschwitz primarily as a place where Jews were annihilated. The process of working through the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne at the hands of their fellow Polish citizens has raised the question of the extent to which Polish victims of National Socialism also committed crimes against Jews during the war. This debate is intensifying in the discussion of anti-Jewish pogroms after the war. Ultimately, the image of “Jew = Communist” from the postwar years is still deeply rooted in society today and often serves as a model for anti-Jewish propaganda.

Rachel Heuberger: Even before the Shoah, the West already had a one-sided view of East European Jewish life and had reduced it to an idealised version of a pre-modern society with an intact religious tradition. Think of the romanticising images of Roman Vishniac, the glorifying interpretation of Hasidism by Martin Buber, or the trivialisation of “eastern Jewish” literature written Sholem Aleichem. The urban intelligentsia and the enlightened Polish Jewry that tried to integrate into civic life were overlooked as were the members of the Socialist movements. As a result of the Shoah, with its destruction of East European Jewish life, this false perception has been reproduced several times over in our commemorative culture and is the only one to have been handed down. The few survivors were not and are not considered authentic Jews. As far as I can tell, there has been no essential change in this view.

François Guesnet: It is true that in the German-speaking countries, the East European Jews were viewed primarily through the prism of the Holocaust. However, this does not apply elsewhere in the world. For the German-speaking countries, this attitude basically signified a continuation of the racist and totalitarian perspective of the German master race: Only the murder of East European Jewish men and women was perceived, not, however, the individual lives, hopes, and aspirations that were extinguished by this genocide. However, there is no question that German-language research has also been focused on this suppressed perspective for some time. The “eastern Jews” – itself a misleading and stereotypical term, by the way – became a topic of interest during the 1980s. Trude Maurer and her work should be mentioned first. For years, it is precisely the historians and cultural anthropologists who have been trying to make the loss of human life in all its complexity more imaginable. Here, the lifeworld-research by Heiko Haumann can be mentioned, but also individual contributions by Gabriele Freitag, Yvonne Kleinmann, Heidemarie Petersen, Gertrud Pickhan, or Katrin Steffen. The large share of female colleagues and the low participation of male colleagues is conspicuous and not coincidental. The situation is also different elsewhere in the world.

Delphine Bechtel: After the Shoah, the history of the living Jews was indeed ignored. In Germany in particular, Jews were perceived solely as “dead Jews”. This emerged implicitly from the systematic way the Shoah was investigated, through the reconstruction of the origins, the preparations, to the implementation of the annihilation. Jews thus became “Jews annihilated by the Germans”. Anything that had to do with Jewish life was engulfed by the aura of the Shoah and consequently became “sacred”, “untouchable”. There were also “imaginary Jews”. In France, which is home to a large number of Ashkenazi Jews, Alain Finkielkraut used this term to describe the descendants of the victims of the Shoah who themselves no longer have any idea of their grandparents’ culture. But their Jewish identity is based on the negative experience of the Shoah. In Germany, where far fewer Jews lived up until the 1990s, the “imaginary Jews” were construed by young Germans. It was known that the Jews were “the victims”, but they otherwise remained unknown.

Anna Lipphardt: There are two prisms among the general public in the West: horror (Auschwitz) and kitsch (klezmer, shtetl, “eastern Jews”). In Eastern Europe, the Holocaust has been ignored for decades. Now, it is becoming the focus of attention. East European Jews are dedicating a great deal of intellectual energy to the issue. From the Jewish point of view, the life of the Jews living in Eastern Europe was also often viewed through the prisms of “horror” and “nostalgia”. But a differentiated attitude also existed after 1945. The YIVO research institute in New York and the Yiddish cultural movement should be mentioned here. Josh Waletzky’s documentary film “Image Before My Eyes” (1981) shed light on the multifaceted nature of Jewish life in Poland between the wars. In the interim, a growing number of impulses are coming from the younger generation of East European Jews, which does not wish to see its cultural heritage reduced to the Holocaust and the shtetl, and from Israel, where the one-dimensional Zionist version of history, which regards the diaspora as the prelude to Auschwitz, has lost its appeal and interest is are growing in East European roots.

Frank Golczewski: A distinction must be made between the academic world and the general public. For the general public, the assumption that their perception is filtered through the Shoah is generally true. This has a political dimension, because the problems surrounding the Shoah are “clearer” than a discussion about today’s “Jewish issues”, and pre-Shoah history is interpreted as a history of “failure”.
For academics, the lifeworlds of East European Jews before the Shoah have been of interest for many years. Think of the work by Verena Dohrn, Yvonne Kleinmann, Kai Struve, François Guesnet, and Gertrud Pickhan. Here, I would say to the contrary that research on the Shoah – to the extent that it was not purely research on the perpetrators – has only gotten underway more strongly in recent years. Here, I’d like to refer to the studies by Dieter Pohl, Michael Alberti, Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk, Christoph Dieckmann, and Joachim Tauber. However, research into the Shoah is still limited, to some degree because work with so-called “ego documents”, such as memorial books, has hardly developed. This work demands a great deal of source criticism and a knowledge of languages. With regard to the subjective view of the persecuted Jews, there is still a tendency toward projecting one’s own attitude. Scholars of East European History in Germany are happy to leave the subject of the Shoah to German specialists such as Christian Gerlach, Götz Aly, or Andrei Angrick. However, the latter are frequently unable to make direct use of Hungarian, Slavic, Yiddish, and Hebrew texts. This may be a “technical” argument, but it is one that is clearly reflected in the type of research conducted.
Despite some differentiating studies, the perception among the general public, and often among academics as well, has been influenced by the ethnicisation of the Jews, which has occurred due to Zionism. References are made to “Germans and Jews”, rather than “Jewish and non-Jewish Germans”. A similar phenomenon applies in Eastern Europe, where the contrast between the full suppression of the Jews in public discourse (victims of the Shoah as “Soviet citizens”) and the reinforcement of their identity by administrative measures (item 5 on the Soviet passport) is still rife. This results in terminological confusion. On the one hand, Trotsky, is defined or defamed as a Jew; on the other hand, it is said that he was not a “real” Jew, because he was a Bolshevik. The issue of assimilation (an insult, even for assimilated Zionists) as a normal process of modernisation has hardly been touched upon. This also goes for the Soviet Union in particular, where assimilation was especially effective.


OSTEUROPA: In Prague, Cracow, or other places that were important centres of Jewish life before the Shoah, a reconnection with Jewish traditions can be observed. What is your assessment of this development?

Bechtel: The situation is not the same in all cities. The manner and timing of this reconnection with the Jewish past differ widely. In Prague, the synagogues and Jewish museums are an integral part of any city tour. The process of putting history in a museum began during the Communist era and progressed very rapidly in a situation where Jews were almost completely absent. In Warsaw, the Jewish Museum still hasn’t been built. In general, there is relatively little in this respect. In the Kazimierz district in Cracow or on Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin, a substitute for Jewish life (Café Silberstein, Tacheles, Café Ariel) has been created for appearances, with much good will and bad conscience. There is something ghostly about this. In Ukraine, there is almost nothing.

Golczewski: This reconnection is part trend and to a large degree commerce. What Neuschwanstein represents for some people is for others the Remuh Synagogue or the Old New Synagogue. This “reconnection” is a romanticisation, “coming out” is also a romanticisation of one’s own vitae – comparable to the “Roots” movement among Afro-Americans. To this extent, it is impossible to be either for or against it, since this meets a basic human need, the need to make one’s past “accessible”. Religious highlights are better suited to this purpose than concentration camps. Atheists also visit the Cologne Cathedral or the Wailing Wall. However, one should not confuse this ultimately anachronistic “revival” with “real” present-day “Jewish life”, in which this environment plays only a very limited role. For most, this is no different than in the gentile world with regard to secularisation and modernisation, including sporadic tourist visits to events with religious connotations – comparable to the hype surrounding the Pope.

Lipphardt: After the decades of suppression, the examination of Jewish history in Eastern Europe is appropriate and important. At the local level, awareness of the Jewish past is beginning to develop. Increasingly, the multiethnic past is seen as also containing potential rather than just ballast. I would not consider the restoration of former Jewish districts, the construction of Jewish museums, and the klezmer festivals a “reconnecting with Jewish traditions”, since much of this is taking place over the heads and needs of the local Jewish communities.
Guesnet: The question is what one understands by reconnection. In general, I can only welcome the fact that in these and many other cities, the Jewish presence and a multiethnic population are being remembered, whether in the form of festivals, film series, literary works, academic events, or other types of public discussion. In some cases, a kind of exaggerated street market gains the upper hand, in order to meet the need among Americans, Israelis, or West Europeans for proper souvenirs, for example. When I first visited Poland over 20 years ago, the carved wooden figures of traditional Jews were nowhere to be found. Is it such a bad thing that in the meantime they can be purchased in every Cepelia store? I don’t think so.

Heuberger: I see these developments critically. The so-called renaissance of Jewish life is based on a hotchpotch of economic interests on the part of the tourist industry, political considerations, and attempts by individuals, who are as a rule non-Jewish, to revive a glorified past. The real problems of the small local Jewish communities are ignored.

Brenner: Aside from several noteworthy academic endeavours, this involves above all the commercialisation of Jewish heritage. Golem figures in Prague and dancing Hasidic dolls in Cracow have replaced the rich Jewish life that once flourished there. Notable efforts have also been made, such as the big klezmer festival in Cracow. Here, there is a reconnection with Jewish culture. However, given the absence of a significant Jewish community, this is a “non-Jewish Jewish culture”. Ruth Gruber has called it “virtually Jewish”.

Kugelmann: Until now, the activities in the area of cultural references to the pre-war Jewish population are repertory theatre. It is well meant, but offers nothing else. The rediscovery of Jewish culture in these geographic regions is perhaps instead the first encounter with this culture for those who occupy their time with it, to that extent it is not a reconnection, but a first-ever confrontation as an attempt to deal with the history of the annihilation.


OSTEUROPA: What does the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union mean for research on Jewish history in Eastern Europe? Where has important progress been made? Where are there still gaps to be filled?

Kugelmann: Archives that were previously inaccessible have opened their doors. More details from the process of mass annihilation and the attitude of the local population to these events can now be analysed using new sources.
Heuberger: The downfall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives have lent impetus to national historical perspectives. However, the Jewish history of individual countries is still not being adequately researched and documented. This may be due to a lack of knowledge of the languages needed and differs from country to country. Poland is taking a leading role in researching the lifeworlds of East European Jews, as is evidenced by the number of new works there. Anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the currents and institutions that are regarded as traditional opponents of Fascism, such as national movements, workers’ movements, and the churches, should be researched and analysed.

Guesnet: The field has become much more dynamic. Here, too, the German-speaking countries lag far behind. Progress has been comprehensive and cannot be restricted to specific issues. To a certain extent, this is due to the improved access to sources in Eastern Europe, but it is due first of all to the great curiosity in Jewish history and culture in Eastern Europe that has been demonstrated by colleagues elsewhere in the world. Eighty percent of the Jews living today have roots in Eastern Europe. The intensity of the discussion is increasing. Works on Poland and Russia show the most dynamism. The most dynamic field internationally over the last 20 years has probably been research into Jewish mysticism, Hasidism. The greatest potential here is the incorporation of East European Jewry into European Jewish history. Here are just two examples: East European Jewry was characterised by a number of specific features, and yet in familial, economic, cultural, and religious terms, these Jews were connected to the Central and West European Jews by networks that were to a certain extent highly stable and efficient. These networks must be researched. The second example is that there was more than one Jewish modernity. There was also a Jewish modernity specific to Eastern Europe, without which, in my view, the Prussian Jewish renaissance would hardly have been possible. This influence came not least of all from spiritual and intellectual stimuli that originated with teachers from Eastern Europe, who, as Heinrich Graetz grumbled, had “corrupted” the German Jews. There was no Iron Curtain in Europe before 1945.

Golczewski: First of all, access to the archives has improved. Issues that had previously been taboo can now be worked on. A large number of source editions and fact-based accounts have appeared in Poland. However, the number of publications in other East European countries has declined. A great deal of work has also been conducted in Poland on the problem of Jewish-gentile relations. Political debates, such as the dispute over Auschwitz, Jedwabne, and the new book by Jan Tomasz Gross, have created a great deal of movement.
A painful issue everywhere is collaboration, the depiction of which is minimised as far as possible. Attempts are made to expel collaborators from their national community, if their existence is acknowledged at all. Another strategy is to convert their activities into a specific form of resistance against Germany. This is the case in Latvia, Slovakia, and Ukraine, for example.
East European historiography would benefit from a move away from the use of history for purposes of national affirmation and apologetics to a critical view of its own history (and politics). In Central and Eastern Europe, criticism is often restricted to the period 1945–1989 and is supported by old notions of the enemy (including anti-Jewish ones). A critical treatment of national identity in general (primordial notions of ethnic origins are widespread) and individual identity in particular (where the postulate of continuity and the “invention of tradition” dominate) would be beneficial.
It would also be productive to refrain from discussing “national” Jewries, but rather to study the historic groups that traverse today’s national boundaries. Ezra Mendelsohn began with this kind of work in his day.

Bechtel: It was better before everything turned into a museum. I will never forget seeing the old town in Lublin for the first time in the early 1980s. It had not changed since 1945: uninhabited, half destroyed with broken windows, Jewish words on the walls, and places where the mezuzot hung in the doorways. It was as if history were “frozen”, as if one could conjure up the past by travelling to the east. One saw the real situation head on, the annihilation without improvements. Now one sees just reconstructed buildings. Even if it is more attractive, perhaps more soothing for most people.
Even so, I do not agree with the competition to erect a Jewish museum in every city. In Warsaw for example, it would be much better, in my view, if Jewish history were integrated into the city museum, rather than building a separate “Jewish Museum”. Jewish history is not the history of an exotic minority that you “attractively” portray in a special museum – and in doing so contain it – and then rub your hands and say: “There! Now we’ve also got a Jewish Museum. Done!” In Warsaw, 40 percent of the population was Jewish. Jews were therefore an integral part of the city. That’s why they should be an integral element of the permanent exhibition in the Warsaw City Museum.
In my view, the same applies to research. I am against special Jewish Studies if they form a type of academic ghetto. In the departments of Jewish Studies at American universities, specialists have been trained who have an excellent knowledge of Jewish culture and history, but know little about other cultures. For this reason, they simply fail to appreciate their penetration. To the contrary, it is very important that scholars, together with researchers on site – be it in Cracow, L’viv, Vilnius, or elsewhere – build up an entangled history in which the Jews are not researched in isolation but in terms of their interaction with the other inhabitants of the city. Unfortunately, in some places, this is still wishful thinking.

Lipphardt: Finally, it is once again possible to research and teach the history of the East European Jews in Eastern Europe proper. The sources are accessible, and scholars are free to focus on Jewish topics. Many younger historians have completed part of their studies in the West. They have international networks, and their horizons extend far beyond their own respective national history.
The run on the archives, which began in 1989, has resulted in a large number of studies on the situation of East European Jewry in the 18th, 19th, and first half of the 20th century. Politics and institutional questions are at the forefront. Jewish urban and local history have also received new impulses. Scholarly interest in the Holocaust in those areas that were not occupied by the Wehrmacht until 1941 has increased. However, controversial topics are frequently ignored, or, as with Jan Gross’s studies on the history of Polish-Jewish relations during and after the Second World War, they result in such an uproar that there is no possibility of holding a differentiated exchange. To date, we know little about the postwar history of the Jews in and from Eastern Europe. I would also welcome more studies on everyday life and the cultural history of the Jews – and not only high culture!
Entangled history offers great potential. Yet, differentiated individual studies are not enough when it comes to writing an integrated or shared European history. For many topics, we need research networks, in which scholars with different linguistic, historical, and cultural skills work together.


OSTEUROPA: Jewish history and European history are inseparably intertwined. This is also true of East European Jewish and East European history. At the same time, the history of the Jews has always been a history of persecution. What significance does the knowledge gained from Jewish Studies or East European History as a discipline have for your work?

Brenner: I don’t work on the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe, rather German-Jewish history, the history of the Jews in Western Europe and the United States, and the pre-history of the State of Israel. However, nobody working on modern Jewish history can ignore Eastern Europe, for that is where the greater part of the Jewish community lived until the Shoah. The descendents of East European Jews have shaped American Jewry as well as the State of Israel, so that even outside Eastern Europe it is impossible to separate Jewish history from the region.

Kugelmann: The degree of persecution of the Jews and the way it was organised provides information on social developments with regard to the economic and demographic development of a region. For cultural history, the influence of the religious and folk customs of Christian cultures on the rituals and traditions of the Jews is of interest.

Golczewski: First of all, Jewish and non-Jewish history really are interwoven, even if representatives of both sides often try to portray their respective turf as “unsullied” by the other. In the linguistic (Yiddish), cultural (clothing), and religious (Hasidim and Pentecostal) fields, we can see developments that traverse and run parallel to these ostensible boundaries. For this reason, Jewish history is by no means always a history of persecution. It is also a history of religious and non-religious development, cultural transfer, economics, modernisation, Socialism, and nationalism. In addition, all categorisations of historical sub-disciplines have been constructed artificially in order to overcome complexity. They should be consciously broken down without being removed completely so as to highlight this fact. However, if one assumes that East European History and Jewish Studies stand in opposition to one another – which one shouldn’t, since each is an integral part of the other – then Jewish Studies allows general historians of Eastern Europe to understand the intellectual and material development within the Jewish population, a development that we often know only from the perspective of the gentile community (and that is warped accordingly) or from the point of view of atypical “frontier crossers”. The autonomy of the inside perspective often comes up short. This makes it possible to grasp the difference between the way the Jews understood themselves and the way they were perceived by others and thus contributes to the analysis of the conflict and to a basis for getting along with one another.
Guesnet: Since I regard neither East European History, nor Jewish Studies as independent academic disciplines with a specific set of methods, I can’t say much about this issue – except, perhaps, that in most cases it is difficult to think of the one in comprehensive terms without the other.

Lipphardt: I’m not of the opinion that the history of the East European Jewry “has always been a history of persecution”. Certainly, it has always been a history of a minority – a minority that has suffered from discrimination more than other East European minorities (except for the Sinti and Roma) and frequently from persecution. But despite the Holocaust, it should not be reduced to this. As minority history, it is a history of relationships, a Beziehungsgeschichte, but it also stands on its own. It is also a history of Jewish self-empowerment, Jewish everyday life, and a separate Jewish culture – in interaction with its surroundings.
But to return to the actual question: Since the end of the Cold War, East European History has developed or adapted an entire repertoire of analytical concepts that have great potential for research into East European Jewish history: empire and border studies, multi-ethnic urban history, and the concept of neighbourhood. The sensitisation to spatial connections and local references, which accompanied the spatial turn in East European History, can also be seen increasingly in the field of Jewish Studies in relation to Eastern Europe. The concept of lifeworlds, as developed by Heiko Haumann, also offers exciting points of contact for Jewish Studies.
However, there are several structural problems that impede a rapprochement between East European History and Jewish Studies. East European Historians who seek to research Jewish topics must acquire a solid knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew and a comprehensive knowledge of the lifeworlds of East European Jews and Judaism in general. Conversely, East European Jewish history and culture cannot be researched without knowledge of East European languages and a sound understanding of the non-Jewish environment. This cannot be learned in a crash course, nor by studying just history. Exchange is hindered by the fact that at German universities, Jewish Studies are, understandably, geared primarily to the study of German-Jewish history and culture. The knowledge and concepts associated with it cannot be transferred to the study of East European Jewry. It would therefore be helpful to strengthen East European themes within Jewish Studies in Germany and to foster closer cooperation between East European History and those academic institutions in North America and Israel where “holistic” and inter-disciplinary approaches are used in teaching and researching on East European Jewry.

Bechtel: Real life cannot be divided into academic disciplines. Researchers have been working according to philological categories (German, Slavic, and Jewish Studies, etc.) for too long. It is still far too easy to tell what kind of background a researcher has, and what their qualifications are. We should be growing out of this self-imposed immaturity and take a genuinely free approach to studying the lifeworlds of the Jews and their neighbours. Even so, in my view, the field of East European studies in Germany, as one of the most active areas of research, has achieved a great deal: Young researchers have emerged who are proficient in three or four languages, including Yiddish, and can shed light on events from several points of view.
Heuberger: For me, as a representative of Jewish Studies, individual local and regional history studies with numerous documents are helpful. Interdisciplinary exchange has been hindered above all by the fact that important Hebrew works have not been translated and are therefore not known in Eastern Europe, just as the West becomes familiar with many East European works only years later.


OSTEUROPA: Every era asks its own questions of history. Dan Diner describes the history of the Jews as a “paradigm of a European history”. Is the history of the East European Jews also of specific relevance for present-day Europe?

Golczewski: If Dan Diner meant that the history of the Jews contains everything that has been broached as a topic in other parts of European history, then this of course also applies to Eastern Europe. However, it does not necessarily follow that the history of the East European Jews is of relevance today. The Jewish group is too small proportionally – and too functionless, because it does not differ from gentile society. Here, I specifically exclude the history of Israel, which I regard as a colonial history. We don’t yet know whether this history will follow the American or the Algerian model – or perhaps a totally different one. If one wanted to be completely heretical, then today one can see greater relevance in the controversial remarks by Faruk Şen [former director of the Centre for Studies on Turkey in Essen, ed.] that the Turks are the new Jews. This may not be true literally, but it does raise the issue of the distrust that exists between mutually dependent groups with different value systems. When politicised accordingly, this distrust can lead to catastrophe.

Kugelmann: The treatment of minorities is a measure of a society’s stability. The “paradigm” should be understood in this light and can be used as a model for analysing comparable situations.

Bechtel: These paradigms were already underscored by German and American sociologists at the start of the 20th century: the Jew as “stranger”, i.e. as an urban dweller, as “modern”, as “neurotic”, as “intellectual”, as “cosmopolitan”, as “outsider”, as intermediary, as European citizen par excellence. However, I am not sure whether that’s still true today. The Jews are so “normal” statistically, so (petit) bourgeois, biased, educated and uneducated, communitarian, etc. – just like other people.

Guesnet: No, the history of the East European Jews has no specific relevance for present-day Europe. At least none that makes them more interesting or relevant than the history of the Greeks or the Catalans or the Germans. It is interesting and relevant in and of itself. It lends itself to the occasional comparison if anything. Currently, references are frequently made to the parallels in the history of the European Jewish minorities and the Muslim minorities now living in Europe, and rightly so. However, the differences between the two should not be forgotten.

Brenner: Jewish history shows how quickly and brutally a culture with such an important influence on a society can disappear not only from life, but also from the memory of its surroundings.

Heuberger: Whereas in Western Europe, the model of emancipation meant the long sought integration of the Jews as individuals into society, the Jewish minorities in Eastern Europe were defined as an ethnic group and were recognised as such to varying degrees, depending on the region. This experience can be used as a “model” for a future multicultural Europe with different cultures and ethnic identities. As a minority per se, one that belonged to no other national movement, the Jews of Eastern Europe were also the only “Europeans in a spiritual sense”. They embodied the ideals and concepts of a transnational Europe.


OSTEUROPA: Why does remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust play a subordinate role in East European countries?

Golczewski: That’s not the case at all. Ultimately, the Holocaust is always latently present, even in its negation and the emphasis given a country’s “own” victims. The entire Holodomor campaign by the Ukrainian government is aimed at equating the victims of starvation with the victims of the Shoah in qualitative and numerical terms. This acknowledges the Shoah – but also the exclusion of the Jews from “real” Ukrainian society. For the historicisation of the new Ukrainian national identity, farmers are better suited than Jews. This process therefore says quite a lot about the essentialisation of the “Ukrainian nation”.
The competition between victims is more ambivalent in Poland. Moreover, Christians and Jews commemorate their losses differently, something that fuels the competition. We know from soccer that in a rivalry, one takes the side of one’s own “team”, thereby making it easy to regard the other team as the “opponent”.
In the end, the Soviet way of integrating Jewish victims into Soviet society without labelling them is not so absurd. This also reflects the attempt at the time to construe a Soviet people (sovetskii narod). Moreover, there is the fact that the perpetrators used the term “Judeo-Bolshevism” in their propaganda, an argument still used by some “historians” today. However, this version does not take into account the fact that groups always seek to remember their own victims. The way they make these victims their own differs significantly. For example, the German Democratic Republic (along with a bloc-party called the National Democratic Party of Germany) declared itself the representative of German “anti-Fascism”. Thus in Poland, Israelis from the March of the Living stand opposite Polish nationalists. They each feel that the victims of the other side are of less relevance than their own. However, in order to have this argument, both sides have to take into account the value of the Shoah’s victims as a subject of debate.

Bechtel: For me, this is one of the most important divisions between East and West today. In Riga, L’viv, and Budapest, the victims of the Soviet terror are given preference as “our victims” over the “others”, the Jews. National history is still being formed. At the same time, the image of “Judeo-Communism” is still vivid. In popular imagination, Jews still tend to be portrayed as executioners (NKVD men, Communists from Marx to Trotsky, Kaganovich as “the man responsible for the catastrophic famine in Ukraine”) than as victims of the National Socialists’ policy of annihilation.
The traumas of Soviet occupation have not yet been processed, nor has local collaboration with the Soviet authorities, even more so collaboration with the Nazis. If the victims of Stalinism are going to be glorified, one should not forget that in some cases these same victims of Stalinism had actively supported the Nazis. To work through and acknowledge this issue in all its complexity has taken decades in Germany and in France as well. I am troubled by the fact that categories such as “biological heritage”, “ethno-national assets”, and the “gene of the nation” are so widespread in Eastern Europe. That has never augured well.

Guesnet: I consider the term “subordinate” problematic. If you look at the Poles, in the years since the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’ book Neighbours – and recently Fear – they have talked in detail about those victims of the Holocaust who were murdered by Polish accomplices in Jedwabne and elsewhere. This was no doubt necessary, but where was the “subordination”? At the same time, there is an urgent need to remember the victims of injustice and tyranny who suffered in such large numbers in Eastern Europe, in particular under the different authoritarian regimes and dictatorships that came to power during the 20th century. This takes time. Franco died in 1975, and it still took around 30 years before the bodies of the victims of the civil war began to be exhumed in Spain. Here, more is probably going on than one can learn about by simply following the major debates in the newspapers. To take just one example: In the Radogoszcz district of Łodz, there is a department of the Museum of the Traditions of Independence that was established in the ruins of a prison run by the German occupiers during the Second World War. In the night of 17–18 January 1945, the occupiers set fire to the prison, which was packed, and burned some 1,500 inmates alive. A good number of temporary exhibitions at this museum have commemorated the Polish and Jewish victims of the German occupation in exemplary fashion. Rather than lumping them together as a single group, the specific nature of the Łodz ghetto, for example, is shown very clearly. This doesn’t mean, incidentally, that it’s not irritating to note that there is still no separate memorial to the many hundreds of thousands of ghetto inhabitants who were murdered.

Heuberger: Here, I would refer first and foremost to antisemitism, which is still rife among various social groups, from the virulent political antisemitism in Hungary, to the clerics in Poland and nationalists in Ukraine, to the suppression of the Holocaust in Lithuania. As a result, the Shoah as well as anti-Judaism and antisemitism in its various forms have yet to be confronted. This lack of discussion concerning their own past, as well as their role under Nazi occupation and collaboration, leads to the suppression of the Shoah’s victims and above all to the complete negation of those few survivors who have not emigrated.
Kugelmann: The heroisation of the Red Army, the process of coping with the huge wartime losses, and the Communist master narrative of the victory over the capitalist hemisphere have not left any room for acknowledging antisemitism and the policy of annihilation motivated by it. This experience had to be suppressed the same way as other national narratives.

Lipphardt: In my view, there is little sense in measuring the degree to which the countries in Eastern Europe have come to terms with their past by using measures geared to the current situation in the West. In the Federal Republic of Germany as well, it took a long time after the Second World War, before discussion of the Holocaust really started. I rather doubt whether this would have happened without an outside push, such as the re-education programme or the Eichmann trial.
Even if a lot has been achieved in the politics of memory as a result of EU integration, East European societies are still in a state of transition. That includes the revision of Soviet and Communist versions of history. First, there was the rehabilitation of the struggle for political self-determination, which had lasted for decades and had been discredited by the Communists before 1989 as a form of bourgeois-fascist nationalism. This national, sometimes even nationalist re-assessment of the past strained relations between Jews and non-Jews. In particular, episodes that took place during the Second World War were assessed in contradictory terms. The problem is aggravated by a great lack of knowledge about the Holocaust and antisemitism. In the Baltic states, for example, many people who look back on a long history of political repression still regard themselves only as victims. From this defensive position, they are neither prepared to confront their behaviour during the Holocaust in a self-critical manner, nor do they recognise that they now form the majority society within a sovereign state that should reach out to the local minorities with the same understanding and tolerance that they previously demanded for themselves.
Remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust is without a doubt a key issue for a pluralistic understanding of society open to historical reflection within Eastern Europe. Remembrance must go hand in hand with a comprehensive process of working through the past. Collaboration, the stubborn persistence of the caricature of “Judeo-Communism” in Poland, or the “double genocide” in Lithuania should not be omitted. Remembrance also includes a fair-minded restitution of Jewish property and compensation for expropriation.

Brenner: For me, this closes the circle. I would give the same answer to this question as at the outset of this conversation.

Translated by Anne Güttel, Berlin

Impulses for Europe
Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry
Berlin (2008)
Page 89 - 100


Micha Brumlik

From Obscurantism to Holiness
“Eastern Jewish” Thought in Buber, Heschel, and Levinas

In public perception, East European Jewish thought continues to be surrounded by an almost mystical veil. Particularly after the systematic murder of at least 3 million Polish Jews by National-Socialist Germany, the perception of this culture is accompanied by a justifiable sense of irreparable loss. An outward sign of this melancholy, which is never precisely specified and often borders on kitsch, is the playing of klezmer music at any suitable – or indeed unsuitable – occasion.
“Eastern Jewry” is itself a culture that is still seen as a mixture of nostalgic perceptions regarding impoverished shtetl life and the sometimes nebulous sayings of miracle-working rabbis. The fact that this narrow point of view fails to do justice to the reality of this destroyed culture, that at least just as many Polish or indeed Russian and Romanian Jews lived in large cities, that – in addition to the largely Hassidic miracle-working rabbis – East European Jewish culture also had at its disposal the intellectually demanding philosophy of the misnagdim, a Vilnius-based school of rational, even rationalistic interpretation of the Talmud, is overlooked as much as the fact that a part of Eastern Europe’s Jews had joined reform Judaism, that they created Socialist mass movements – from a Yiddish-speaking trade union, which strove for cultural autonomy, the General Jewish Labour Union (the Bund), to a Zionism that aimed at Socialist self-realisation – and that a large Jewish underworld also existed, as did an entrepreneurial and capitalist class that was anything other than weak.
The colourful spectrum that emerged from the co-operation, co-existence, and competition among these extremely different classes, groups, ideologies, and schools of religious thought has been preserved mainly in the novels and shorter works of the Nobel Prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer. Due to its complexity, this spectrum is ill-suited for simplified views aimed at mystical edification. Judaism, not least in its East European forms, was the expression of a profound economic, cultural, and political modernisation process that has even provoked some historians to claim somewhat audaciously that the 20th century was a “Jewish century”.
“Eastern Jewry”, in the first place, was the perception of a Judaism “to the east”, namely to the east of Germany, where the Jews had been granted equal civil rights following the establishment of the German Reich (1871). With regard to Jewry, east of Germany in 1913 meant Galicia, which was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and those areas of Poland under Russian rule, Ukraine, and Russia west of the Urals as well as the Danube principalities, that is to say, Romania and parts of southern Hungary. Up to 1913, “Eastern Jewry” was also a form of Judaism characterised by its own language, a separate Jewish idiom, Yiddish, which originated from Middle High German and incorporated words borrowed from Hebrew and the Slavic languages.
In the end, this form of Judaism to the east of Germany – and on this enlightened national Jewish intellectuals (such as the historian Heinrich Graetz), liberal philosophers (such as Hermann Cohen), and neo-Orthodox spiritual leaders (such as Samson Raphael Hirsch and his successors) were of the same opinion – was considered to be the epitome of an unenlightened, obscurantist, ultimately superstitious form of the Jewish faith, which was to be resisted or enlightened. This “Eastern Jewry” was regarded as a problem child, the defenceless victim of antisemitic pogroms and excesses, the source of an never-ending stream of immigrants who flooded the major population centres of Central Europe – Vienna, Berlin, or Hamburg – from whence they travelled on to the United States or Canada, and to a far lesser extent to Argentina or to Ottoman-ruled Arz-i Filistin, the land of Palestine.
The crisis of the First World War and the bankruptcy of the bourgeois-enlightenment culture, the experiences of the German Jewish soldiers in Poland and Russia with their peculiar “tribesmen” behind the front, and the emerging failure of assimilationist Jewry against the backdrop of growing antisemitism produced a change in attitudes. What had previously been considered dangerous – Jewish revolutionary efforts, be they Socialist or Zionist – was now regarded as an articulation of hope. What used to be seen as obscurantist nonsense – Hasidism – appeared as the locus of living holiness that had been misunderstood for too long. What had formerly seemed repulsive and vulgar – Yiddish – now became the epitome of a poetic and sensitive language.
But what was considered “especially Jewish” was hardly more than a kind of intellectual trend cultivated by Jews and at the same time adopted by the entire German intelligentsia after the First World War: an enthusiasm for the feeling and thinking of Russian culture, which was at least “non-Western” if not downright “anti-Western”. From the early poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, to appraisal of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work among ethno-nationalist circles and enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution (for example, Ernest Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia), to the melancholy of Cossack ballads sung around the campfires of the German youth movement, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, Russia was seen as the reservoir of a revolutionary new world orientation.
The three Jewish thinkers examined here – Martin Buber (1878–1965), who focused on dialogue and encounter; Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995), who promoted an unconditional human responsibility; and Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), who concerned himself with God’s questions to humanity – were shaped by this constellation just as much as they helped shape it – at least within Jewish intellectual movements. Above all, however, this constellation had a profound and formative influence on their thought and philosophy. These “Eastern Jewish” philosophers were essentially trained in Germany, in the Germany of dialogue and existential philosophy, a philosophical climate that was by no coincidence fascinated and overshadowed by the thinking of Martin Heidegger.
It is also striking how these “Eastern Jewish” philosophies influenced and enriched those philosophical and political cultures in which their protagonists were active, be it Buber, that “Habsburg intellectual” whose influence may have been greater in Germany after the Second World War than in Israel, the country in which he lived and taught; Levinas, the Lithuanian-French moralist, whose work increasingly emerged as the secret background for “new philosophy” and “deconstruction” once structuralism and Marxism had come to an end in France; or Heschel, the “spiritual leader” whose existentialist-progressive convictions were to propel him to the forefront of the civil rights and peace movements in the United States of the 1960s.
In all three cases, the “Eastern Jewish” experience, existential philosophical thinking, the mass murder of six million European Jews, and the contemporary conflicts in the countries where they lived in their later years merge into a framework of thought combining a universalist ethic promoting direct human responsibility with clear reference to the “Eastern Jewish” legacy. However, it must be asked whether this clear reference to the “Eastern Jewish” legacy is more than simply an expression of “imitated substantiality” (Jürgen Habermas), whether this legacy has in fact been recently invented, and whether the thought set in motion by these three philosophers really does justice to the “Eastern Jewish” legacy or at least one of its characteristic and distinctive elements.
Martin Buber
Martin Buber was by no means always interested in Hasidism. Born in Vienna in 1878, he moved to Lemberg (today L’viv, Ukraine) in 1881, where he grew up in the house of his grandfather, an enlightened, rationalist academic, who interpreted and edited rabbinical and Talmud scriptures. Buber probably saw a Hasidic group for the first time in Sadagora (today Sadhora, Ukraine), a town in Austrian Bukovina, when he was 14. Years later, in 1918, when he was 30 and living in Heppenheim in southern Germany, he described this experience as follows:

The palace of the rebbe, in its showy splendor, repelled me. The prayer house of the Hasidim with the enraptured worshipers seemed strange to me. But when I saw the rebbe striding through the rows of the waiting, I felt, “leader”, and when I saw the Hasidim dance with the Torah, I felt, “community”. At that time there arose in me a presentiment of the fact that common reverence and common joy of soul are the foundations of genuine community.


However, as a student in Vienna, Buber was above all drawn to other thinkers. Buber was attracted by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche as much as that of Nietzsche’s follower Micha Josef Berdyczewski (Mikhah Yosef Bin Gurion), whose merits included the publication of a compilation and readable summary of Jewish sayings. A year of study in Zurich and Theodor Herzl’s work stirred Buber’s enthusiasm for Zionism, but his dissertation was a conventional one: “Contributions to the History of the Problem of Individuation” (Beiträge zur Geschichte des Individuationsproblems), which was submitted in Vienna in 1904. After two years in seclusion, Buber published The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman) in 1906. In retrospect, Buber saw his studies on Hasidism during that period of reclusiveness as a path to conversion and enlightenment. In 1918, by then 40, Buber wrote of himself at age 28:

The primally Jewish opened to me, flowering to newly conscious expression in the darkness of exile: man's being created in the image of God I grasped as deed, as becoming, as task. And this primally Jewish reality was a primal human reality, the content of human religiousness. Judaism as religiousness, as “piety,” as Hasidut opened to me there. The image out of my childhood, the memory of the tsaddik [spiritual leader, ed.] and his community, rose upward and illuminated me: I recognized the idea of the perfected man. At the same time I became aware of the summons to proclaim it to the world.

After The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, additional works followed in rapid succession: The Legend of the Baal-Shem (Die Legende des Baalschem, 1907); Ecstatic Confessions (Die Ekstatischen Konfessionen, 1909); a translation of sayings and parables by Zhuangzi (Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang Tse, 1910) with an epilogue on the teachings of Tao; a volume of Chinese ghost and love stories (Chinesische Geister- und Liebesgeschichten, 1911); a collection of speeches on Judaism (Drei Reden über das Judentum, 1911); Daniel: Dialogues on Realisation (Daniel – Gespräche über die Verwirklichung, 1913); and an extended translation of the Finnish national epos Kalewala (1914). It is clear that Buber was not only interested in exploring Judaism in a narrow sense, but in tracing a certain type of holistic, mystical experience in its various cultural articulations. What was ur-Jewish turned out to be ur-human, a road to experience and enlightenment, which was attainable by all human beings - perhaps most clearly in Hasidism.
After the First World War, which Buber clearly hoped would end in victory for Austria-Hungary and Germany, the story “Der große Maggid und seine Nachfolge” [The Great Maggid and his succession, 1921] appeared, followed by “Das verborgene Licht” [The hidden light, 1924]. These were then published in a compilation in 1928 and appeared in expanded form in 1938, when Buber was already living in Palestine. In 1949, all of the Tales of the Hasidim (Erzählungen der Chassidim) were published in German. Buber explained in the introduction to this book that he was consciously writing about “my work of re-telling the Hasidic legends”. As collector and compiler, he was most aware that the source material was unreliable and based on “fervent human beings”, so that the stories of miracles can be regarded as “only” an expression of enthusiasm, as stories about things “which cannot happen and could not happen in the way they are told, but which the elated soul perceived as reality and, therefore, reported as such”.
Therefore, Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim are, in his own words, his own personal “re-telling” of the fervour among the supporters of a charismatic rabbi that is not even based on reliable sources. This re-telling consists above all in giving the anecdotes and novella-like short stories “the missing links in the narrative”. Even so, research on Hasidism – research subjecting the sources to historical and critical scrutiny – had already been underway since the 1890s at the latest, when the leading Jewish historian Simon Dubnov published six articles on the history of Hasidism in a Russian Jewish monthly. In 1931, re-worked versions of these articles appeared in a two-volume compilation published in Berlin. In a supplement to the first volume, Dubnov acknowledged 193 source editions, including Buber’s work, which he discussed in detail and assessed in a balanced way. Summarising Buber’s life work – Buber was by then 53 – Dubnov wrote:

The thought arises that [Buber] himself could be the subject of the final chapter of the history of Hasidism, that of neo-Hasidism. From him the legendary “reality” of Hasidism’s creators emerges ahead of the true reality, which can be explained by academic criticism. Buber’s books are therefore suitable for promoting contemplation and speculation, but not research. They do not broaden our knowledge, but merely enable deeper psychological empathy. They represent a new and thoroughly modern commentary on Hasidic teachings.

Buber, who spoke Polish, spent the first 13 years of his life in an upper middle-class household in the metropolis of Vienna and the subsequent 11 years in the equally upper middle-class household of his grandfather in the East Central European city of Lemberg. He studied in Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin, then in Zurich and again in Berlin, and finally – between 1919 and 1938 – lived in Heppenheim and taught in Frankfurt, from whence he emigrated to Jerusalem in 1938. He remained there until his death in 1965. Apart from his brief childhood experience in Sadagora, Buber never lived in East European Jewish surroundings. There is nothing to suggest that he ever sought any personal contact with mystics or Hasidim or with their rabbis and tsaddikim – as was the case with Dubnov and the historian and philosopher Gershom Scholem.
However, between October 1941 and October 1942, Buber’s story “Gog and Magog” appeared in a Hebrew newspaper, the central organ of the Zionist trade unions in Palestine, then still under British mandate. The subject of the story was the possibility of a mystical influence on the politics of Russia during the Napoleonic War. It was written at the height of the Second World War, months before Britain’s decisive victory against the German Afrika-Korps, whose victory would have exposed the Yishuv – the Jewish population of Palestine – to the same fate suffered by the Jews of Eastern Europe.
Here, Buber describes for a second time direct contact with Hasidism – even if it was only on the occasion of a visit to his son behind German lines in Poland during the First World War that he “could familiarize myself with the physical scenes in which the story of this controversy [between two Hasidic schools, M.B.] took place”. This experience, he explained, had enabled him to envisage recording the story, even if – later in Jerusalem – what ultimately compelled him to complete the repeatedly postponed project was an “objective factor”:

the beginning of World War II, the atmosphere of telluric crisis, the dreadful weighing of opposing forces and the signs of a false Messianism on both sides. The final impulse was given me by a dream-vision of that false messenger spoken of in my first chapter, in the form of a demon with bat's wings and the features of a judaizing Goebbels.

The world of the Hasidim and their spirits were an object of projection, a stage, the figures of a vast global theatre where the philosopher, who regarded himself as existentialist, gave form to his conflicting principles. The “Eastern Jewry” of Buber’s Hasidim, as it has become known since the 1950s, especially in postwar Germany, thus proves to be – and this is no small matter – a fiction, the fantastic notions of a talented philosopher of language with great powers of imagination, of a “religious intellectual” (F.W. Graf) who was not even remotely concerned with participating in the way of life that he glorified so poetically, and who – and this is also not without significance – did not see this way of life as having a promising future. Appraisals of his work that naively assume the existence of a distinctively Hasidic “conception of man” culminating in individual value and perfection confuse against better judgement Buber’s own ethic with the very different ethic of the historic Hasidim. Was it possible for somebody who was at least a kindred spirit to Buber – somebody who projected the image of a modern intellectual during his studies in Berlin and a 19th-century Hasidic rabbi during the American civil rights movement – to avoid such false appraisals?


Abraham Joshua Heschel
Abraham Joshua Heschel, who invited the 30-year-old Buber from Berlin to Frankfurt’s Free Jewish House of Learning in 1937, really did come from the Hasidic milieu that had purportedly fascinated Buber so much. In 1973, Heschel’s widow Sylvia, a concert pianist from New York, published a study by Heschel on the Hasidic rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk, which he preceded with a brief introduction entitled “Why I Had to Write This Book”. Here, Heschel tells the reader not only that he was born in Warsaw, but that in his early childhood, he lived in Medzhybizh (Yiddish, Mezhbizh), Ukraine, a small town where the founder of Hasidism, Baal Shem Tov, spent the last 20 years of his life.
Describing the landscape of his childhood, Heschel, who was descended from famous Hasidic dynasties on his mother’s and father’s side of the family, wrote that “every step on the way was an answer to a prayer, and every stone was a memory of marvel”. It was in Medzhybizh where, at the tender age of nine, he apparently first heard of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk (Polish: Kock), a spiritual leader who was to accompany Heschel throughout his life, binding him with the chains of doubt, the power of sadness, and the authenticity of dismay. According to Heschel, the Kotsker Rebbe became for him an antidote to uncontrolled feelings of love, excitement, and fervour, attitudes that led to “a fool’s Paradise” that could equally become “a wise man’s Hell”. Some time before taking his school-leaving exam, Heschel left Warsaw and sat for the exam at a gymnasium in Polish Wilno (today Vilnius, Lithuania), a secular institution. He then studied in Berlin at the Friedrich Wilhelm University and at Jewish institutions of higher education. He earned his doctorate with a work on the Biblical prophets and was ordained as a rabbi in 1934.
Heschel, unlike Buber, had known Hasidic rabbis from his own family and had thus observed them at first hand. There was for him no possibility of glorifying their lives and piety. Heschel, who remained in Berlin mainly as a teacher of adults until 1937, worked from March 1937 until October 1938 at Franz Rosenzweig’s Free Jewish House of Learning in Frankfurt. Following his deportation to Poland in the autumn of 1938 and a brief stay in London, Heschel finally travelled to the United States in 1940, where he lived as a prophetic poet and thinker, spiritual leader, civil rights activist, and teacher at various institutes of higher education until his death in 1972. In his later years, he became the first officially recognised Jewish advisor to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).
Heschel lived for only 65 years, of which the first 30 were spent among the Jews of Eastern Europe: in Warsaw, in Medzhybizh, in Wilno, and in Berlin. At the time, the German capital was a lively centre of culture for Jews from Eastern Europe and served as home to no fewer than 19 Yiddish newspapers. Berlin’s East European Jewish culture never drew Buber’s attention, however. For Buber, contact with non-Jewish
religious intellectuals who followed the philosophy of dialogue and existentialism or the German-Jewish Zionist and non-Zionist youth movement was in every respect more important than any involvement with the lively Hebrew and Yiddish language scene in Berlin in those years.
Heschel spent the second half of his short life in the United States, where he became a leading figure of a type of neo-Hasidism only possible in that country. In fact, Heschel was by no means the only Eastern Jewish religious intellectual who was to leave his mark on the development of Jewish life in the United States. The lives of all those Jews who had been deeply influenced by Eastern Europe in terms of culture, language, and religion and then found themselves in the United States were characterised by a deep antagonism. On the one hand, they had been left with no other alternative but to adhere to modern western culture, while on the other, they considered it essential that they remain true to their experiences of childhood and youth. The change in their geographical position, which went far beyond the external, required that they re-invent this past. Heschel, who wrote in English just as fluently as he did in Hebrew and Yiddish, felt that he was no longer in a position to pursue this way of life, although he was an observant Orthodox Jew and undertook his own efforts to modernise Hasidism. During the 1950s, a student who Heschel had expressly recommended spend the Sabbath with the strictly Orthodox Satmar Hasidim in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of New York City asked his teacher:

why, if he envied me my weekend there, as he repeatedly said, he did not go to live in Williamsburg himself. “I cannot,” he replied. “When I left my home in Poland, I became a modern Western man. I cannot reverse this.”

This modernity found unique expression in Heschel’s piety and the fact that, alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., he became one of the leaders of the civil rights marches and anti-war demonstrations. During his later life, Heschel’s outward appearance, long time after immigrating to the United States, seemed no different than that of the Satmar Hasidim among whom he no longer wished to live. His face, which was overshadowed by a broad-brimmed hat, was framed by long hair and a long beard. However, the road to modern American life had led through Weimar-era Berlin, where he had eagerly absorbed existential philosophy, a philologically correct knowledge of Judaism, and a radically rejuvenated Yiddish literature, before transforming them for his own creative impulses.


Emmanuel Levinas
Unlike Buber and Heschel, Levinas, who was born in 1906 in Kovno (Kaunas), a centre of anti-Hasidic, rationalist Talmud scholarship, never wore a beard. Levinas’s parents considered themselves to be “Russian Jews”. They occasionally spoke Yiddish with one another, but only Russian with their children. Levinas later referred to works by Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky and the rationalist school founded by the Gaon of Vilna, the leading anti-Hasidic academic figure of the 18th century, as the formative influences of this “Russian” childhood. Levinas found a role model in the rationalist Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner, a student of the Gaon of Wilna, who despite his general anti-Hasidic stance contemplated the tradition of Jewish mysticism and combined personal piety, rational argument, and deliberative thoroughness.
Levinas’s family was forced to flee when Kovno was occupied by German troops in 1915, ultimately finding a home in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Levinas, who had led a sheltered childhood and had learned Hebrew as a small boy, enrolled at a Russian gymnasium in 1916 despite restrictions on the number of Jewish pupils. Starting in 1919, he attended a Jewish lyceum in Kaunas, where he was impressed by the teachings of the head teacher, an enlightened German Jew who had a particular weakness for Goethe.
After taking his school-leaving examination in Lithuania, Levinas also travelled to the west, but did not remain long in Berlin, or Leipzig, which he had visited. Instead, in 1923, at the age of 18, he matriculated at the University of Strasbourg, France, where he studied under Maurice Halbwachs, among others, paying particular attention to psychoanalysis. In 1928–1929, Levinas followed the reputation of Edmund Husserl and moved on to the University of Freiburg. While there, he also completed two seminars under Martin Heidegger, whom he in turn followed to Davos in 1929 for a seminar lasting several weeks, the famous Hochschulwochen. Levinas was particularly interested in the notorious debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, squarely siding with the former and making fun of his defeated adversary in a student cabaret at Davos. Levinas, who later regretted this performance, imitated Cassirer with a stammer when saying words such as “Humboldt” and “culture” and lampooned Cassirer’s pacifism.
In the 1930s, Levinas worked for the Alliance Israelite Universelle, a Jewish educational and welfare organisation rich in tradition and was at the time actively involved in the Parisian intellectual scene. He was highly esteemed in particular for his excellent knowledge of Husserl and Heidegger. Naturalised as a French citizen, Levinas was drafted into the army in 1939, captured by the Wehrmacht, and held for more than four years at a POW camp where his Jewish origins were well known. Soon after his release from captivity, he learned that his father, mother, and two brothers had been murdered in Kovno by Lithuanian nationalists during the German occupation.
Emmanuel Levinas

Upon receiving this news, Levinas made a decision never to set foot on German soil again. As director of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, he published more philosophical texts and took up teaching in 1961, first in Poitiers, then in Nanterre, and finally in Paris at the Sorbonne. His semi-private Talmud courses, which found inspiration in philosophy, became a secret centre of learning for an entire generation of intellectuals, just as his contacts with the Catholic Church enabled him to pioneer a Jewish-Christian dialogue based on philosophy.
In 1976, already over 70, he gave up teaching at the university. Until his death in 1995, he worked in Paris as a highly sought-after spiritual teacher, whose reputation grew from year to year. Levinas, however, credited his own Jewish education not to the memory of the religious setting of his childhood, but to Monsieur Chouchani, a Sephardic Jew who was as obscure and fascinating as he was learned and irritating, a Talmud scholar who roamed the earth like the cliché of the Eternal Jew. The polyglot Chouchani was probably born in Marrakech and wandered between the continents without a home or fixed address before dying in Uruguay.
Levinas almost lived to be 90. The first 17 years of his life were spent in Eastern Europe, and he was never to return there. His intellectual career led him to Strasbourg, Freiburg, Davos, and Paris. In contrast to Buber and Heschel, the East European Jewish background that may have helped shape his views was not Hasidism, but Talmudic rationalism. Levinas was also deeply influenced by existential philosophy and its precursors: What Nietzsche was for Buber and Soren Kierkegaard was for Heschel, so Edmund Husserl and Heidegger were for Levinas. After 1945, Levinas was to dedicate his philosophical life to refuting Heidegger’s un-ethical, indeed anti-ethical thought. Prepared intellectually by Russian literature, Talmudic rationalism, phenomenology, and existential philosophy, Levinas was ultimately able to develop his own Jewish thought in the narrower sense of the term after being inspired by Chouchani. Nevertheless, we can give credit to Levinas – unlike Buber and Heschel – for a clear appreciation of that which could be defined as “Eastern Jewry”.
“Eastern Jewry”?
In his treatment of Rabbi Volozhiner, Levinas begins by discussing the very different way the Jewish enlightenment, the Haskalah, initiated by Moses Mendelssohn and others, was received among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe:

From the nineteenth century onwards they in fact found themselves progressively led towards studies that were different to those of the Torah, and towards forms of what are known as Western thought and life; a process into which Western European Jewry had voluntarily been entering since the eighteenth century. This movement towards so-called modern life really became apparent with the Russian, Polish and Lithuanian Jews almost concurrently with the influence that can be attributed to the yeshivah of Volozhin. But while undergoing the seduction of the West and its rationalist culture, Eastern Judaism, for the greater part, remained immunized against the temptations of pure and simple assimilation to the surrounding world. It refused to treat as secondary the spiritual world of its origins, and to doubt the complete maturity of traditional Jewish culture, even when it gradually distanced itself in its way of life and intellectual preoccupations from the strict rules handed down by tradition. This faithfulness to the Torah as culture, and a national consciousness determined by this culture, remained the distinctive feature of the Eastern Jew at the heart of a Western style of life. There were, admittedly, many demographic, social and political reasons for this. But among the causes of this steadfastness, it is also necessary to include the education received in the yeshivot like that in Volozhin by the elite of these Eastern Jews. The Judaism of the Talmudic schools – or the memory of this Judaism as it persisted in families – was to protect the Jewish masses from assimilation, as it protected the Hasidic movement from schism.

Levinas is to be amended by one exception, namely the sizable number of young Russian Jews, male and female, who in their struggle against tradition resolved to join the Bolsheviks, fought religious and Yiddish Jewry, and thus played no small part in the intellectual destruction of East European Jewish culture.
“Eastern Jewry”, as we also know from its representative thinkers, is the result of a double loss and double mourning, as well as the result of re-invention. This mourning has been most precisely expressed by Heschel, who described the painful path of transition into the modern age as follows:

When we were blinded by the light of European civilisation, we could not appreciate the value of the small fire of eternal light ... We compared our fathers and grandfathers, our teachers and rabbis, with Russian and German intellectuals. We preached in the name of the twentieth century, compared Berdichev to Paris, Ger [Góra Kalwaria] to Heidelberg. Dazzled by big city street lamps, we lost our inner vision. The luminous vision that for so many generations shone in the little candles was extinguished for many of us.

The re-discovery of that extinguished light, however, did not lead to its re-kindling. In fact, a new light was created.

Translated by Anna Güttel, Berlin

Impulses for Europe
Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry
Berlin (2008)
Page 179 - 186


Manfred Sapper

Overcoming War
Ivan Bloch: Entrepreneur, Publicist, Pacifist

Ivan Bliokh? Never heard of him? Never mind. You probably don’t have a copy of the Brezhnev-era Great Soviet Encyclopaedia at home. It is ideologically short and sweet about this Bliokh: “bourgeois economist, statistician, financier and son of a Polish factory owner”. Perhaps the German version of his name, Johann von Bloch, means something to you? Still doesn’t ring a bell? This is no shock, for you are in the best of company: The paperback version of the Brockhaus Encyclopaedia has to take a pass. The Swiss composer Ernest Bloch, who found fame in the United States, is there, as is of course Ernst, the philosopher of hope, but Johann? No. This is not a one-off. The Staatslexikon, a bastion of Catholic erudition, has much to say about Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor who unified Germany, and something on Theodor Blank, the Catholic social policy expert and first defence minister of the Federal Republic of Germany. But it draws a blank on Bloch.
And so it goes, wherever one looks: If one turns to encyclopaedias from France and Italy, two of the founding states of European integration after the Second World War, perhaps the Encyclopédie Française or the Grande Dizionario Enciclopedico Utet, the results are no different. Even that most noble of European encyclopaedias of the pre-Wikipedia age, good old Britannica, is no exception. No John Bloch at all. If one takes these English, German, Italian, and French repositories of knowledge as representative of Western Europe, the chances of Bliokh, or Bloch, being embedded in Europe’s memory do not look good. Is this an expression of the difference between “old” and “new” Europe? Is this a reflection of the Cold War division of the continent? Or does this phenomenon have deeper causes?
Bloch’s scant presence in present-day European historical memory would not have been expected in his lifetime. On the contrary, everything pointed to him being mentioned in the same breath as Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) and Alfred Nobel (1833–1896). All thee were children of the Industrial Revolution. During the 19th century boom, they made their fortunes in steel, coal, and chemistry and became world famous businessmen and benefactors. They all seem to have been especially committed to peace. The Nobel Peace Prize is the most prestigious among the awards presented every year in Stockholm. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, drawing on its limitless resources, runs projects for the good of peace and education around the world.
All of this makes the non-peaceful background of these benefactors one of the great ironies of history. The chemist Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, which provided the basis of his wealth, as well as nitro-glycerine and the explosive Ballistit, helped make possible the mass destruction of 20th-century warfare. The steel tycoon Carnegie showed a toughness unmitigated by any kind of morals or sense of fairness when his own interests were at stake. Whereas the Swede and the born Scot are now well established in collective memory and are almost household names throughout Europe and the rest of the world, Ivan Bliokh, also known as Ivan Bloch, is barely to be found. Bloch is at risk of dying for good, in the Jewish understanding of the word. As the Talmud says, a person is only truly dead when the memory of him has also passed away.
Not to Be Pigeonholed
It is of course no coincidence that the lexica are silent, and that Bloch is in danger of vanishing from Europe’s collective memory. If encyclopaedias and lexica impart the consolidated knowledge of an epoch at their time of publication, then this is a lesson on the gaps in European memory. The collective memory of Europeans does not take notice of backward or cumbersome phenomena from Eastern Europe or does so only in exceptional cases.
Bloch was definitely a man who could not be pigeonholed. Europe knew him by many names: in Polish as Jan Bloch, in Russian as Ivan Stanislavovich Bliokh, in French as Jean de Bloch. In the Netherlands and Germany, he was known as John Bloch or Johann von Bloch. He was a successful entrepreneur and an exceptionally gifted autodidact who never completed an ordinary degree, but mastered French, English, and German alongside Polish and Russian. He concerned himself with national economic problems as well as the living conditions of the Jewish population within the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. A tireless peace activist, he was the intellectual father of the 1899 International Peace Conference at The Hague. Already during his lifetime, he could not be understood or classified by any standard of measure involving dogma. He transcended every category: He was too much of a pacifist for the militaries, too well versed in military technology for the pacifists, too conservative for the left, and too liberal for the reactionaries.


Ivan Bloch (1836–1902)
He was too Russian for the Polish nationalists, who would have gladly incorporated him into their campaign for Polish independence. To the Russian Communists, even after the successful October Revolution, Bloch was no more than an “element” of the bourgeoisie, the class now historically condemned to die out. And for antisemites in every country, he was and remained above all a Jew. Neither his conversion to Christianity, his willingness to assimilate, his enormous productivity, nor least of all the cosmopolitan horizons of his thought and actions could do anything to change this.
The Europe that came after him found it difficult to accept him into its collective memory. To this day, there is no critical biography of Ivan Bliokh that does justice to the depth of his personality and the scope of his activity and at the same time meets academic standards.
The Doer
Bloch was born on 24 August 1836, the seventh of nine children, to a Jewish family in the Polish town of Radom, which had been under Russian rule since the end of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. His parents were poor. His father worked as a wool dyer. Since the 1830 Polish November Uprising and the ensuing customs restrictions, business had been miserable. As a 14-year-old boy, Jan was sent to Warsaw, where he became an apprentice in Szymon Toeplitz’s bank. Under his influence, Jan converted to Calvinism in 1851 at age 15. Five years later, on the occasion of his marriage, Bloch converted again, this time to Catholicism. The conversion was an example of the readiness of ambitious Jews in those days to break with their own religion and tradition, if it seemed likely to improve their social situation. In the years that followed, Bloch advanced from errand boy to banker. He moved to the Russian capital, St. Petersburg, in 1856 and stayed there till 1864.
These were the years of “borrowed imperialism”, to use Dietrich Geyer’s phrase. After the military debacle of the Crimean War (1853–1956), Russia took out huge loans in Western Europe as part of a drive to catch up in industrialisation and modernisation. Railway construction was an area of industrialisation that was also useful for the military. The government planned the lines, built selected projects with its own resources, issued special loans for railway construction, and sought to acquire private investors. Jan Bloch participated in the construction of the St. Petersburg–Warsaw line. Due to the political unrest in the former Kingdom of Poland, this line was also of strategic military importance for the government in St. Petersburg.
At first, Bloch was a supplier of construction materials. In the last stage of construction, Bloch paid for the building of all of the train stations between St. Petersburg and Warsaw. The line went into service at the end of 1862. He built further connections, for example, to Łódź, and made a fortune from them. In Warsaw, he founded his own banking house and was the main shareholder in the Southwest Railway Company, which operated the Brest-Kiev and Brest-Odessa lines in addition to building additional railroads.
Bloch was now considered one of the most successful “railway barons” of his day. At the same time, he was looking for ways to “diversify his business portfolio”, as we would say today. He invested capital in the sugar, timber, and paper industries and bought up estates and shares in public companies. In the second half of the 1870s, he reached the zenith of his career. He was co-founder of a merchant bank, sat on the board of directors of the Bank of Poland, and was chairman of the Trade Association and president of the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
At this point, he began a second career as a scientific publicist. In the context of numerous, extended journeys abroad, including to the Humboldt University in Berlin, he at first dealt extensively with problems of national economy. His productivity in this area was enormous and compared favourably with his indefatigability as an entrepreneur: His first work, Russkie zheleznie dorogi [Russian railways], appeared in 1875. This was followed by a five-volume statistical investigation of how the railway influenced Russia’s national economic development. These works were in turn joined by studies on Russia’s finances in the 19th century, the factory industry in Poland, and agricultural credit policy. All of these works used the findings of a bureau of statistics that he himself had founded.
Two of his later works brought him into a crossfire of criticism: The first dealt with the situation of the Jews, the second with the future of warfare. Responding to an outbreak of pogroms in the southwest part of the Pale of Settlement and the antisemitic stereotypes of “Jewish exploitation” used to justify them, Bloch turned his attention to the economic activities of the Jews. He presented a memorandum to the Russian government in the 1880s, in which he examined the national economic effects of land leasing on the Jews. He managed to show that Jewish economic activity made an important contribution to the national economy. Later, Bloch used his direct access to Alexander III to stop the Russian government from extending to the Kingdom of Poland legislation that was to restrict the economic activity of the Jews living there.
As a thinker committed to the Enlightenment, Bloch was convinced that prejudices could be undermined by empirical facts, and that state antisemitism could be overcome in this way. In 1891, he completed a multi-volume systematic, comparative investigation into economic performance and wealth. This also showed that economic productivity was higher in the Pale of Settlement than in the Russian interior. Because of his work on behalf of Jewish interests, Bloch became a target for antisemitic reactionary groups. A fire at the printing press destroyed almost the entire print run of this latter work. The cause of the fire was never explained. The findings, however, were published and disseminated after Bloch’s death in a summary by A.P. Subbotin entitled Evreiskii vopros v ego pravil’nom osveschchenii [The Jewish question in the right light].
The Future of War
Bloch attracted international attention only with his magnum opus, which for a time established his reputation as one of the most influential pacifists of Europe. It was the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) that stirred Bloch’s interest in military affairs. During the conflict, he had been in charge of railway transport and had organised provisions for the troops. This experience left him with the impression that the military did not understand even the most basic consequences of industrialisation on warfare. This led to a long-term preoccupation with military and technical issues. At first, he merely wanted to solve the problems of logistics and infrastructure encountered in transporting troops. In the course of this work, Jan Bloch – who the State Council ennobled as Johann von Bloch in 1883 for his services to railway construction – became a committed pacifist. Bloch wrote many smaller studies during this period, but the end result of this preoccupation with the technological changes in warfare, or in modern parlance the arms dynamic, was a exhaustive study of war: Budushchaia voina v technicheskom, ekonomicheskom i politicheskom otnosheniiakh [The future of war from technical, economical, and political points of view]. The Russian original was published in St. Petersburg in 1898, with the German version appearing a year later at the renowned Berlin publishing house Puttkammer & Mühlbrecht, which specialised in political science and legal affairs. It was simultaneously published in French.
Bloch’s book is not a moral plea in the spirit of Bertha von Suttner’s 1888 novel Lay Down Your Arms. It also has none of form, argument, language, or style of Leo Tolstoy’s grandiose, religiously motivated, radical pacifist pamphlets against the state and war, which appeared in print at almost exactly the same time. Bloch’s study is a dry but methodologically exemplary masterpiece of empirical social research. The six-volume work includes a wealth of illustrations, tables, foldout maps, and sketches of all kinds. It is no exaggeration to count the book among the classics of peace and conflict research – except that it remains an undiscovered “classic”. This work stands alongside Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, and Quincy Wright’s unsurpassed work of empiricism A Study of War.
Over 3,474 pages, Bloch describes how – in light of higher arms levels and aggregate destructive power – the character of war had totally changed and could no longer be waged between modern industrialised countries. Ultimately, this meant dismissing Clausewitz: “War as the continuation of politics by other means” had become obsolete, according to Bloch, because it could no longer be decided on the battlefield. Otherwise, the European powers would face a battle of materiel, which would make such demands on financial and human resources that no country could sustain it. Finally, he presaged the collapse of national economies – first and foremost Russia’s. What’s more: Wherever the civilian population was drawn into the war and soldiers returned home demoralised by the enormous losses and senseless battles of materiel, internal political consequences would become unavoidable. War would foster subversive, revolutionary movements. To prevent all of this, Bloch advocated preventative measures so that conflicts between countries could be resolved peacefully. In particular, he championed an international forum for arms control and an international court of justice.
Bloch was the first to develop a systematic concept of peace as a mechanism for preventing revolution. This made him suspect among members of the Socialist International, who otherwise welcomed the work’s critical stance towards the military. Bloch’s fundamental criticism of the arms race and warfare was firmly rejected in military circles. The Russian military press ignored the book and denounced its author as a parvenu and converted Jew. It was no different for him than it had been for his fellow campaigner Bertha von Sutter in the Habsburg Empire or Alfred Fried in the German Empire. However, he was successful in one respect: After the book was published, Bloch put all his boundless energy into promoting his ideas. His book, pamphlets, and lectures caused a sensation all over Europe.
In Russia, he succeeded in attracting the Tsar’s attention. Bloch’s influence on the Russian government’s decision to request a conference on disarmament, or at least on arms limits, is unquestioned. On the initiative of Tsar Nicholas II, the European powers met for the first International Peace Conference at The Hague from May to July 1899.
Even though the historian Theodor Mommsen turned up his nose at the opening of the conference and derided it as a “misprint in world history”, it was not without consequences. However, the efforts at disarmament failed due to the European powers’ ambitions, but the conference still had some success in the field of peaceful conflict resolution. The first international institution for conflict resolution was created in the form of Permanent Court of Arbitration, which remains based in The Hague. Long before the invention of non-governmental organisations, which are now a part of the baggage-train at Group of Eight summits and United Nations conferences, Bloch and those who shared his views acted as a pressure group on the periphery of the Hague conference. With Bertha von Suttner and others, he contributed to making sure that the closing convention included the section “Pacific Settlement of International Disputes”. The ideas for the appointment and intervention of investigative committees had an effect that stretches from The Hague Convention to the present.
The fact that Bloch’s main thesis – the unfeasibility of war – was proved wrong in August 1914 did not change any of this either. His basic theories on the character of industrialised mass warfare in the 20th century were remarkably precise. His book on the future of war was a nightmarishly accurate prediction of the mass deaths in the trenches and on the battlefields of the First World War. And this enlightened conservative was also spot on in establishing a link between war and social revolution. With hindsight, it reads like a script for the Russian Revolution, which would have been unimaginable without the First World War as midwife.
It was the substance of his book on the future of war, as well as his life’s work, which prompted the Cracow Academy of Sciences to nominate Johann von Bloch for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. In the meantime, he had been preparing a foundation to set up a peace museum in Lucerne. He did not live to see its opening, and due to a lack of financial and organisational resources, it was not a long-term success.
Nor did the Nobel Prize Commission concern itself with the suggestion from Cracow. The successful entrepreneur, publicist, and pacifist, who had worked his way up from modest Jewish-Polish beginnings in Radom, died on 7 January 1902. People like him are slipping into oblivion in Europe. It would do European memory some good to remember the more exceptional achievements and people from the eastern half of the continent. Johann von Bloch deserves a place in Europe’s collective memory.

Translated by Mark Belcher, Berlin

Impulses for Europe
Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry
Berlin (2008)
Page 199 - 218


Karin Steffen

Disputed Memory
Jewish Past, Polish Remembrance

“Our memory is a place where there are no Jews.” This is how cultural anthropologist and ethnologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir characterised Polish society’s collective memory of the Second World War in January 2001. In 2008, Barbara Engelking-Boni confirmed this judgement with respect to Polish historiography:

The historiography on the National-Socialist occupation of Poland has a tradition going back 60 years, with patterns for categorisations and principles of chronology. In most cases, the Jews have no place there. The Holocaust has still not become part of Poland’s history.

Tokarska-Bakir made her assessment not long after the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbours. In this book, Gross reconstructed how the Polish inhabitants of the small town of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish fellow citizens in 1941. By apportioning a share of the blame for the Shoah to the Poles, Gross triggered the most intense and most emotional postwar debate on Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War.
Engelking-Boni expressed her views in a discussion on Gross’s latest book Fear. The book deals with antisemitism in Poland after the Second World War. The public debate sparked by this book in early 2008 was not as intense as the Jedwabne debate of 2001 to 2003.
The topic of Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War was left on hold during the Cold War in that it was not possible to discuss it in public in Poland. It did emerge on a superficial level during the 1980s, but it was only during the Jedwabne debate that it moved to the centre of society. Meanwhile, three generations have passed since the war and the Holocaust. Even so, the Jedwabne debate gripped and shocked almost all of society. Some people welcomed it as an admission of Polish guilt and perceived it as a catharsis. Others branded it anti-Polish and feared that it would damage Poland’s image throughout the rest of the world. They wanted to defend themselves against such a prospect. This division in society deepened during disputes over other issues related to reassessing the past, and it has again surfaced during the debate surrounding Fear.
This division also reflects a split reality. On the one hand, the assessments made by Tokarska-Bakir and Engelking-Boni are accurate. They are based on the specific, Polish manner in which the nation and state have been created. On the other hand, the Jewish population is very much present in the Polish remembrance culture in three ways. While it is claimed that Jews do not exist as a distinct group of victims, they are still present as something that has been suppressed. Second, there exists a notion of the mythical, symbolic Jew, which is important to the stereotype of Polish self-perception. And third, Jewish history is present in the public sphere in the form of folklore.
The fact that Poland’s Jewish population failed to be recognised in Polish memory as distinct victims is rooted in a number of factors. Between 1949 and around 1980, a type of “official remembrance” predominated that was defined by those in power in the Socialist state. It increasingly drew on the traditional historical canon of national history. Although internationalism and friendship among the peoples were promoted in official ideology, the Communists’ nationalism, which was designed to stabilise their hold on power, was by contrast highly traditional and xenophobic. Reflection on Polish history, open and public debates of self-perception over Polishness, patriotism, and the nation, as well as discussions about the Holocaust or the minorities living in Poland were thus prevented. Topics of this nature tended to be discussed in private, where a counter-memory existed. To this extent, it would be wrong to assume that Poland had only a monolithic, official culture of remembrance. The Jews were very much present in the memory of private individuals. In public, however, they were not mentioned. This changed significantly only after 1989, when there were no longer any taboos, and historical gaps began to be filled.
Throughout East Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, this was accompanied by a pluralisation of historical memory. Beyond this general political framework, there were numerous other factors that prevented the public mourning of the murder of Poland’s Jews.
The Reduction of History
One of these factors, according to historian Marcin Kula, is the distance that separated Jews and Poles before the Second World War. Jews and Poles, he writes, knew little of each other, which is why the Poles were unable to lament the loss of Poland’s Jews. Furthermore, he adds, it is difficult to remember people who were viewed negatively; thus negative stereotypes of Poland’s Jews would also have been a reason to forget them. Even if this argument appears plausible at first, the fact is that the two sides were not so ignorant of each other. Many of these 3 million or more Jews – first and foremost, but not only those who spoke Polish - showed a deep-rooted, genuine interest in Polish history and culture. This interest, however, was barely reciprocated and generated little affection in return.
Many of these Jews used the Polish language as writers, journalists, academics, and teachers. In many Yiddish-speaking families, parents made sure that their children were no longer affected by a severe language division. Isaac Bashevis Singer remembers that: “there was an unwritten law among the wives of Yiddish writers and of the great number of so-called Yiddishists that their children should be raised to speak the Polish language.” Historians and the general public have yet to delve into the prewar interests and contacts between Jews and Poles. To this day, the divisive features of this relationship have stood front and centre, not least because the contemporary discourse on Polish-Jewish relations in Poland and elsewhere has been dominated by 20th-century events, particularly the Holocaust. In this way, the legacy of 1,000 years of living among one another as neighbours has been reduced to just under 100 years of exclusion, mistrust, hostility, and despair. Consequently, the fact that the history of the Jews in Poland-Lithuania and Poland was more than a history of exile, persecution, and isolation, let alone something that should be reduced to “ghetto history”, is all too easily forgotten. This history is also the history of a Jewish homeland, Jewish presence, as well as specific types of Jewish modernity in Eastern Europe.
From the moment the first Jews arrived in Eastern Europe – especially in Poland – in search of a haven from persecution in Western Europe during the late 11th century, they strived to achieve equal rights as citizens, while at the same time preserving their cultural differences. Everyday, it was necessary to find a compromise between Jewish religious law and concepts, on the one hand, and state law and practises, on the other.
Living conditions among the Jews in Poland were therefore contingent upon the result of cultural, political, economic, and legal arrangements between Jews and other ethnic and confessional population groups. These arrangements were neither ideal, nor did they result solely in conflict. They varied according to the situation. Jews and non-Jews lived alongside each other in clearly defined structures. Each group had its own administration and autonomy. At the same time, there were spaces where the groups came into contact with each other, whether in the tavern run by a Jewish innkeeper or when trading at the market. These arrangements and contacts took place whenever religious, national, ethnic, or other groups encountered one another. They form an important and lasting part of Polish-Jewish history. After the Second World War, however, this history was perceived almost solely as a history of destruction. “Auschwitz” has become the universal catchword for this destruction, a symbol that goes far beyond the German-Polish-Jewish framework of remembrance.
The Nation’s “Foreigners” or the Right to a Homeland
Another reason why Jews have been excluded from Polish collective memory is related to the history of the Polish nation’s formation, during which the concept of a nation without a state was created. At the end of the 18th century, Austria, Prussia, and Russia partitioned the Polish Commonwealth. For Poles, the desire to re-establish the state became so powerful that nationalist ideas gained the upper hand over other political ideas, such as liberal ones. During the late 19th century, the concept of the exclusive, ethnically homogeneous nation-state had already gained dominance over the idea of a shared republican identity for all citizens, regardless of their nationality and faith. National self-identification took on forms that were accompanied by drawing of clear boundaries between the Poles and the other, who were treated as foreigners. Antisemitism, the roots of which extended back to Christian anti-Judaism, became an important element in Polish society’s mentality.
That the construction of the nation was accompanied in political and cultural terms by a hostility towards the Jews is not unique to Poland. Every nation strives for homogeneity. The fact that such homogeneity is a fiction, since antagonistic and plural elements are intrinsic to every collective, was ignored. In its concept of the nation, a majority within Polish society frequently defined the Jews as the epitome of the “foreign element”, as the “enemy within”, which was hollowing out and destroying the “healthy” national and social fabric.
In the wake of the partition of Poland, a Romantic and messianic understanding of history became popular among Poles. In this perception of history, the suffering of the divided Polish people was defined as a moral distinction. The sense of moral superiority that ensued negatively influenced popular relations with the Jews. Religion was also important in shaping these relations. The Roman Catholic faith was considered the guardian of Polish national identity and played an important role in the formation of the nation-state.
Already before the modern era, the religious identity of the Jews had made them the “others”, the “foreigners”. In the eyes of many Christians, the Jews were a prime example of the non-believers, while the national element in Poland was in turn largely based on Christianity. The religious, ethnic, and social antisemitism that existed in Poland during the pre-modern era saw the Jews as the embodiment of a demonic “anti-Christ”, assigned to the Jews an “unsafe place” that could vanish from the face of the earth at any time. The Jews retained this demonic role during the Second Republic, from 1918 to 1939. Nationalism, which reached its peak in Europe at this time, also held sway in Poland. Nationalist concepts also played a role in numerous other political movements beyond the Roman Dmowski’s right-wing oriented party National Democracy.
The effect that National Democracy had on many Poles should not be underestimated. The writer Kazimierz Brandys called Dmowski, the author of several antisemitic works, a devastating figure for the Polish intelligentsia, the man “responsible for greater intellectual damage than the partitioning powers, since this damage poisoned the minds of three generations”. During the 1930s in particular, Poland was dominated by a dichotomous view of the world, which was divided into “ours” and “the other”. Depending on one’s political views, the enemy could be a Fascist, a Communist, a capitalist, a Freemason, a spy, or indeed a Jew.
Between 1918 and 1939, antisemitism was widespread among most political parties and within society. The political sphere was dominated by national attributions and categories from the 19th century. These included the antisemitic scenario that the Jews posed a threat. It was insinuated that they wanted not only to damage Poland, but to destroy it. Jews became the subject of numerous debates and were encouraged to leave the country.
In cultural and literary circles, antisemitism was considered to be almost de rigueur. So it was that in 1933, the well-known writer Karol Irzykowski announced in the Jewish newspaper Nasz Przegląd that he was also willing to become an antisemite: “I, too, will have to write an antisemitic article at some point.” He picked up on this thought again in 1937 and began his contribution by noting that an antisemitic article had been on his mind for a long time. In the article, he called the Jews “Poles with reservation”, since a Jew could easily stop being a Pole, while non-Jewish Poles were bound to their fatherland for better or worse. He then called for an “intelligent antisemitism” as opposed to a violent antisemitism.
The language and ideas used in reference to the Jews were frequently pejorative during this period. A young writer called Zbigniew Uniłowski described the largely Jewish district surrounding Warsaw’s Nalewki Street as an “urban abscess” with a “sickly vitality” and as a gloomy “ghetto” where the residents were unhappy and anaemic. Such notions of the urban environment of the Jews contributed to the development of certain ideas of Jewishness. Jews were regarded as a backward mass of city dwellers who voluntarily cut themselves off from the rest of society, and who turned the cities into unpleasant places simply by their mere presence.
The importance of the interwar years and the attitudes that developed during this time should not be underestimated with regard to later developments. Many unresolved social and national problems, such as the failure to implement land reform or the minorities policy, which erupted in bloodshed during and after the war, have their origins in the Second Republic. To this day, it still casts a long shadow over the prospect of mutual understanding between Poles and Jews. Many Jews had hoped that, with Polish independence, they would obtain equal rights in that country that they had helped to create. These hopes were for the most part dashed. Writer Zusman Segałowicz, for example, described the city of Warsaw as a shared achievement of Poles and Jews. Singer expresses a similar view in his memoirs:

The Poles still considered us aliens, but the Jews had helped build this city and had assumed an enormous participation in its commerce, finance, and industry. Even the statues in this church represented images of Jews.

Few Poles were at the time willing to express such a view so clearly as writer and journalist Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who noted in 1960 that Poland’s Jews should not have been denied their right to a homeland, because they had helped to create the country over the centuries. Most people between the wars saw things differently: Many continued to consider the Jews “foreign” and “disloyal”, no matter how much they had acculturated to the majority population. The nation-state required homogeneity and clarity. Flexible notions of identity among Jews, which by no means entailed disloyalty to Poland, appeared not to fit in.
The Murder of the Jews and Its Repercussions
The murder of almost all of Poland’s Jews during the Second World War did not lead to a change in Polish attitudes. Instead, it deepened both the fictitious and the real divisions. This occurred, for one, due to the isolation of the Jews through the German policy of ghettoization and then their murder. Furthermore, there were, to a limited extent, some Poles who played an active part in the Holocaust. It became known that others, after being forced by the National Socialists into the highly compromising role of witnessing the Holocaust, they allowed themselves to be tempted into exploiting the situation and demanded large payments for providing hiding places for Jews or blackmailed Jews for these services. On many occasions, these Poles may have saved the lives of the Jews concerned, but their conduct created new rifts.
Memories of the war period also created divisions. The memories of the Jews and the Poles drifted far apart from each other. For the Jews, the Shoah formed the basis of all remembrance of the Second World War. Non-Jewish Poles mourned their own, immense sacrifice. Due to the historical constellation of the August 1939 German-Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression, the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, and the establishment of the Communist system after 1944, the history of the Second World War is in Polish cultural memory above all the history of a confrontation with Stalinist Soviet Union as well as Nazi Germany.
In Polish memory, the support for Communism among a small part of the Jewish community was exaggerated and generalised. Although many Jewish Communists did not see themselves as Jewish, they were nonetheless perceived precisely as such and, with that, as different from other Communists: They were considered collaborators in the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland after the Hitler-Stalin pact and accomplices in establishing the Communist system in Poland after the war.
No Language for Remembrance
Remembrance of the Jewish population after the war was also difficult because almost all of the Polish Jews had been murdered, and most of the survivors had emigrated. As a result, by the early 1950s, there were relatively few bearers of collective memory. Such a collective memory usually has an appellant, trans-generational character: Those who are born later commit themselves to shared memories and thus compensate for the passing of the generation that experienced the events first hand.
The non-Jewish members of Polish society failed to take on this role. The sociologist Hanna Świda-Ziemba has made an interesting observation on this subject: After the war, the “Jewish question” was treated among young people as if the world had gone back to the prewar period and the Holocaust had never happened. For this reason, society was again dominated by either the adherents of antisemitism, who continued to invoke the arguments of the prewar era, or their staunch opponents. This emerged from a certain sense of time: Whereas the postwar era was assuming an indistinct shape for Polish youth, the war era was set apart as a closed matter. By contrast, the prewar years were perceived as very much alive. The unpleasant realities of the war and the insecurities of the present were blotted out. This situation, Świda-Ziemba wrote, resulted in the preservation of antisemitic attitudes, which were then passed on to the next generation and polarised the intelligentsia. This constellation should not be underestimated either, when it comes to the issue of remembrance.
The few Holocaust survivors who remained in Poland were either unwilling to acknowledge their Jewish origins in the light of the postwar pogroms, or they were so traumatised by their wartime experiences that they suppressed the memory of what had happened to them. There was no question of their becoming bearers of remembrance. Furthermore, right after the war, there was quite simply no language available to describe what these two groups – separated from one another, yet side-by-side – had experienced in the same country during that period. The unimaginable could not be articulated at first.
Warsaw as Paradigm
The killing of 3 million Poles of the Jewish faith had destroyed social structures, not just Jewish ones. The middle classes and the intelligentsia, including the Jewish intelligentsia, had been murdered, and those who had survived had lost the settings in which they had acted. Warsaw is a clear example of the lack of ability to articulate the grief over the murder of the Jews. The fact that the entire Jewish quarter around Nalewki Street and the 380,000 Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw were simply no longer there, was not discussed. This was due not only to the traumas that they had experienced, but also to the fact that Warsaw was an empty city after the war. All that remained was the dust on the rubble. Following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the city had lost over 50 per cent of its prewar population. Warsaw had to integrate thousands of people who had never lived there. The Polish capital changed dramatically as a result.
When it comes to remembering Polish-Jewish relations, Warsaw is almost a paradigm. Remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was overshadowed by remembrance of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, during which 180,000 people died and thousands of Warsaw families lost their relatives, even if in the official Communist propaganda, no mention of the Warsaw Uprising was permitted. This ban on remembrance tended to have the opposite effect in the memories of many Polish families.
That the Ghetto Uprising was the first armed conflict involving street-by-street, house-to-house fighting in a German-occupied city in Europe, or that the Ghetto Uprising could have provided inspiration for the Warsaw Uprising, was not an interpretation of events that came from Polish historians. However, the Bulgarian-born writer Tzvetan Todorov has shown that the arguments presented by Jewish and Polish underground leaders were strikingly similar.
On the other hand, according to Marcin Kula, the Ghetto Uprising tends to be degraded in the minds of many Poles to a form of self-defence and is denied the honourable label “uprising” in Polish history. Already during the Second World War, it was not regarded as a Polish tragedy. According to historian Tomasz Szarota, the tragedy of their murdered Jewish fellow citizens did not provoke the same kind of response as the crimes that Germans committed against non-Jewish Poles in the Pawiak prison. According to Szarota, “We will avenge the ghetto” was never written on the walls of Warsaw as justification for the Warsaw Uprising, only “We will avenge Pawiak”.
Due to the influx of immigrants to Warsaw from the countryside after the war, the memory of the Holocaust was lost. The city was no longer multinational. There was hardly anyone left to keep alive the memory of the old Warsaw. At the same time, the national Communist ideology that pursued the vision of a homogeneous culture and nation was consolidated. Even sculptor Nathan Rapaport’s well-known monument to the ghetto fighters, which was erected in 1948, was in keeping with this ideology. With its mythologised, proletarian figures depicted in a mix of Romanticism and Socialist Realism, the monument is saturated in proletarian ideology, thus successfully eradicating the religious affiliation of the insurgents as a mark of their identity. Jews were not to be recognised as such; they were instead instrumentalised as the fighting proletariat. In this way, the monument contributed more to forgetting than to remembering.
Only writer Hannah Krall’s famous 1976 interview with Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Ghetto Uprising, and the translations of works by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978 showed the Poles just how interesting and varied Warsaw once was. For while the city was for many Poles the mother of the patriotic resistance, for many Jews it was one of the largest Jewish cities in Europe, a centre of religious and political thought, of literary life, a kind of “new Jerusalem”.
These two memories were not reconciled after the war, not in Warsaw, nor anywhere elsewhere in Poland. To the contrary: Until the 1980s, Jewish memory simply did not exist. This is one of the reasons why there remains to this today only limited knowledge of the fact that Warsaw was also a Jewish city before the war. However, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto also spawned feelings of guilt, as one observer diagnosed: The Poles suffered from a “guilt by neglect”, from the guilt of being witnesses. A further result of this trauma is that there is hardly anything in Warsaw’s public spaces to remind us that a Jewish quarter ever existed there. The “ghetto” established by the Germans is now an empty space, a place that does not recall the ghetto’s destruction, a place that has been filled with residential buildings, but that calls on the observer to interpret the empty space.
Possibly, this empty space can be filled to some extent by the Museum of the History of the Jews in Poland, which is currently under construction. It remains to be seen whether this can compensate for the suppression of memories, that were so difficult to process emotionally. Those who participated in the atrocities or made money from the Jews during or after the war had a vested interest in this suppression. Furthermore, many Poles were also ashamed of their negative attitude towards the Jews. Sometimes, their incapacity to show sympathy veered to anger, aggression, and antisemitism due to feelings of guilt. At any rate, the events of the Second World War left deeply wounded memories.
Competition among Martyrs and Victims
The way in which the Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising have been treated is an example of what is known as competition of victims. At times, this competition has dominated the dialogue between Poles and Jews and contributed to the failure to remember Jewish life in Poland as well as Jewish suffering. The almost inflationary use of the term “victim” today is in historical debates always linked to an assumption of innocence. Jan Philip Reemtsma has also spoken of the interpretative authority of the victim, “as if great suffering could only generate insights, rather than hinder them at the same time”. Moreover, victims and guilt are not only to be understood as opposites; they can certainly function in a complementary manner. Against the backdrop of the aforementioned romantic paradigm, which created a victim myth in Poland that “is so rooted in our awareness that we regard it as historical reality”, there developed among Poles a type of self-immunisation against the view that their own victim status did not protect them from taking responsibility for injustices done to others. The human rights activist Jacek Kuroń put it this way in May 2001: “The problem is that... we have cultivated ourselves as a nation of martyrs and have difficulty recognising that there are other nations of martyrs.”
The competitiveness between Poles and Jews goes back a long way. It can already be found in the messianic ideas of Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz. Both peoples, he claimed, were chosen by God. Poles and Jews had to travel the road of exile and suffering in order to be “redeemed”. Failure as a nation could thus be re-interpreted as a sign of “God’s grace”. Such a self-image was able to convert a history of defeat and victimisation into an expression of a “divine plan”. Feelings of inferiority could thus be tempered and reinterpreted as strengths. Here, parallels can be seen in the concepts of identity and the memory of both Poles and Jews.
Under the influence of growing nationalism, an identity competition emerged from these parallels. It manifested itself in debates on how much Jewish blood was flowing in the veins of certain Poles: In the interwar years, several court cases were held that aimed to prove that the individual in question was not of Jewish origin. The issue was discussed with regard to poet Mickiewicz and composer Chopin. After 1989, presidential candidate Tadeusz Mazowiecki had to field questions in public as to whether he was a Jew. Those individuals who look “Jewish” find it necessary to explain themselves or are publicly forced to do so.
Since 1945, the competition of victims has been expressed by the fact that many Poles, given their own suffering, find it difficult to acknowledge the victim status and unique nature of Jewish suffering during the Shoah. A symptomatic example from the 1960s is the entry “concentration camp” in the new Great Encyclopaedia. Here, a distinction was made between concentration camps and extermination camps, with Treblinka and Birkenau being included in the latter. This was met with protests by the nationalist oriented faction within the Polish United Worker’s Party led by Mieczysław Moczar, who claimed that all concentration camps had been extermination camps, and that the Polish people had also been threatened by extinction. According to this logic, the history of the Polish Jews should not be granted a unique status.
The competition of victims was repeatedly reflected in the way the symbolic site of the concentration camp and killing centre Auschwitz was treated. The Communist government made Auschwitz a symbol of the persecution and resistance of the Polish nation, while the murder of the Jews was to a large extent ignored. After the visit of Pope John Paul II to the memorial site in 1979, the camp gained a new religious, Polish Catholic significance as well, which resulted in numerous conflicts after 1989. One need only recall the controversy surrounding the Carmelite nunnery in a building bordering the camp and the crosses erected there in the former gravel pit. This unilateral appropriation of Auschwitz has since then been corrected: Today, Auschwitz is for many Poles a Polish, Jewish, multi-national, and universal symbol.
Treatment in Historiography
After the war, Polish historiography failed to make any contribution to the process of coming to terms with the Holocaust. The terror of the German occupation, the martyrdom of the Polish nation, and the heroic armed struggle against the occupiers took centre stage. In general, Polish historiographers regarded the Poles and the Jews as separate subjects of enquiry. This tendency can also be found in other nationally oriented historiographies, such as Jewish or German historiography. Since the late 1960s, Polish historiography has become somewhat more complex, and the fate of the Jews has to some extent been incorporated into studies on the Second World War. However, the emphasis has remained on the political history of the occupying regime. Until the 1980s, the Jews were omitted from the history of Poland and were not treated as a distinct victim group in official works on the war.
During the 1980s, the traditional stories of armed resistance and the heroic conduct in Poland during the occupation were put into perspective. The impulses for this came from international research on the Holocaust, which described the Polish population’s behaviour as marked by passivity, indifference, or schadenfreude. The indifference among the Poles to the genocide of the Jews was also the thesis of the essay “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”, with which literary critic Jan Błoński unleashed the first broad debate on Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War. After 1990, the genocide of the Jews became the subject of intense study, which led to a wave of popular representations in films, works of art, and video installations. Academic research also had a great deal of catching up to do. Independent research on the Holocaust in Poland had been possible only from 1945 to 1947 and to a certain extent during the early 1960s – and then with only limited public impact.
New Frameworks of Memory: Remembrance after 1989
Since 1990, the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War has been the subject of intense examination. The fact that all of the killing centres were located on Polish soil makes this examination particularly dramatic and historically explosive. The close spatial connection between the genocide of the Jews and the persecution of non-Jewish Poles in places such as Auschwitz raises such questions as: What kind of national and international remembrance is appropriate? What does balanced commemoration involve?
The location of the extermination camps has repeatedly focused world public attention on Poland. Some Poles regard this international dimension as a burden, because they fear Poland’s standing in the world will be damaged, something that cannot be reconciled with the Polish self-image of moral superiority. As a consequence, there is a competition in Poland between Polish and international remembrance, which is obvious, for example, when Israeli youth delegations visit Auschwitz-Birkenau and have hardly any contact with the Polish population. They have little interest in contemporary Poland or the fact that numerous Poles also lost their lives during the Second World War in general and at Auschwitz in particular. It’s the same with the annual “March of the Living”, which is held in Poland every April.
At the same, however, Poland is also part of the international developments that have taken place since 1989 and is involved in shaping them. In the early 1990s, seemingly fixed constructs of memory from the immediate postwar years started to crumble throughout Europe. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, a rather stable collective memory had taken shape in the countries concerned. At the core of these constructs was the uncontested fact that Nazi Germany bore responsibility for the Second World War and had caused great suffering to Europeans in the course of the conflict. Issues of collaboration with the National Socialists were suppressed. In many countries, a myth of resistance was created.
In Poland, the effects of this myth have not been eliminated completely. It was only during the debates over Neighbours and Fear that the many different degrees of collaboration and culpability became known. This development is due not least of all to the fact that the generations that experienced these events are dying in increasing numbers. Since 1989, a fundamental, Europe-wide shift has taken place away from memory of the war to cultural memory. The Holocaust became the centrepiece of these cultural memories, but so did the genocide of the Sinti and Roma and the persecution and murder of homosexuals and the disabled.
However, the fact that the Holocaust has become a type of “negative founding myth”, particularly for Europe’s west, cannot simply be carried over to “the east”. Remembrance cannot be homogenised in the name of a common European culture: Nobody can be forced to remember in accordance with a particular norm. The Holocaust cannot play the same role for Polish society as it does for German society. Nonetheless, Poles are also demanding that the Holocaust be recognised as a universal event, as a never-ending mourning ritual, in which the Poles should also participate. This mourning should be an ethical attitude, according to literary critic Maria Janion, who quotes a thought by Maria Czapska that was published in the Paris-based exile magazine Kultura in 1957:

The most terrible genocide in the history of mankind, the massacre of several million Jews in Poland, which had been selected by Hitler as the place of their execution, the blood and ashes of the victims, which seeped into Polish soil, form an important bond linking Poland to the Jewish nation, and it is not in our power to release ourselves from this bond.

This obligation, Janion adds, applies equally to Poland and to Europe. She calls on her countrymen to show an empathy hitherto withheld, to lament the Holocaust, and to re-write the history of Poland. Similarly, the writer Kazimierz Brakoniecki appeals to Poles to respect Jewish pain and sorrow, for they are the inheritance of all mankind. According to Janion, this path can be followed by taking a critical approach to one’s own myths.
The Jedwabne debate must be seen as a step along this path, which leads through a differentiation and pluralisation of memories. The fact that this is not a linear or irreversible process lies in the nature of memory. A secure consensus that is shared by all and never again called into question is unknown to democracy. Thus, after the Jedwabne debate, a general consensus was not reached, for this debate was then followed by a counter-wave of renewed heroisation and a return to a confrontational history of the war, as if a shock reaction to the loss of innocence.
This was seen immediately after the Jedwabne debate in the history policy that the then government was promoting so as to generate a positive sense of community, an “affirmative patriotism”, and a favourable image of Poland abroad. The same can be said for the controversy over German plans to create a Centre against Expulsion. Among this history policy’s advocates, the Jedwabne debate had raised the question: “If we agree on a collective sense of shame, why can’t we reach an understanding on a collective sense of pride?”
To some observers, it now appeared as if history policy had been initiated in order to eliminate the topic of Polish-Jewish relations from the public sphere. That this did not, and could not, succeed has been shown by the recent discussion of Gross’s book Fear. According to Gross, Polish antisemitism, which he confirmed was widespread in postwar society, can be traced back to fears on the part of the Poles that they would have to return Jewish assets to returning Holocaust survivors as well as to feelings of guilt arising from their conduct during the occupation.
The positions taken by representatives of the national right-wing parties and of the episcopate have made it particularly clear that they are not yet willing to part with the old myths. Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz wrote in an open letter to the Catholic publishing house of Fear that its task was not to stir the demons of anti-Polishness and antisemitism. He also claimed that the book created an atmosphere of tensions among the nationalities in Poland. However, in a democratic society, controversies and debates over self-perception are an indispensable component of political culture and a measure not only of its existence, but its quality as well. Such debates do not aim for acquittal, or conviction, but for insight and understanding. The ongoing discussion of Polish-Jewish relations in Poland is nothing more than a Polish-Polish, democratic debate over self-perception. As such it is incapable of blocking the Polish-Jewish dialogue, as sociologist Ireneusz Krzemiński said it was. To the contrary, the Polish-Polish debate can if anything support the Polish-Jewish dialogue, since one’s own memories are a prerequisite to showing empathy for the memories and the suffering of the others.
The “Mythical” Jew
As these debates have shown, hardly anybody in Poland, whether it be among historians or the general public, is indifferent to this topic. Few “if any narratives in contemporary European history are as fractured as that of Polish−Jewish relations in the Second World War”. This brokenness has lasted to this day, and there continues to be no other historical subject that has such a polarising effect in Poland: Moral sensibilities collide with anger and resentment. After all, for a significant share of Polish public opinion, the “Jewish question” in the 20th century meant more than just the task of shaping the co-existence with a community that had another religion, different customs, and in part different professions. The “Jewish question” formed the core of the worldview of Poland’s national right-wing parties, the core of their worldview on social, political, economic, and spiritual issues. In this worldview, the Jews seemed to be the embodiment of satanic evil, treason, and perfidy. As such, they were the central figure of this worldview.
Since nobody else could take on this demonic role, the “symbolic, mystical Jew” survived in society’s collective imagination even though there were hardly any Jews left in Poland after the war. Since then, a symbolic Jew has existed in the Polish consciousness. This symbolic Jew constitutes a key element of the auto-stereotype of many Poles. That is why it is possible to revive the image of the “perfidious” Jew in any political crisis. This image appeals in different ways to existing patterns of thought. These range from Jews as Communists or capitalists, to dissidents or Zionists who are hiding behind the scenes, conspiring against the Poles, and secretly pulling the strings. The result is a Judaisation of the rejected “other” – and it has never been left to the Jews or the “others” to decide who was a Jew and who were the “others”. Those who are drummed out of the national corpus by means of definitions or oppose such putatively absolute values as Catholicism or the family, which have always been regarded as the pillars of the nation, can pose a potential threat. Formerly, it was the Jews who bore the brunt of this argument; nowadays, it affects others, according to historian Andrzej Walicki. In the perception of the political right, these are primarily feminists and homosexuals.
With regard to the stigmatisation of homosexuals, the arguments put forward today are astonishingly similar to antisemitic sentiments of the 1920s and 1930s: Homosexuals are considered the enemy within, just like the Jews, without their own territory; both are branded as being anti-Polish, as “foreign”, and as an internal danger for the Polish family, the pillar of the nation. At demonstrations, direct comparisons are sometimes made in terms as in the slogans: “We’ll do to you what Hitler did to Jews” (Zrobimy z wami co Hitler z Żydami) and “It’s no myth, it’s so true: where there’s a gay, you’ll find a Jew” (To jest prawda a nie mit, tam gdzie gej tam i żyd.)
This recourse to antisemitic set pieces is not representative of Polish society. It is used by right-wing and extreme right-wing parties. Most Poles, particularly younger Poles, do not share these attitudes. However, this recourse shows that pre-modern, antisemitic thinking and the antisemitism of the interwar years are still alive.
Here, one has to ask what it is that Jews or homosexuals threaten. For those who harbour this worldview and the media that propagate it, such as the popular Radio Maryja or the daily newspaper Nasz Dziennik, their own identity is at stake. They fear losing the traditional family, which they regard as the foundation of the nation. What Jews and homosexuals have in common is their place in the construct of a national, Catholic identity structure. The symbolic Jew is still present, as is also shown in the use of the term “Jew” – in different linguistic forms – in public discourse and set phrases. In colloquial speech, on the streets, where children use the word “Jew” to insult one another, in the football stadiums, where the opponent is vilified as “Jewish”, in everyday conversations while shopping or talking to workmen, in which Jews stand for a symbol of whatever is fickle, unreliable, dirty, perfidious, fraudulent. “The Jew”, this “abstract negative symbol”, as he has been defined by Leszek Kołakowski, remains a traditional object of aggression.
As a foil to the presence of the “mythical Jew”, initiatives and associations such as Borussia in Olsztyn, Pogranicze Sejny, or the German-Polish project Spurensuche have begun to pluck the Jewish life from oblivion. Their way of life, their streets and squares, their works and buildings, synagogues and customs are to be made visible on site. These initiatives are frequently organised by non-Jews. This results in the creation of what Ruth Ellen Gruber calls “virtual Jewish”: a putative Jewish culture without Jews. There is always a danger of a folklorisation of Jewish life and its clichéd distortion. Klezmer music and Jewish restaurants are booming in Berlin just as they are in Kazimierz in Cracow, places that used to be centres of European Jewish life, and where there are no longer any Jews left. However, klezmer music and Jewish restaurants are flourishing there precisely because there are no longer any Jews remaining. This appears to be the alternative: Jewish culture will either be forgotten, as has generally been the case in Warsaw to date, or it will become virtual. But this also means that notions of the East European Jews and who they were will increasingly be defined by this virtual Jewishness.
Paths of Remembrance
In the attempt to summarise the different levels of remembrance of the Jewish population, it is noticeable that, since 1990, the landscape of remembrance in Poland has changed dramatically despite certain continuities. The process of analysing the entangled history with the Jews, as well as Polish-Ukrainian, Polish-Russian, and Polish-German history, can be observed in historiography and numerous public debates. Former Foreign Minister Stefan Meller sees these debates about the past as a blessing for his country in the long term. In its treatment of the past, Poland is going through an interregnum. The past can no longer be found where it used to be. The country is poised between different myths, of which some are not yet accepted, while others no longer are. On the one hand, received attitudes towards the persecution of the Jews are now being questioned, attitudes that to date tended to be remembered as giving assistance to persecuted Jews or as standing by helplessly. On the other hand, there is a gap between the Polish general public and historiography as to how the limited participation of some Poles in the Shoah should be classified. It is impossible to predict whether an integrated culture of remembrance can be achieved, or whether in the long term there will be two separate remembrance communities that hardly communicate with each other, if at all. Historiography, which is currently scrutinising the period of the German occupation, will find it just as difficult as the general public to ignore the fact that despite the ghetto walls, the Poles were involved in the fate of the Jews in a number of ways and to a far greater extent than has been assumed to date.
Those who wish to pursue the path of an integrated history and culture of remembrance, those who wish to abandon an exclusive way of remembering that separates the Poles from the Jews in favour of an inclusive remembrance that incorporates the two groups in their shared history will probably have to leave behind the level of nation-state, or at least question it critically. To date, the point of reference in most debates is the nation-state, which is conceived as being mono-ethnic. However, the Polish people were never mono-ethnic. The modern nation-states were not really ethno-national entities, but emerged from historical constructs and are based on myths. In European history, the nation and the nation-state have been an extremely strong gravitational force in the forging of identity, and this phenomenon also applied not least to the Zionists among the Jews. The nation continues to provide an important point of reference. However, a mentality that adheres to a portrayal of history that focuses solely on the nation-state tends to create a clear division between national groups, even though, as is still the case today, these people by no means regarded themselves as being as purely “Polish” or “Jewish” as the nationalists imagined.
Leaving behind the level of the nation-state also presents an opportunity, since in this way, a national self-image based predominantly on continuity and homogeneity becomes more difficult. The current Polish debates are so painful precisely because they have departed from the national (protective) space as transnational debates over self-perception. The Holocaust, for example, has also become a universal point of orientation in commemoration as well as political reception, albeit with very different functions.
But maybe this is what is needed for an open historical memory: leaving behind the nation-state, opening oneself up, and searching for other points of reference that can be researched and debated. In this way, memories of history can become less vertical and more horizontal. Differences, rather than homogeneity, can come to the fore. If it is possible to overcome the current incompatibility within national remembrance, without apportioning blame or pursuing a competition of victims, to adhere to the principle of self-questioning, while recognising the suffering of others and one’s own guilt, then the normative exclusivity of the individual stories among Jews and Poles could itself be consigned to the past.

Translated by Anna Güttel, Berlin

Impulses for Europe
Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry

The Place Does not Speak
Photography in Auschwitz

“Could you take a picture of me, please?” asks the friendly tourist, hands over the camera, poses, and indulges in every imaginable cliché – including fingers held up in a “V” sign. It is not the Eiffel Tower in the background, however, but the camp gates at Auschwitz. This is only one of countless photographs taken on this day. More than 1 million people visit the former extermination camp every year – and almost all of them bring a camera. There are not many places in Europe where more photographs are taken than herePerhaps all of these pictures are an expression of insecurity. You can hold onto the camera and keep your distance. At each gas chamber and every gallows, you get be-hind your camera and look at everything on a smaller scale, through the viewfinder or on the screen. “The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation.”
But taking photographs can also have more than a soothing effect. It can facilitate understanding, encourage reflection. For these reasons, the International Youth Meet-ing Centre in Oświęcim (Auschwitz) has for several years been organising the photo seminar “Hopes” for young photographers from Israel, Poland, and Germany. In 2008, 20 participants spent ten days photographing the Auschwitz camp and the town of Oświęcim, meeting witnesses, discussing photos, and working through the night in the darkroom in order to prepare an exhibition. The resulting pictures tell very differ-ent stories of the confrontation with the past. Often it is an examination of the surface, which seems so banal as it is: grass, stones, sand. But everything is contaminated with history. At the same time, “at the site of the mass graves [...] the grass is no less green than elsewhere”. Only our impressions adapt themselves to our imagination.
Some people prefer to rely on themselves. They have to touch the objects. They pick up stones, find old spoons and buttons, and still cannot understand. To be certain of at least this, they photograph themselves doing such things. These will be the pictures to remember the lack of memory.
For the place does not speak, it leaves you alone. It offers no spatial perspective that could also be temporal. There are no explanations here. Everything feels empty, actu-ally there is nothing to see here.
The glimpse through the viewfinder is suddenly more distressing than soothing.
By Ansgar Gilster

Impulses for Europe
Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry
Berlin (2008)
Page 271 - 278


Anatolii Podol’s’kyi

A Reluctant Look Back
Jewry and the Holocaust in Ukraine

At the end of the 19th century, there were at least 3 million Jews living in the territory of what is today Ukraine, which was at that time divided between Austria and Russia. Ukraine represented a major religious, literary, and political centre of East European Jewry. The co-existence of Jews and Ukrainians was deeply influenced by social, cultural, and economic exchange, but also by differences and conflicts. The worst example of anti-Jewish violence in the distant past took place during a 17th-century uprising of Ukrainian Christians and Cossacks against the Polish republic. After the partition of Ukraine between Russia and Austria in the late 18th century, the Jews of eastern Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia enjoyed the same civil rights as other subjects of the Habsburg Empire. There, antisemitism was for the most part marginal. In the Russian Empire, however, antisemitism was official policy, and pogroms were carried out against Jews in 1871, 1881, 1903, and 1905. The recurring waves of pogroms prompted thousands of Jews to emigrate to the Austrian part of Ukraine, the United States, South America, and Palestine. State antisemitism in Russia reached its climax in 1913 with the infamous trial of Mendel Beilis in Kiev. Beilis was accused of ritual murder, but due to the decisive intervention of the Ukrainian and Russian intelligentsia as well as ordinary Ukrainians, he was acquitted.
Unlike Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Baltic states, Ukraine did not gain independence after the First World War. From 1917 to 1921, a fierce struggle between the imperial Russian army, the Bolsheviks, and Ukrainian national forces took place in the Ukrainian lands. The Jews fell victim to pogroms committed by all of the warring parties during these years. The Bolsheviks accused the Jews of collaborating with the Ukrainian National Republic, while Ukrainian national forces accused them of collaborating with the Bolsheviks. The tsarist loyalists continued the anti-Jewish policies of the Romanov dynasty. In 1922, the greater part of the Ukrainian territory was absorbed by the newly founded Soviet Union. Eastern Galicia and western Volhynia were allotted to Poland, Bukovina came under Romania rule, and Transcarpathia became a part of Czechoslovakia.
Whereas the Jews in the Ukrainian lands of Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were able to maintain their traditional way of life, Jewish life in Soviet Ukraine gradually came to an end. In the 1930s, synagogues and religious schools were closed, and Hebrew was forbidden. Jews and Ukrainians were victims of both the Great Famine (1932-1933) and the Great Terror (1936-1938). Jews and Ukrainians were also to be found among the perpetrators. The relatively high proportion of Bolshevik functionaries of Jewish origin fanned latent antisemitism in Ukrainian society.
The repression of Jewish and Ukrainian national life did not stop Jews and Ukrainians from working together. This was especially apparent in literature. During the 1930s, Yiddish literature was able to develop in Ukraine. Among the brightest talents in this period were David Gofsteyn, Perets Markish, and David Bergelson. A number of Ukrainian writers of Jewish origin – Natan Rybak, Leonid Pervomaiskii, and Abram Katsnel’son – saw themselves as the bearers of Jewish and Ukrainian culture. Moreover, there existed in Ukraine at this time Jewish agricultural settlements where only Yiddish was spoken.
By May 1941, around 2.5 million Jews lived within the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Under German occupation, the Jewish community in Ukraine, like all other Jewish communities in occupied Europe, was subjected to total destruction. The only Jews to survive were those who fled to the Soviet interior (Central Asia and Siberia) or joined the Red Army and helped to defend the Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Belarusians from the Nazi regime. Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the Holocaust were extremely complex. Many non-Jews in Ukraine collaborated with the National Socialists. A large part succumbed to the Nazis’ inflammatory propaganda against “Judeo-Bolshevism”, which was allegedly responsible for the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. Historians assume that in Reich Commissariat Ukraine – which encompassed Volhynia, central Ukraine, and parts of eastern Ukraine – approximately 140,000 people served in local auxiliary police formations. Not all of them were Ukrainians, however. In addition, many inhabitants of Ukraine decided to work with the Nazis, and as a consequence of this decision, some ended up as guards at the killing centres Sobibór, Treblinka, and Bełżec. In many towns in western Ukraine, the local non-Jewish population killed Jews without waiting for instructions from the occupying authorities. On the other hand, Ukraine occupies fourth place on a list of rescuers compiled by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority in Jerusalem. This list includes more than 2,200 people from Ukraine who risked their lives to save Jews in the Ukrainian territories under Nazi occupation.
After the Second World War, Jewish life no longer existed in Ukraine. There were no more Jewish communities, no Jewish schools, no Jewish periodicals, no Jewish agricultural settlements. At the end of the 1940s, Stalin’s antisemitism moved from latent to open, resulting in the open persecution of everything Jewish. This antisemitic campaign culminated in the shooting of Soviet Jewish writers in 1952. By the 1960s, Jews in Soviet Ukraine had largely assimilated to the Soviet way of life.
According to the 1989 census, there were 486,000 Jews on Ukrainian territory. The collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by a massive wave of emigration to Israel, the United States, and Germany, on the one hand, and the resurrection of Jewish social and community life in Ukraine, on the other. According to the 2001 census, there are now only 103,000 Jews in Ukraine, but synagogues and Jewish schools have re-opened, Jewish newspapers are being published, Jewish social organisations have taken up their work, and there are institutes of Jewish studies.
Ukrainian Research on the Holocaust
Over the past decade and a half, the progress made in community life has been matched by great progress in Holocaust research in Ukraine. A new school of research on the Holocaust has emerged. The development of Holocaust historiography in Ukraine began with regional research and published memoirs. In a second step, individual aspects were examined. This was followed by the publication of standard document collections and dissertations, of which there are still too few.
The works of Ukrainian historians who research the Holocaust are largely ignored by official scholarship in Ukraine. At the same time, they have been received with great interest in the West and are frequently cited. The persistent ignorance of Ukrainian academics has increased in the last few years. Recent academic publications on modern Ukrainian history and university-level historiography textbooks address the Holocaust by making brief mention of Babi Yar – the Kiev ravine where nearly 34,000 Jews were shot over two days at the end of September 1941 – or these works suggest that the victims were first and foremost Ukrainians and Russians. In introductory surveys to historiography, no reference is made to publications about the genocide of Ukrainian Jews. Especially shocking is a recent publication by the Institute of History and the Institute of Political and Ethno-National Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, a publication dedicated to the political history of Ukraine in the 20th century and the early 21st century. This enormous volume, with more than 1,000 pages compiled by a collective of well-known and respected authors, addresses the most important events of the country’s history. One of the central chapters concerns the Second World War on the territory of Ukraine. There is not a single word about the fate of the Ukrainian Jews to be found there. In recent years, the road has apparently led from disconnected pieces of information to the total exclusion of the Holocaust from academic publications.
This volume and other publications like it are based on the idea of a mono-cultural or even mono-ethnic history of Ukraine, although there is widespread understanding in Ukrainian historiography that Ukraine’s culture and history were also influenced by minorities, including the Jews. The published papers from the series of conferences entitled “The Second World War and the Fate of the National Minorities of Ukraine” are evidence of this approach. These volumes reconstruct the fate of numerous peoples under Nazi occupation in great detail. Such conferences and publications are as a rule initiated by non-state academic organisations, in this case by the Committee Babi Yar and the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust Studies. The sponsors prepare the shape of events with regard to content and search for funding to pay for the conferences and resulting anthologies. Interestingly, representatives of academic institutes such as the publishers of the aforementioned work on Ukrainian political history also gladly take part in these conferences. They give informative presentations about the Crimean Tatars, Poles, Jews, Germans, or Czechs of Ukraine. But in the “official” tomes published by the Academy of Sciences and financed by the state, national minorities, such as the Jews, are not to be found.
Unlike Ukrainian historiography, European historiography follows a multicultural approach. This approach is also widespread in post-socialist countries. In Poland, for example, the most delicate subjects – such as the shooting of Polish officers by the Stalinist secret police in Katyń in 1940, the Polish-led expulsions of the Germans from western Poland in 1945, the destruction of Polish villages in Volhynia in 1943 at the hands of Ukrainians – can be discussed. Even the Jedwabne pogrom, which was carried out by Poles in 1941, and the 1946 pogrom in Kielce are topics of public discussion. This shows that Poland is assuming responsibility for historical remembrance.
The omission of everything Jewish in official Ukrainian historiography cannot be explained solely by the continued existence of the mono-cultural Soviet approach to history. Ukrainian society seems incapable or unwilling to perceive its national history as a history of various cultures. The “other” tends to be excluded and viewed as something alien. Apparently, it is more comfortable to talk about “us” and “others”, for example about “our Great Famine” and about “the others’ Holocaust”. A certain narrative is taking shape, in which the Holocaust does not appear. This is leading to a situation in which Ukrainian society, especially the younger generation, does not know the background to the Holocaust in Ukraine. A notion has even taken hold that the Holocaust took place exclusively in Western Europe and is not of any importance to Ukraine. The generally acknowledged, indisputable fact, as depicted in numerous Western and Ukrainian works of historiography, that the primary victims of the German occupation in Ukraine and other European countries were the Jews is being ignored or withheld. What is more, in recent times, the Great Famine in Ukraine is increasingly being called “the Ukrainian Holocaust”. The fact that the Jews were the Nazis’ chief victims is being obscured.
Liberal historians in Ukraine and abroad, independent publications, non-government organisations are working to counter this simplification. They clearly understand the Holocaust in Ukraine as an integral part of Ukrainian history. But they are not supported by the state, or only insufficiently so, and therefore have only little influence on public opinion. With the subordination of academia to political interests, Ukrainian historiography as an institution is continuing the Soviet tradition.

The Shoah in Classroom Instruction
No less important than research into the Holocaust is discussion of the topic in school so that the memory of the fate of Ukrainian Jewry is preserved and passed on to future generations. Starting in the first half of the 1990s, the Holocaust was included in the official school curriculum, to be precise: in the basic course “History of Ukraine and World History”. In 2000, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine recommended universities introduce a special course on the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Europe. This decision was apparently motivated by the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000, at which Ukraine gave its approval to a declaration to preserve the memory of the Holocaust through research and education. Since 2006, questions on the history of the Holocaust have been included in the final examinations of general-education schools.
Although all of the preconditions have been formally met, the Holocaust can hardly be taught in Ukrainian schools. First, the curriculum does not provide enough time for the topic. The Holocaust is to be handled in just one class as part of the more general topic “National-Socialist Occupation Regime”. Second, official textbooks lack compelling explanations of the Holocaust as part of Ukrainian history. Here, too, the Soviet tradition of maintaining silence on the Holocaust is being continued. In Soviet textbooks, the Holocaust was not even mentioned. Yurii Komarov, a teacher and training specialist from Kiev, has compared the treatment of the Holocaust in textbooks from Ukraine, Germany, and Great Britain. He has noted that, under such conditions, it can hardly be expected that Ukrainian pupils see the connection between Babi Yar and the Holocaust. In a study of how Ukrainian pupils receive the Holocaust, Professor Elena Ivanova of Kharkiv concluded that the Holocaust was for youth an abstract event without any kind of connection to Ukrainian national memory.
Since the mid-1990s, the non-state education sector in Ukraine has been a source of invaluable impulses. Step by step, institutions such as the Committee Babi Yar, the Association of National Minorities of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust Studies, the history teacher association Nova Doba, the centre Tkuma are working towards changing official education policy and embed within Ukrainian society an awareness of the responsibility to remember the Holocaust. With almost no state support, these organisations have developed a system for conveying the history of the Holocaust. They organise educational-methodology seminars for teachers and university instructors, work with schoolchildren and university students, hold competitions and summer schools, and facilitate internships in international Holocaust centres. In addition, they publish instruction materials that go far beyond official curricula and textbooks. Numerous teachers and instructors have since used them. The state does not place any obstacles in the way of teachers who want to learn more about the topic of the Holocaust. Unlike in Soviet times, the Holocaust is not taboo. However, discussion of the topic in school is not given any special support.
In Western Europe, it is widespread practice to use the study of the Holocaust to instil ethnic and religious tolerance in younger generations. Ukrainian NGOs are therefore able to receive financial support from abroad. Important partners for Ukrainian NGOs are the Anne Frank Museum, the Dutch government, and the Task Force for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research. Such projects attract little attention in Ukraine. NGOs represent a significant segment of Ukrainian civil society, but, unlike those in other countries, they receive little state support. Whereas the partner institutions of the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust Studies, such as the Centre for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo and the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, receive state funding, in Ukraine, there is a complete lack of moral, institutional, or financial assistance from the state.
The Holocaust in Politics and Society
In Ukraine, there is no official remembrance of the Shoah. There is no state museum of the history of the Holocaust. The sites where the mass shootings took place are not always indicated. At Babi Yar, there is no memorial complex. January 27, the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is not officially observed in Ukraine. All of this, although Ukraine signed the Stockholm Declaration in 2000.
The numerous existing monuments and memorial plaques that indicate where there ghettos or mass shootings took place can all be traced back to Jewish communities, non-state entities, and individual persons and donors. However, these memorials, according to Omer Bartov, are located on the periphery of public memory. To date, the state has shown no willingness at least to maintain these memorials. The overview of research and education policy has already demonstrated that the Ukrainian government has no interest in promoting a discussion of Jewish life and the Holocaust in Ukraine.
After 1991, monuments and museums were established for the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. It is as if national monuments were being built on top of the history of the Jews during the war, in order to make it easier to forget the “other victim–nation”. Like the Soviet government before it, the Ukrainian government is obscuring the fact that the Holocaust’s victims were Jews.
Most politicians do not see the Holocaust as a part of Ukrainian history, but as a tragedy of another people, which is also responsible for commemorating it.
In public, the topic of the Holocaust is hardly discussed. Instead of remembrance of the Holocaust, there is a looming “competition of victims”. Some “researchers” weigh the number of dead from the Great Famine against the number of dead in the Holocaust and have coined the incorrect designation “Ukrainian Holocaust”. It is thoroughly justifiable to analyse the mechanisms and basic features of the Great Famine and the Holocaust in comparative manner, but an equation of the two is fully inappropriate.
The omission of the Holocaust in Ukraine leads back to the fact that Ukraine does not accept any responsibility for the past, because neither the National-Socialist, nor the Stalinist crimes have been legally or historically assessed in full. Thus a usable model for remembering the history of the 20th century and the Second World War remains missing.
German historian Wilfried Jilge believes that the shortage of information on the Holocaust and on Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the German occupation prevents Ukrainians from seeing not only the “dark side” of national Ukrainian history but also the courage and selflessness of those Ukrainians who rescued Jews. The way Ukrainian historiography concentrates on the nation-state and the mono-ethnic concept of history is preventing the rest of the world from overcoming stereo-types and prejudices concerning the “antisemitic Ukrainians”.
A Way Out of a Dead End
Remembrance culture in Ukraine has reached a dead end. The only way out is not through continued adherence to totalitarian models of remembrance that allow only black and white but no grey tones. What is needed is an open discussion led by the desire to accept the “other” as well. Perhaps Wilfried Jilge is right to assume that the sum of the different wartime experiences – those of the Ukrainians, Jews, the Crimean Tatars, Poles, and others – would serve national consolidation in Ukraine more than official declarations that allow for only one reading of history. Unconnected, isolated histories lead to the expression of memories that are isolated from one another. Each is in and of itself biased. The risk that aggression and intolerance in Ukrainian society will increase is considerable. The only solution is to accept history responsibly and to promote the exchange and reconciliation of competing narratives. The German historian Guido Knopp has written that the Holocaust is a part of German history and a part of his personal history, and that every person bears responsibility for remembering the past. Ukrainian historiography still faces the task of assuming this responsibility.

Translated by Stephan Lang, Toronto

Impulses for Europe
Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry
Berlin (2008)
Page 279 - 288

Toleikis Vytautas

Repress, Reassess, Remember
Jewish Heritage in Lithuania

In the beginning was the void. When Lithuania gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, 50 years had passed since the murder of over 150,000 Lithuanian Jews under Nazi occupation. Their physical destruction was followed by the eradication of their memory under Soviet rule. There was little left of Jewish Vilnius, which had been known as the “Jerusalem of the north”, or of Jewish Kaunas, which had been a centre of rationalist Talmud scholarship. In 1949, the Jewish museum in Vilnius, the only one in the Soviet Union, was closed, and several years later, the Yiddish primary schools in Kaunas and Vilnius were also shut down. The Soviet Union remained silent about the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy and propagated anti-Zionist and even partly anti-Semitic stereotypes. Thus, the Yiddish inscription on the memorial at the mass murder site Ponariai (Ponary), located outside Vilnius, was changed in 1949: The new inscription, in Russian and Lithuanian, commemorated the massacre of “Soviet citizens”.
The remaining traces of Jewish culture were forgotten or erased. The Soviet authori-ties allowed old Jewish graveyards to fall into disrepair; in the larger towns and cities, they destroyed Jewish cemeteries and used the tombstones for construction material. The Great Synagogue in Vilnius, whose roof had been destroyed by fire, was aban-doned to the elements. Eventually, the authorities tore it down, in order to build a nursery school on the site – a symbol of the Soviet Union’s bright future. A palace of sports and culture was built on the site of the once famous Jewish cemetery in the Šnipiškės district of Vilnius. The cemetery had been closed in the tsarist era, but had survived the Second World War unscathed. Only the remains of the most famous dead, such as the Gaon of Vilna, ger tsedek (righteous convert) Count Walentyn Potocki, and some of the more famous leaders of the Bund (the General Jewish Workers Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia), were transferred to the Jewish cemetery on Sudervė Street. The grave of the Gaon of Vilna was then brought to the Jewish cemetery in Užupis in 1953, where it remained until this graveyard was also demolished in 1968. After the war, almost all of the surviving synagogues were turned into warehouses, school sport halls, and shops. Only in Vilnius, Kaunas, and Plungė were synagogues allowed to remain open for a while.
The Soviet authorities removed Yiddish inscriptions from houses and tore out the mezuzahs, the traditional parchment cases that usually hung on the doorposts of Jew-ish shops and workshops. At the sites where mass shootings of Jews had occurred, commemoration plaques with the following inscription were introduced: “At this place, the Hitler-occupiers and their volunteer helpers – the bourgeois nationalists – shot and killed Soviet citizens.” At the time, everybody knew that these Soviet citi-zens were primarily Jews, and that the “bourgeois nationalists” were primarily Lithuanians. By the end of the 1950s, little was left to remind the population of Lithuanian Jewish life.
The Search for Traces
It first became possible to write about the crimes against the Jews in the 1960s. In 1960, journalist Stasys Bistrickas published a small volume titled Ir sušaudytieji pra-byla [And those who were shot bear witness] about “the crimes of the Hitler-occupiers and the bourgeois nationalists in Ponary”. This was followed by the document collec-tion “on the trials against Lithuanian war criminals held in Vilnius and Kaunas in 1962”. These trials were held at the same time as the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jeru-salem and were extensively covered in the Soviet press. The case in Israel was not ignored in Lithuania either. In 1963, the diary of Masha Rolnikaitė, a “former inhabi-tant of the Vilnius ghetto and Concentration Camp Stutthof”, was published, and in 1967, there appeared Sofia Binkienė’s book Ir be ginklo kariai [War without weap-ons], which dealt with those who rescued Jews. This was followed in 1969 by a work on resistance in the Kaunas ghetto that was written by Meiris Eglinis-Elinas and Dimitrius Gelpernas. The year 1965 saw the publication of the first part of a harrow-ing two-volume collection of documents that made extremely clear who the Nazis’ primary victims were. However, these books were hardly read in Lithuania, as they came with forewords and commentaries laden with Communist ideology. Soviet propaganda equated Nazi collaborators with supporters of an independent Lithuanian state and portrayed “bourgeois Lithuania” as a loyal accomplice of Fascism.
The Soviet authorities soon allowed this rivulet of commemoration to run dry again. After the emigration of many Jews to Israel, which began in the early 1970s, secret orders were issued to remove a number of books from Lithuanian libraries and book-shops. These included autobiographical sketches by Mejeris Elinas-Eglinis, the works of Icchokas Meras, which were published throughout the Soviet Union, and the poetry collections of Hirsh Osherowicz. These were replaced by a deluge of propaganda pamphlets against Israel and Jews seeking to emigrate. Prominent personalities of Jewish origin, such as sports journalist Saliamonas Vaintraubas or Volfas Vilenskis, who had been awarded the title “Hero of the Soviet Union” for his military service during the Second World War, had to sign the public declarations against alleged Zionist warmongering.
One genre that made Holocaust remembrance possible was the memoir literature written by some Jewish authors wrote. However, these memoirists came exclusively from the ranks of the Communist Party, the Communist youth organisation Komso-mol, or other Soviet organisations, or they had served in the 16th Rifle Division, were former partisans or members of the Red Pioneers before the war. Masha Rolnikaitė, in her portrayal of the Vilnius Ghetto underground, writes exclusively about Commu-nists and Komsomol’ members. She does not say a word about Bundists, Zionists, or the representatives of other parties who had come to together to form a united under-ground organisation.
It was a similar story in film: Two films with clear references to the Holocaust – Žingsniai naktį [Footsteps in the night] by Raimundas Vabalas from 1962, about the escape of Jewish prisoners from the killing site Fort IX near Kaunas, and Ave, vita! by Almantas Grikevičus from 1969 – deal with opposition to the Nazis without mention-ing the heroes of Jewish background. The fact that Jews were only discussed if they were Communists only fuelled the antisemitic stereotype that all Jews were Commu-nists. This perception was strengthened by an expansion of the definition of “partici-pants in the revolutionary struggle” to include all left-wing youth. As a result, Soviet-era Lithuanian encyclopaedias swarmed with Jewish names.
Euphoria and Setbacks: Perestroika and Its Consequences
When the Lithuanian independence movement Sąjūdis was founded in 1988, the So-viet authorities tried to discredit its followers as radical nationalists. However, Jewish artists and men of letters – such as Emanuelis Zingeris, leader of the Jewish Cultural Association of Lithuania, and Grigorijus Alpernas, leader of the Tkuma association for the rebirth of national consciousness – published open letters in support of Sąjūdis in 1988 and were consequently well received among the Lithuanian population. An exhibition on Lithuanian Jewish art organised by Zingeris, later a member of parlia-ment, opened in Kaunas in June 1988, just one week after the founding of Sąjūdis, before moving on to Vilnius. This also helped bring Jews and non-Jews in Lithuania closer together. Zingeris understood the need to make Lithuanian society aware of the rich heritage that had been lost to the destruction and repression of Jewish life in Lithuania. Lithuanians at the time saw the Jews as allies in the struggle for inde-pendence. When Lithuanian Jews founded a cultural association on 5 May 1989, the leading members of Sąjūdis congratulated them in person and apologised for the col-laboration of their compatriots with the Nazis.
Commemoration of Lithuania’s Jewish heritage and remembrance of Holocaust vic-tims were increasingly permitted and officially promoted as Lithuania came closer to leaving the Soviet Union. At the end of 1989, the republic’s government agreed to re-open the Jewish museum that had been closed in 1949. On 13 February 1991 – four days after its referendum on independence – the Lithuanian government decided that the scattered collections of individual Jewish museums should be turned over to the new Jewish museum. In October 1989, the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Middle School in Vilnius opened its doors. Many Jewish organisations were also founded at that time. Prime Minister Adolfas Šleževičius and President Algirdas Brazauskas made state visits to Israel in the mid-1990s. There, before the Knesset, they acknowledged the crimes committed by Lithuanians during the Second World War and asked the surviving Jews and descendents of the victims for forgiveness. However, in Lithua-nia itself, these apologies in the name of the Lithuanian people aroused indignation among parts of the population and some politicians.
Lithuanian independence also had its dark side. For example, all those who had been sentenced by the Soviet secret service were rehabilitated no matter the reason behind the sentence. This resulted in the rehabilitation of a number of war criminals who had not been sentenced for participation in anti-Soviet fighting, but for participation in the mass murder of Jews under Nazi occupation. This decision was revised two years later, but the pardon brought a wave of international condemnation, to which Lithua-nia failed to respond adequately. Instead of apologising to the Jewish community, many Lithuanians saw the episode as a Kremlin intrigue. Around the same time, the United States began deporting to Lithuania U.S. citizens of Lithuanian origin who were suspected of participating in Nazi crimes. Many of them had gained a good reputation in emigration; the discovery of their past was a great shock for Lithuanian society, especially within the diaspora. The case against Aleksandras Lilieikis at the end of the 1990s attracted particular attention. Under Nazi rule, he had been in charge of the Vilnius district’s branch of the Saugumas – the Lithuanian security police, i.e. the Gestapo’s local auxiliaries; later in the United States, he had helped publish a standard reference work on Lithuanian history. The resultant international pressure – for example, from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem – increased the coun-try’s defensiveness.
At the same time, the “two genocides theory” spread from the émigré community in the United States to Lithuania. According to this theory, the Jews had collaborated with the Soviet occupiers in carrying out a genocide of Lithuanians in 1940; when Germany liberated Lithuania, Lithuanians spontaneously carried out revenge against the Jewish traitors. A prominent representative of this apologist view of history is writer Jonas Mikelinskas, who wrote an essay for the renowned Lithuanian literary journal Metai in which he claimed that responsibility for the Holocaust ultimately lay with the Jews themselves. This theory found a shockingly large number of supporters in Lithuania. The hope that Jews and Lithuanians would live amicably side by side – a hope that had seemed so promising in the early 1990s – had vanished within a decade.
Civil Society Awakens
The dispute over Lithuanian participation in and responsibility for the murder of Li-thuania’s Jews revealed considerable potential for antisemitism, but at the end of the 1990s, Lithuanian society began to give a great deal of attention to its Jewish heritage and the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. The impulses coming from society – pressure from the West did not play an important role here – were much stronger than elsewhere in East Central Europe at the time. This was largely due to the engagement of non-state initiatives. They recruited many volunteers, aroused the interest of politicians and au-thorities, built relationships with partners abroad, and worked constructively with state and non-state institutions.
Up until the end of the 1990s, Jewish organisations, such as the Jewish Museum, the Vilnius Pedagogical University, and foreign organisations had been primarily respon-sible for the protection of Lithuania’s Jewish heritage. In 1999, the international Jew-ish organisation B’nai B’rith and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the support of the Lithuanian Ministry of Education, published a two-volume schoolbook on the Holocaust, which was distributed to schools throughout the coun-try. However, it was hardly used, because it differed significantly from the textbooks in circulation, and because teachers were not instructed in how to apply it.
It was possible to learn from these mistakes, however. The Lithuanian teacher training centre, together with the British Holocaust education centre Beth Shalom, organised seminars for teachers. In 2001, Beth Shalom produced the two-hour film Saulėlydis Lietuvoje [Sunset in Lithuania] for classroom instruction. It covered Lithuanian-Jewish culture, the Holocaust, and relations between Lithuanians and Jews. There was an accompanying teachers’ guide for the film. All over Lithuania, teachers were given seminars to show them how they might integrate the film into lessons. Since the end of the 1990s, the more Lithuanian organisations have shown an interest in redis-covering the Jewish heritage and confronting the Holocaust, the more resonance these topics have found in society.
In 2000, the association House of Remembrance was founded. It launched five history competitions on the theme “The Jews – My Grandparents and Great Grandparents’ Neighbours”. Schoolchildren from across Lithuania participated in the competitions. They recorded stories from their grandparents about former Jewish neighbours, col-lected historical photographs, and took pictures of houses where Jews had lived. The best pieces of work were published, and the authors invited to an awards ceremony in Vilnius. With support from the Ministry of Science and Education, the association also founded history clubs in schools, information centres, and museums, organised excursions to former concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, Stutthof, and Klooga (Estonia), and published books on Lithuania’s Jewish heritage and the Holocaust.
Working together with the Ministry of Culture, the New Education Foundation (Švietimo kaitos fondas), which was founded by the Ministry of Science and Education in 1999, organised a national competition for museums in 2001–2004. In 2001, the theme was “The History of the Holocaust in Our Region”, in 2002–2004, “The History of the Jewish Communities in Our Region”. In 2005, the foundation set up an Internet database to register Holocaust-related projects at schools, universities, museums, and other state and non-state institutions. The foundation also created an interactive map that documents approximately 200 known locations of mass murder in Lithuania.
Political education about the Holocaust is also offered by the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazis and the Regime of the Soviet Occupation in Lithuania (Tarptautinė komisija nacių ir sovietinio okupacinių režimų nusikaltimams Lietuvoje įvertinti), which President Valdas Adamkus established in September 1998. International Jewish organisations initially expressed criticism, saying that the commis-sion’s simultaneous evaluation of both Nazi and Soviet crimes played down the signifi-cance of the Holocaust. After noteworthy historians from the United States and Israel accepted invitations to join the commission, criticism receded.
The education programme unveiled in 2002, however, created a controversy that revealed the two basic tendencies in assessing the Holocaust in Lithuania: For one group of people, working through the past is a politically motivated issue and serves above all to enhance Lithuania’s image abroad. For the others, confronting the crimes committed by Lithuanians is a moral issue.
Thus historians and multipliers who had worked for many years to get Lithuanian society to recognise the Holocaust were critical of the fact that the commission was financed by the state to conduct historical research, but not to promote political education. The head of the education programme, Snieguolė Matonienė, also sparked controversy when she claimed that teachers took up Jewish topics “to improve their career prospects”. There was also criticism of the fact that the commission was too keen to see Lithuanian teachers and multipliers travel abroad for training courses.
People were irritated as well by the way the commission conveyed the impression abroad that work on the Holocaust was in its initial stages in Lithuania, and that cur-rent initiatives were unprofessional. The authors of a textbook on the history of Lithuania that comprehensively addressed Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis were particularly aggrieved. A co-operation treaty between the Lithuanian Ministry of Education and the Israeli Holocaust memorial authority Yad Vashem was met with incomprehension, as was the rush to found tolerance centres in Lithuanian schools and universities due to fears that there were not enough motivated teachers available to introduce such a sensitive issue into classroom instruction. With time, however, the positions of the parties involved converged. The New Education Foundation, together with the commission, organised a history competition in Lithuanian schools: “From Civil Initiatives to Civil Society”. Working together, the New Education Foundation, the Jewish Museum, and the Ministry of Science and Education developed a state education programme to promote learning about the Holocaust.
Despite these initiatives, Jewish heritage is still recognised as a part of Lithuanian history and culture primarily in the larger cities, especially in Vilnius and Šiauliai and to a lesser extent in Kaunas. In the provinces, it is left to a handful of idealists, such as those teachers who encouraged their pupils to enter the aforementioned competitions and thus broke through the general indifference.
The Kėdainiai Museum offers a ray of hope. Museum workers there have succeeded in restoring two synagogues in the old quarter of this central Lithuanian town. One of the synagogues has been turned into a cultural centre. It hosts events on Jewish his-tory and culture, organises projects that promote tolerance, and creates teaching mate-rials on the history of the Jews in the area around Kėdainiai.
The small town of Kaišiadorys, also in central Lithuania, has been very active as well. The town museum published a book on the Jews of the Kaišiadorys region by histo-rian Rolandas Gustaitis and helped to preserve the wooden synagogue in the nearby village of Žiežmariai. The latter was particularly important, as the Nazis burned down most of these unique wooden houses of worship. Pupils at the children’s music school in the village of Rumšiškės in Kaišiadorys district put together a programme on the Jewish community of Rumšiškės and recorded a CD Forgotten Melodies of Rumšiškės. This is the first CD of Yiddish songs performed in Lithuanian translation. With the consent of the Jewish community, the open-air ethnographic museum at Rumšiškės, which features farmhouses from all regions of Lithuania and a typical Prussian Lithuanian town, has re-built a preserved wooden synagogue in the town.
In the small towns Kalvarija and Joniškis, in southwestern and northern Lithuania respectively, synagogues are to be restored. However, many of these former prayer houses, especially those built of wood, are in poor condition. The Vilnius Art Acad-emy and the Centre for Research into the Culture and History of East European Jews are trying to find, document, and photograph all of the surviving synagogues. The Jewish Museum and the Office for the Preservation of Cultural Artefacts, a part of the Ministry of Culture, are pursuing similar projects.
Against this backdrop, another source of optimism is the unveiling in recent years of several monuments and commemoration plaques to honour Jewish-Lithuanian writers, artists, and musicians. Kaunas’s Liberty Avenue (Laisvės alėja), Europe’s longest pe-destrian street, now has a monument to the legendary, prewar popular singer Danielius Dolskis. In Vilnius, a sculpture was erected in honour of the distinguished doctor, medi-cal theorist, and politician Zemach Szabad, who is well-known all over the former So-viet Union as the model for the main character in the children’s book Doktor Aibolit by Kornei Chukovskii. There is also a monument to the French writer Romain Gary, who was born in Vilnius. All three sculptures were made by Romualdas Kvintas.
Alongside the sculptures, there are countless commemoration plaques, for example, for Theodor Herzl, Joseph Brodsky, violinist Jascha Heifetz, philosopher Emmanuel Levi-nas, painter Rafael Khvoles, poet Moshe Kulbak, and the founder of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Max Weinreich. Many of these commemoration plaques were created at the initiative of Pranas Morkus, chairman of the Lithuanian-Israeli Society.

Summary
Over the last decade, Lithuanian society has begun to reflect more intensively on its Jewish heritage and the Holocaust, but most government officials still have very vague notions of Lithuania’s Jewish history and are unwilling to confront this history. This includes not only authorities at the local level, but the ministries of justice and culture and even the Ministry of Science and Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The minds of many politicians are still awash with stereotypes from the interwar and postwar periods. They still tend to see the conservation of the cultural heritage of Lithuanian Jewry as a foreign, non-Lithuanian event, something the West has forced Lithuania to acknowledge. They do not see it as the responsibility of the Lithuanian state to restore cemeteries or synagogues or to produce commemoration plaques.
The kind of attitudes that ensured a delay in the legal proceedings against Lithuanians accused of participating in the Holocaust still exist. There should be no mistake about that. On the other hand, it is clear today that young people see the history of Lithua-nia’s Jews as part of Lithuanian history.
This new attitude flickers from time to time in politics as well: In June 2008, the Li-thuanian government approved the construction of a new museum, which will be conceptualised in co-operation with the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Guggen-heim Museum in New York. It is to bring not only avantgarde art to Vilnius – above all works by the Lithuanian-born American director Jonas Mekas and the musician and video artist George Maciunas (Jurgis Mačiūnas) – it is to include as well a section dedicated to art by Lithuanian Jews.