The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust 9781350039667, 9781350039698, 9781350039681

Citation preview

The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust

CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE The Bloomsbury series of Cultural Histories of Theatre and Performance recognizes that historical knowledge has always been contested and revised. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the transformation of conventional understandings of culture created through new political realities and communication technologies, together with paradigm shifts in anthropology, psychology and other cognate fields, has challenged established methodologies and ways of thinking about how we do history. The series embraces volumes that take on those challenges, while enlarging notions of theatre and performance through the representation of the lived experience of past performance makers and spectators. The series’ aim is to be both inclusive and expansive, including studies on topics that range temporally and spatially, from the locally specific to the intercultural and transnational. Series editors: Claire Cochrane (University of Worcester, UK) Bruce McConachie (University of Pittsburgh, USA) George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed David Roberts Forthcoming titles Alternative Comedy: 1979 and the Reinvention of British Stand-Up Oliver Double A Century of South African Theatre Loren Kruger

The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust Grzegorz Niziołek Translated by Ursula Phillips

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published as Polski Teatr Zagłady in 2013 in Poland by Instytut Teatralny im. Z. Raszewskiego and Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej This edition first published in Great Britain by Methuen Drama, 2019 Copyright © Grzegorz Niziołek & Instytut Teatralny im. Z. Raszewskiego, 2013, 2019 English language translation © Ursula Phillips, 2019 Grzegorz Niziołek has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Publication is financed under the ‘National Programme for the Development of Humanities’ for 2016–2019 of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Adriana Brioso Cover image: Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), directed by Krystyna Skuszanka and Jerzy Krasowski, Teatr Ludowy (The Ludowy Theatre), Krakow-Nowa Huta, 1962. Photograph Tadeusz Rolke. Agencja Gazeta All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3966-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3968-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-3967-4 Series: Cultural Histories of Theatre and Performance Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of figures  vi Acknowledgements  x

Introduction  1

PART ONE  The Holocaust and the theatre  15  1 The theatre of gapers  17  2 Who was not in Auschwitz?  50  3 Playing the Jew  62  4 Wrongly seen  76  5 Without mourning  99

PART TWO  The theatre and the Holocaust  107  6 This shameful Jewish war  109  7 What is unthinkable in Poland  141  8 A crushed audience  161  9 Archive of the missing image  196 10 Duplicitous spectator, helpless spectator  225

Notes  255 Bibliography  287 Index of names  300 General index  304

LIST OF FIGURES

Introduction I.1

I.2 I.3

I.4

I.5

I.6

I.7

I.8

I.9

View of the burning Warsaw Ghetto at the time of the ghetto uprising. Warsaw, April 1943. Photograph Karol Grabski. From the collection I ciągle widzę ich twarze (And Still I See Their Faces), edited by Lech Majewski and Anna Bikont (Warsaw: American-Polish-Israeli Shalom Foundation, 1996)  7 People watching the burning ghetto. Warsaw, May 1943. Private collection of Anna Pielińska  8 Inhabitants of Warsaw observing the burning ghetto. Warsaw, 1943. Warszawska Gmina Wyznaniowa Żydowska (Jewish Community of Warsaw)/East News  8 Inhabitants of Warsaw observing the burning ghetto. Warsaw, 1943. Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute)  9 The Warsaw Ghetto, Żelazna Street, junction with Chłodna Street. Warszawska Gmina Wyznaniowa Żydowska (Jewish Community of Warsaw)/East News  9 Deportation of Poles and Jews under German police escort. Oświęcim 1941. From the collection I ciągle widzę ich twarze (And Still I See Their Faces), edited by Lech Majewski and Anna Bikont (Warsaw: American-Polish-Israeli Shalom Foundation, 1996)  10 The Warsaw Ghetto, footbridge over Chłodna Street linking the two parts of the ghetto. Warszawska Gmina Wyznaniowa Żydowska (Jewish Community of Warsaw)/East News  10 The funfair in Krasiński Square. Warsaw, April 1943. Photograph Jan Lisowski. Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute)  11 The Warsaw Ghetto. A crowd of civilians watches a ‘Jewish entertainment’ organized by the Nazis. Warsaw 1941–1942. Muzeum Niepodległości (Museum of Independence)/East News  11

LIST OF FIGURES

I.10

I.11

I.12

vii

Photograph from the time of the German Occupation. Exact date and place unknown. Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute)  12 Scene of a Jew being beaten by German soldiers. Exact date and place unknown. From the collection I ciągle widzę ich twarze (And Still I See Their Faces), edited by Lech Majewski and Anna Bikont (Warsaw: American-Polish-Israeli Shalom Foundation, 1996)  13 Photograph from the Second World War. Exact date and place unknown. From the collection I ciągle widzę ich twarze (And Still I See Their Faces), edited by Lech Majewski and Anna Bikont (Warsaw: American-Polish-Israeli Shalom Foundation, 1996)  13

Chapter 1 1.1–1.12 Frames from Andrzej Wajda’s film Samson. Production: Zespół Filmowy Droga, Studio Filmowe Kadr, Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych, Łódź. Poland, 1961  18

Chapter 4 4.1–4.2

4.3

Frames from the documentation records of Miasto liczy psie nosy (The Town Counts Dogs’ Noses), directed by Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Teatr Studio im. Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza, Warsaw 1991. Video production by Jerzy Karpiński, Pracownia Filmowa Studio  84 Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), directed by Krystyna Skuszanka and Jerzy Krasowski, Teatr Ludowy (The Ludowy Theatre), Kraków-Nowa Huta, 1962. Photograph Tadeusz Rolke. Agencja Gazeta  95

Chapter 6 6.1–6.3

Stefan Otwinowski, Wielkanoc (Easter), directed by Leon Schiller, Teatr Wojska Polskiego (Polish Army Theatre), Łódź 1946. Photograph Stanisław Stępniewski. Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego (Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute), Muzeum Teatralne (Theatre Museum, Warsaw)  129

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Chapter 7 7.1–7.4

Studium o Hamlecie (Hamlet Study), based on the text by Stanisław Wyspiański, directed by Jerzy Grotowski, Teatr Laboratorium 13 Rzędów (Laboratory Theatre of 13 Rows), Opole 1964. Photograph Ryszard Cieślak. Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego [Jerzy Grotowski Institute]  144

Chapter 8 8.1

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive  169 8.2 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive  173 8.3 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive  176 8.4 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive  178 8.5 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive  180 8.6–8.11 Frames from the film Lovelies and Dowdies, directed by Ken McMullen, 1974. The film contains a record of the production of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Nadobnisie i koczkodany (Lovelies and Dowdies; also translated as Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1973; Edinburgh Festival. Cricoteka Archive  184 8.12–8.18 Frames from the film Szatnia Tadeusza Kantora, czyli Nadobnisie i koczkodany w Teatrze Cricot 2 (Tadeusz Kantor’s Cloakroom, or Lovelies and Dowdies (Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes) in the Cricot 2 Theatre), screenplay and production by Krzysztof Miklaszewski and Włodzimierz Gawroński, OTV, Kraków, 1973  188

LIST OF FIGURES

ix

Chapter 9 9.1–9.3

Kazimierz Moczarski, Rozmowy z katem (Conversations with an Executioner), directed by Andrzej Wajda, Teatr Powszechny, Warsaw 1977. Photograph Renata Pajchel. Archiwum Teatru Powszechnego w Warszawie (Archive of the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw)  205

Chapter 10 10.1–10.5 Frames from the documentation records of (A)pollonia, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Nowy Teatr (New Theatre), Warsaw, 2009. Video production by Marcin Latałło, Nowy Teatr/Camera Obscura  246 10.6–10.8 Frames from the documentation records of (A)pollonia, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Nowy Teatr (New Theatre), Warsaw, 2009. Video production by Marcin Latałło, Nowy Teatr/Camera Obscura  249

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A book such as this, covering many topics, people, places and times, is not created in a vacuum. It benefits from a multitude of inspirations and suggestions, sometimes pursuing and developing an idea initiated by someone else. It incurs debts that cannot be repaid. It is simply not possible to capture in one place all the stimuli and pointers I received from others during the creation of this work. First of all, I would like to thank Piotr Gruszczyński and Krzysztof Warlikowski for their invitation to deliver a series of lectures on Polish theatre entitled ‘The Holocaust in a Brave New World’ in 2009 and 2010. The first draft of this book emerged from these lectures. The audiences also proved to be a great support: loyally accompanying me, responding with animation and willingly engaging in further discussion. Their reactions convinced me that it was worth continuing my research into this topic. During the course of writing this book, I received constant and dedicated support from Leszek Kolankiewicz, Joanna Krakowska and Piotr Mitzner. I am grateful to Maria Bardini for giving me permission to look at the family archive of Aleksander Bardini, located in the Warsaw University Library. The late Anna Halczak gave me access to many valuable materials relating to Tadeusz Kantor. I would also like to thank Maria Dworakowska of the Theatre Institute in Warsaw, Małgorzata Paluch-Cybulska of the Cricoteka Archive and Bruno Chojak of the Grotowski Institute for their kind assistance and unfailing advice. Thanks are due likewise to Jadwiga Adamowicz of the Contemporary Theatre in Warsaw, Magdalena Jaracz of the Gustaw Holoubek Dramatic Theatre in Warsaw, Maria Klotzer of the People’s Theatre in Nowa Huta, Michał Smolis of the National Theatre, Adam Wyżyński of National Film Archive and Mateusz Żurawski of the Studio Theatre, Warsaw. I am especially grateful to Jerzy Karpiński of the  Theatre Institute for allowing me access to film materials relating to the work of Jerzy Grzegorzewski and Józef Szajna, and to Paweł Płoski for suggesting some intriguing leads. Danuta Żmij-Zielińska not only lent me her only copy of her translation of Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, but also shared with me her knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the play’s Warsaw premiere. The Andrzej Wajda Archive was a place full of treasures. I am most grateful to the late Andrzej Wajda and to Krystyna Zachwatowicz for

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xi

allowing me access to these materials, and to Bogdana Pilichowska for her professional care during my research. During the preparation of the manuscript for the original Polish publication of this book, I had the good fortune to work with a number of people who demonstrated both their professional commitment and individual engagement. I am grateful to Dorota Buchwald, Magdalena Jankowska and Monika Krawul for their careful reading of the text. I also thank Dorota Kubica for her invaluable assistance in selecting the illustrative material, as well as Iwona Kurz of the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw, who also advised on this matter. Many thanks also to Rafał Benedek for the overall design of the book. All expressions of thanks seem too conventional in relation to the debt I owe to Agata Adamiecka-Sitek, who took charge of my project even at a very early stage of its realization. She was the first – and the most attentive and critical – reader of the book. She inspired its ultimate form in terms of both content and design, and approached all stages of the publication process with energy, consistency and faith in the value of the whole undertaking.

xii

Introduction

The most important thing is to realize that everything was visible, that it really did take place and that everyone saw at least a fraction of what was going on. In his book Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) Zygmunt Bauman posed the question as to whether sociology, as a science that grew out of the Enlightenment project of modernization, was capable of contributing anything substantial to our knowledge of the Holocaust.1 Is it not ‘blind’ to the Holocaust? As a product of Enlightenment rationalism, is it not disposed to constantly confirm the same old belief in social progress and humanity’s ability to morally perfect itself on the road to improving social organization, and by the same token to treat the Holocaust solely as an aberration and act of barbarism, which can be counteracted – morally, politically and ideologically? In this way, sociology seems to protect the dogmas of humanism which the Holocaust, through the very fact of its existence, has violently destroyed. Bauman proposed, as we recall, a radical change of perspective. The Holocaust is not, in his opinion, the defeat of modernizing social projects, but an integral part of them, arising out of the same notions and capable of realization on a massive scale, thanks to models of functionality and productivity inculcated in daily social practice, and which are inseparably linked to ideologies of modernity. Sociologists researching the Holocaust must therefore reassess the assumptions of their field of study, re-examine and challenge its conditionings and dogmas. Sociology does not teach us about the Holocaust, but learns from the Holocaust, as Bauman emphatically repeats. His conclusions, somewhat reformulated, I attempt to apply to theatre. Must not forms of theatre originating in Enlightenment educational projects and Romantic national ideologies (as well as procedures created within this framework) become, by their very nature, instruments for practising defensive strategies, both social and individual, when faced by an experience such as the Holocaust? Are practices elaborated in Polish theatrical institutions

2

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

regarding the initiation of performances, construction of identity (based on the exclusion of the other) and the establishment of a relationship with an audience (treated here as part of the common community) genuinely able to measure human experiences, which have isolated different social groups from one another and, as Jerzy Jedlicki suggests, set the bar of empathy very high? Has not Polish theatre therefore become, on account of its traditions, fervently harnessed to participating in ideological projects that deny memory of a too painful past? And in the same way, has not theatre become – similarly to sociology in Bauman’s critique – ‘blind’ to the Holocaust? In the current book, drawing on many examples, I analyse the conditions causing this ‘blindness’, although I devote most space to analysing cases of ‘poor eyesight’ (yet eyesight nevertheless!). The blindness of theatre to the Holocaust is, however, disturbing and paradoxical. All testimonies to the Holocaust are full of theatrical metaphors; it is impossible to narrate the Holocaust without using such words as: play, mask, illusion, directing, role, stage, wings, the obscene, tragedy, victim. People who survived are ready to describe themselves as ‘play-actors’, an attribute thanks to which they managed to come through. Those who watched the events would prefer to remain hidden in the gloom of the auditorium. Those who were perpetrators would like to see their deeds (if they were allowed to do so) as a work of tragedy. What is more, such metaphors not only enable us to describe the events of the Holocaust; in their own way, they also condition them, organize them and set them in motion. Every event of the Holocaust depended on the distribution of roles and organization of the field of visibility. Theatre was therefore engaged in the work of the Holocaust both as purveyor of ominous strategies for creating illusions, of justifications for attitudes of passivity and of the instruments of salvation (if only thanks to a change in identity – in the case of individuals who had gone into hiding). Today, this awareness prevents us from seeing the events as an aberration in cultural history, because they are an integral part of it. For this way of thinking, I am indebted to Zygmunt Bauman and his book. I begin my exposition by recalling one of the ‘banal’ incidents of the Holocaust: the reaction of Polish passers-by to a Jew who unexpectedly appeared on a Warsaw street, having been driven by fear from his hideout. Although the example comes from Kazimierz Brandys’s novel Samson, it is a known fact that Brandys did not invent it and it is not simply an element of literary fiction. Brandys recorded one of the episodes he might well have witnessed in occupied Warsaw. The refusal to treat the incident as fiction anticipates my strategy of treating theatre as a space for bearing witness and not for creating performances. In the first part of my book, I refer many times to this incident, which took place on a Warsaw street, in an attempt above all to get to the bottom of the experience of the passersby who positioned themselves as passive and powerless spectators, cast the disorientated Jew into the role of protagonist, the victim of a tragic

INTRODUCTION

3

spectacle, and fatalistically recognized the invisible perpetrators as a ruthless inevitability. They therefore turned the incident, in which they participated, into theatre, with roles appropriate to it as well as uncrossable dividing lines between stage and auditorium, thereby endowing the situation with a false transcendence. Here, it is not I who imposes a theatrical structure on the episode; it was interpreted in this way – or sensed semi-consciously – by the participants themselves. Hence the title of Chapter 1, ‘The theatre of gapers’. In this chapter, I concentrate on the phenomenon of denial of the position of witness to someone else’s suffering, and on the historical precedents of such denial, or rather the changing forms of its cultural symptoms. The reason for such strong denial is not the incident itself, nor the perceived threat to oneself based on someone’s fate, but the actual position occupied by the spectator, most often an attitude of passivity. Put in highly simplified terms, we could say that the denial by Polish society of the memory of its own indifference has been decisive in creating tensions in the whole of post-war Polish culture – if we assume, of course, that the extermination of the Jews, scenes of their persecution, humiliation, exclusion and killing, were clearly visible and the universal experience of the society of bystanders (as Raul Hilberg calls the incidental observers). In the history of this denial, a special role has to be ascribed to theatre, since theatre participated both in the processes that upheld the state of denial, and in attempts to break it down. It became a place of repetition – that is, of constant referral not so much to the denied events, because these would have required direct representation, easily accessible to audiences, but to the very fact of denial. Such repetition of denial I call the witness of theatre. One of the most important questions I raise in the book relates to the influence of such proactive theatrical metaphors on the medium of theatre itself. Theatre – defined by Marvin Carlson as a ‘memory machine’ – appears in his conception as a set of replicated and culturally stabilized creative and perceptual procedures based on mechanisms of memory and repetition.2 If ‘theatre’, understood as a powerful cultural instrument for restricting the field of visibility and distributing roles, was engaged in the carrying out of mass crime, then has not memory of this very fact led to the smashing of traditional models of theatre, and above all to a violent compromising of the safe, external position of the spectator? The first half of this book, entitled ‘The Holocaust and the theatre’, is devoted to this issue. I put forward the hypothesis that a deep transformation occurred in the theatre as a result of the universal social experience of being a witness to someone else’s suffering, and of the equally universal denial of this experience. When the mechanisms of representation fall short, and hence the creation of legible and understandable images of the past (and these, for various reasons, were undesirable or difficult to articulate), theatre has at its disposal the mechanism of repetition, thanks to which it can utilize with impunity the resources of social experience – it does not have to state what it is actually

4

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

talking about. It can operate in the space of taboo. It can reiterate otherwise hidden experiences in the symptomatic and affective dimensions, reproduce in continually new variations the situation of denial and the violation of defensive mechanisms, as well as place the spectator in the uncomfortable position of being an indifferent or mocking observer of someone else’s suffering, provoking in him or her shock, aggression, sympathy, paralysis, anxiety or fear. The creative theatre of Tadeusz Kantor or Jerzy Grotowski especially appears to confirm this hypothesis. My separation of the system of representation from that of repetition, I base on Freud’s concept of Verleugnung (‘denial’ or ‘disavowal’) – that is, on the division between the mental image and the affect associated with it. The liberated affect may attach itself to other mental images; meanwhile, images deprived of the affective charge appropriate to them may appear in the field of consciousness as neutral representations without provoking any vivid emotional reactions. ‘But we’ve heard it all before’ is then the answer received from audiences. Repetition, on the other hand, becomes the result of the work of the affect; it selects for itself deformed or distant images, thereby allowing the impact of the affect to be prolonged, renewed within the confines of the theatrical experience, and at the same time propelled onto fresh tracks; to provoke shock, yet to keep the reasons for it in a state of agonizing obscurity. The marginalization of theatre in research on memory of the Holocaust ought to cause amazement, especially in relation to the cornucopia of analyses dedicated to literature, cinema, the visual arts, monuments and museology; but also because all kinds of cultural texts devoted to the Holocaust elaborate their research tools according to models of theatre and theatricality, without taking up at the same time the constant challenge to reflect on the participation of theatrical strategies in the carrying out of the cultural work of the Holocaust (here I use the word ‘work’ [Polish: dzieło, a work of art] quite deliberately, recalling Stanisław Lem’s apt observation that every planned mass crime, like culture, generates its own autonomy). Theatrical categories are therefore used in Holocaust studies in an uncritical fashion, as if theatre were an ahistorical and culturally stable model for manufacturing ideological divisions in the social space, a synonym for power and a tool for distributing roles, a reservoir of convenient metaphors and easy-to-decipher strategies of identity. No attention is paid to the damage that the medium of theatre itself has undergone. Reflecting on the participation of theatrical metaphors, both in the handiwork of the Holocaust itself and in the discourse about it, forces one to approach every absolutizing conception of the relationship between present and past with greater suspicion, especially when it comes to the concept of trauma, which allows too widespread a spectrum, in my opinion, of genuine experiences to be included (and because of this, masked). The society of bystanders dreams of salvation through trauma. But what about ressentiment, stupidity, lack of imagination? Studies of trauma are a good example of the usurpation of theatrical metaphors without any attempt

INTRODUCTION

5

to confront the polymorphic medium that is theatre, or to confront the deconstructive element in theatrical metaphors that always sets us on the trail of genuine experience, and not only of symbolic representations of the loss of this experience. Theatre, before it becomes a metaphor, must first be a sensory, concrete experience secured in some here and now. My research into the history of actual theatrical events, covering a broad framework of time from 1946 to 2009, has taught me to be suspicious of such abused concepts as trauma and mourning. Functions of mourning in particular are readily usurped by theatre because of the pale and mystified memory of its own roots in ritual. The various forms of repetition, of constantly the same experience (namely denial of the fact of having been a witness of someone else’s suffering), found in the productions that I have analysed, are difficult to define and categorize. One has to learn to respect their namelessness and affective power, better described in categories of excess rather than loss. The second part of my book, entitled ‘The theatre and the Holocaust’, consists of analyses of selected theatrical events. Here I discuss the productions of Leon Schiller, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Warlikowski and Ondrej Spišák, as well as two Polish dramas about the Holocaust, one written just after the war, the other only a few years ago: Wielkanoc (Easter) by Stefan Otwinowski and Nasza klasa (Our Class) by Tadeusz Słobodzianek. Witness offered by the theatre, however, cannot be any symbolic compensation for the fact of previous passivity, indifference, fear and stupidity. Such witness cannot help to ‘work through’ the past; nor does it belong to the ritual of mourning. It is powerless – and even the hubris of performance studies and optimism of the anthropology of theatre (Victor Turner always placed theatre among the rituals of compensation) cannot assist here. The witnesses of theatre that I discuss in this book will not salvage anything. They are not in a position to represent anything. Will not bring catharsis. But they exist. They existed. They are linked to the past by a particular symptom – one of many experienced by the community of bystanders. The sole aim of this book is to expose this symptom and describe it. In both parts of the book, I frequently refer to the concept of libido. Following the suggestions of Sigmund Freud and Jean-François Lyotard, I treat this kind of instinctive life energy as a transgressive element that facilitates transcendence of binary oppositions between internal experience and external experience, between positive experiences (overabundance, excess, the formation of bonds) and negative experiences (loss, passivity, ‘blockade’, paralysis), between mourning and forgetfulness. I am not able to interpret theatrical space other than from the perspective of a ‘libidinal economy’ – that is, of the generation, and not always fortuitous control, of affects; the liberation of their power with potentially unforeseen consequences. In the stage productions I discuss, these types of event, libidinal incidents, excesses, but also defeats, are what fascinate me most – for me, these are precisely the theatrical facts whose traces we can find

6

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

in existing theatrical documentation. I have not analysed overarching artistic structures, the construction of intentional meanings or the forms of representation, but rather the social and artistic conditions that have given rise to particular affects within the framework of theatrical experience. I present the methodological basis for these proposed investigations in the chapter entitled ‘Wrongly seen’. Let us return to the first part of the book, where theatre is examined not as a medium for remembering the Holocaust, but as its active component, its ‘co-participant’. At the end of the 1970s, Stanisław Lem described the theatricality of the Holocaust in shocking terms, including its connections with eschatological forms of Christian pageant – drawing attention to the libidinal aspect of the Holocaust and to the excess of spectacle written into it.3 Lem’s Provocation was discreetly passed over in silence, though today he should be read not only as the precursor of Slavoj Žižek, who in his book The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003) portrayed the Holocaust as an obscene secret of European culture founded on Christianity,4 but also as an important complement avant la lettre to Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust. The killing of people on an industrial scale devoid of precedent produced, according to Lem, a void in the experience of those who took part in it. This void was taken over by tacky notions of eschatological spectacle. Theatre turned out to be the phenomenon of European culture that enabled loss of experience to be made up for; it became a remedy for the inability to outlive the events in which one had taken part. Theatrical kitsch, so Lem explains, had crept into the ‘dramaturgy of conveyor-belt murder, although no one had intended this’. Theatre is the most autotelic of all the arts – openly or secretly, it strives towards self-exposure. Used as a pivotal metaphor, it enables in any wellplanned work of deconstruction the unmasking of various illusions, one’s own and those of other people, including terminological illusions. Therefore, in this book the orthography of such words as Annihilation, Genocide, Holocaust, Shoah, appears in a number of different variants: written with lowercase or capital letters, in English or other versions. This stems from the need to quote different sources, but not only. The variety of terms and differences in writing practices ought to direct our attention to the ideological, ethical and emotional manipulations (as well as their cultural contexts) that we all constantly perform in relation to this historical event. Even if I myself consistently use, in the original Polish version of this book, the word ‘Zagłada’ (extermination), I find myself inwardly baulking at it: at the capital letter, the striking lack of grammatical supplementation, since the Polish structure leads one to expect ‘extermination’ to be followed by some named entity (extermination of what?), an implied superiority that erases the genuine reality of the events. I am ready to compromise, however, with the rules of communication that demand a term recognizable to all readers. I therefore chose a word for the Polish version less disturbing than ‘Holokaust’, which produces in the case of Polish culture, in my opinion, a

INTRODUCTION

7

conceptual void as well as paralysis of empathy, because it sounds foreign and its etymology is difficult to decipher. In the current English version, however, the term ‘Holocaust’ will be used in preference, since this is the word established in the English language to designate the event at the centre of my reflections. It is worth remembering that Imre Kertész never called his novel Fatelessness (1975) a book about the Holocaust, because he wanted, as he himself declared, to raise the experiences described in it ‘to the level of human experience’, while the term ‘Holocaust’ he regarded as a euphemism: ‘a cowardly shallow simplification devoid of imagination’5 – although, as he recognized, he was forced to use it in many situations in order to be understood. Researching theatre as witness to the genocide of Jews, I have come across many works and texts that have left this experience totally nameless, but in so doing have made it more concrete and more intensely painful. ‘Martyrdom leaves no trace,’ Leonia Jabłonkówna wrote of Jerzy Grotowski’s play Apocalypsis cum figuris.6 The experience of excessive visibility and at the same time the effacement of all traces following the events of which one was a witness, created the theatre which I discuss in this book, along with its audience.

FIGURE I.1  View of the burning Warsaw Ghetto at the time of the ghetto uprising. Warsaw, April 1943. Photograph Karol Grabski. From the collection I ciągle widzę ich twarze (And Still I See Their Faces), edited by Lech Majewski and Anna Bikont (Warsaw: American-Polish-Israeli Shalom Foundation, 1996).

8

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

FIGURE I.2  People watching the burning ghetto. Warsaw, May 1943. Private collection of Anna Pielińska.

FIGURE I.3  Inhabitants of Warsaw observing the burning ghetto. Warsaw, 1943. Warszawska Gmina Wyznaniowa Żydowska (Jewish Community of Warsaw)/East News.

INTRODUCTION

9

FIGURE I.4  Inhabitants of Warsaw observing the burning ghetto. Warsaw, 1943. Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute).

FIGURE I.5  The Warsaw Ghetto, Żelazna Street, junction with Chłodna Street. Warszawska Gmina Wyznaniowa Żydowska (Jewish Community of Warsaw)/East News.

10

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

FIGURE I.6  Deportation of Poles and Jews under German police escort. Oświęcim 1941. From the collection I ciągle widzę ich twarze (And Still I See Their Faces), edited by Lech Majewski and Anna Bikont (Warsaw: American-Polish-Israeli Shalom Foundation, 1996).

FIGURE I.7  The Warsaw Ghetto, footbridge over Chłodna Street linking the two parts of the ghetto. Warszawska Gmina Wyznaniowa Żydowska (Jewish Community of Warsaw)/East News.

INTRODUCTION

11

FIGURE I.8  The funfair in Krasiński Square. Warsaw, April 1943. Photograph Jan Lisowski. Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute).

FIGURE I.9  The Warsaw Ghetto. A crowd of civilians watches a ‘Jewish entertainment’ organized by the Nazis. Warsaw 1941–1942. Muzeum Niepodległości (Museum of Independence)/East News.

12

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

FIGURE I.10  Photograph from the time of the German Occupation. Exact date and place unknown. Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute).

INTRODUCTION

13

FIGURE I.11  Scene of a Jew being beaten by German soldiers. Exact date and place unknown. From the collection I ciągle widzę ich twarze (And Still I See Their Faces), edited by Lech Majewski and Anna Bikont (Warsaw: American-Polish-Israeli Shalom Foundation, 1996).

FIGURE I.12  Photograph from the Second World War. Exact date and place unknown. From the collection I ciągle widzę ich twarze (And Still I See Their Faces), edited by Lech Majewski and Anna Bikont (Warsaw: American-Polish-Israeli Shalom Foundation, 1996).

14

PART ONE

The Holocaust and the theatre

16

1 The theatre of gapers

1. ‘Around noon that day numerous passers-by on Aleje Jerozolimskie indicated to one another with a glance or with their fingers a man who had aroused general excitement on the street.’1 On a sweltering July day in 1943, Jakub Gold, the protagonist of Kazimierz Brandys’s novel Samson (1948), is driven by fear from his hiding place in a cellar, where he had lived for several months in darkness. By that time, as Brandys scrupulously notes, Warsaw had already been ‘cleansed of Jews’. The sight on the street in the bright light of day of this dark, filthy, emaciated figure therefore arouses all the more excitement and curiosity. Someone spits at him, someone laughs, someone hurls an insulting word. Someone else expresses helpless compassion. At first, they don’t all recognize him as a Jew, thinking he is perhaps blind or a madman. But Jakub is aware of everything: dazzled by the sunlight and feeling bewildered, like an actor pushed onto a stage, he does not see his audience, although he naturally senses its aggressive presence. Brandys portrays various reactions of the passers-by, as if he were an omniscient narrator knowing the secrets of this momentarily enlivened crowd, although he really identifies with Jakub, paralysed by fear and incapable of observing his surroundings. The community of onlookers united by their exchange of looks and gestures is a great enigma not only to Jakub. Brandys wrote his novel immediately after the war, exposing and recording a situation in which to Polish passers-by, Jewish suffering was purely a spectacle taking place beyond an invisible, impassable boundary line and affecting beings who had already been excluded from the human community and left to their ‘fate’. The real event already appears within a framework of theatricality, which tries to justify the indifference and shameful behaviour of the ‘spectators’.

18

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

19

20

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

21

FIGURES 1.1–1.12 Frames from Andrzej Wajda’s film Samson. Production: Zespół Filmowy Droga, Studio Filmowe Kadr, Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych, Łódź. Poland, 1961.

22

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Were we to refer to the famous example of the Street Scene as the most basic model of epic theatre, as analysed by Bertolt Brecht (1950),2 everything in our case would have to be reversed. There is no one who could explain to the audience – like Brecht’s zealous narrator – the sense of the street incident. Reconstruct it and analyse it. However, in this case, the ‘sense’ is clear to everyone, as is the inevitable fate of the Jew driven onto the street by fear. The true mystery here remains the audience, united by a wave of shared energy, a secret code of understanding, the conspiracy of distance. The audience is as if divided, diverse in its reactions, yet at the same time united, animated (not to say – roused), bound by a common impulse. This precise scene will remain long in the collective memory as a situation devoid of explanatory meta-commentary, uninscribed into any narrative order, left to the law of unconscious repetition, and therefore seized upon by theatre. Brecht, in constructing his model of the street scene, accepted several self-evident assumptions. First: the street scene is the repetition – within the framework of a consciously constructed dramaturgy – of something that happened a moment ago. Second: the narrator has clearly seen the event, has at his disposal analytical tools (for example, class consciousness) capable of illuminating the causes of the incident, and manages to distance himself from his own ‘experiences’ as a witness. Third: the audience is innocent; therefore, the circumstances in which the spectators, fearful maybe of being accused of participation, might have had an interest in the truth about the incident remaining concealed, are not taken into consideration. In the case of the street incident described by Brandys, we cannot apply these assumptions. It cannot therefore be repeated according to Brecht’s prescription. Raul Hilberg expressed the experience of the Holocaust in terms closely related to the phenomenology of spectacle, defining the three main positions of active and passive participants as those of perpetrators, victims and bystanders. He tried to establish the extent of their awareness as well as – most importantly – the degree to which events were visible at the time of the persecution and extermination of Jews. The most hidden participants were the perpetrators, the most visible – the victims: ‘the victims were perpetually exposed. They were identifiable and countable at every turn.’3 The scene from Brandys’s novel confirms Hilberg’s observations. There are no obvious perpetrators, while the victim is clearly visible, though he himself has difficulty seeing. Exposing the fact of visibility points in turn to the inescapable presence of witnesses. The invisibility of the perpetrators, on the other hand, allows for various ways in which the incident may be ‘sacralized’, inscribed into systems of necessity, destiny, human helplessness, in relation to ‘higher powers’. The matrix of ‘tragedy’ emerges of its own accord. ‘The Lord God Himself didn’t help, but you would have liked to,’ a woman is told when she expresses her timid and feeble desire to help Jakub,4 to include him in so doing in the community of spectators, and thereby violate the ‘tragic’ theatricality of the entire

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

23

incident. Within the confines of the described situation, Brandys carries out a stage director’s radical intervention: he allows an audience to be seen, including its libidinal engagement in the creation of attitudes of indifference and hostility. Easy disruption of ties with an excluded and persecuted person brings with it a series of consequences. When it is impossible to gain physical distance from the watched sufferings, a psychological distance appears. As Cynthia Ozick explains in her text on the ‘ordinary’ observers of the Holocaust, ‘indifference is not so much a gesture of looking away – of choosing to be passive – as it is an active disinclination to feel’.5 The perpetrators expect the ‘bystanders’ to go on leading ‘normal’ lives, and so the latter have to work out a series of self-justifications, so as not to perceive themselves as the ones who refused help.6 Going on living according to previously held ethical and social principles inevitably acquires aspects of theatricality: abiding by former standards alters their sense, and becomes a strategy for performing forgetfulness, not only for performing community. By the same token, the bystanders cease to be reliable witnesses to the events which they have seen. They are no longer spectators but have become actors. In using the word ‘witness’, Hilberg has in mind the passive observer; therefore, he employs the designation bystander and not witness. ‘Bystander’ describes more precisely the position of the passive witness, and even evaluates it morally. A ‘witness’, on the other hand, could also be a victim or a perpetrator. Or – according to more radical formulations – there are no witnesses at all to the Holocaust,7 because a traumatic event of this kind is based on the loss of experience, leaving in its wake the impossibility of coming to terms with reality through the act of bearing witness. Loss of any stable knowledge for understanding the event in which one is a participant also encompasses the bystanders. The attempt to precisely define and separate the three positions can therefore lead to their surprising intermixing – or rather standardization – in a common feeling of loss of reality linked to the trauma. Clear distribution of roles, even though this may seem historically unproblematic and ethically correct (if only as an answer to the Nazi legislation that sought to identify as precisely as possible victims for persecution and extermination), constantly comes up against the barriers created by the very act of bearing witness to past events. Hilberg himself confirms this in the afterword to the Polish translation of his book: ‘In the years 1933–1945 perpetrators, victims and bystanders made up separate groups, and each one of them perceived events from their own perspective, playing their own appropriate role in them. However, despite all the differences that divided them, their experiences and behaviour had certain features in common.’8 In the first place, Hilberg mentions incomplete knowledge of the events in which all sides were involved. The incomplete knowledge that Hilberg writes about does not

24

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

necessarily overlap, however, with the loss of experience indicated by researchers of trauma. The first of these phenomena should be located within the discourse of history, the second in the discourse of memory. This does not mean, however, that they have to be mutually exclusive: loss of experience can produce the impression of incomplete knowledge, while incomplete knowledge can intensify or weaken the traumatic loss of experience. In the case of the position of the bystanders, however, we cannot overlook the fact of their generally over-eager reconciliation to the inevitability of what is going on. From this moment on, history becomes negative history – not an account of heroic deeds but a virtual stage of deeds not undertaken. Michael R. Marrus calls the history of the Holocaust, a history of ‘inaction, indifference, insensitivity’.9 Knowing that people ought to have behaved otherwise does not entitle us, however, so Marrus claims, to morally evaluate them, but rather to analyse their states of mind.

2. In the 1990s, Feliks Tych researched a large collection of Polish diaries and memoirs of the Second World War looking for evidence of the Holocaust. Tych tried to recover in them the experience of Polish witnesses. The material proved to be highly diverse, but one conclusion emerges most strongly from his reflections: Were we to ask what dominates in the texts I have read, then the answer would have to be, from the point of view of our analysis, that the dominant thing is what is not there. The authors of the majority of the analysed texts either made no note of the phenomenon of the Holocaust, or they did not perceive its civilizational exceptionality. For some, it was merely an episode. Many did realize, however, that they were confronting an exceptional crime, totally alien to the civilization in which they had grown up and its moral canons.10 Following on from Tych’s conclusions, one could risk the assertion, crucial to my own reflections, that eagerness not to accept the position of observer, to deny it, became the strongest experience of Polish witnesses to the Holocaust – if, of course, we accept that it was an event sufficiently visible to Polish society; for Tych, there was no question about this. Feliks Tych is naturally aware of the various reasons behind this eloquent and dominant fact of the inadequate recording of the Holocaust in Polish written testimonies: ‘sometimes it is fear that the text would be discovered by the Germans, sometimes an expression of helplessness, sometimes a symptom of indifference, sometimes self-defence against fully admitting to oneself the enormity of the crime committed against Jews.’11 Among the reactions to the

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

25

Holocaust recorded in diaries and memoirs, the most typical is dismay at one’s own helplessness; on the other hand, according to Tych, the attitudes most passed over in silence were, for obvious reasons, those of open hostility towards the victims. Despite this, it is possible to reconstruct from the written testimonies a characteristic mechanism of mounting aggression on the part of the observers towards the victims as the persecutions intensified. This aggression was a result of the breaking of ties of empathy with the victims, becoming the order of the day and enabling one to disregard one’s own helplessness and actively justify it. ‘We will probably never find out, in how many cases the disappearance of the Jewish theme from a large number of wartime memoirs resulted from complete indifference to the Jewish fate, and in how many from a desire to stifle some traumatic experience, or from moral discomfort.’12 Even if we have to resign ourselves to the unresolvability of this conclusion, it indicates clear limitations to applying the methodology of research on trauma to accounts of the experience of Polish witnesses to the Holocaust. This is particularly the case since we must take into consideration also the potential indifference of Polish society. It is difficult, however, to definitively resolve whether the fact of watching someone else’s suffering – in forms so extreme and before then unknown in the experience of the observers – was subject to the phenomenon of traumatic paralysis. Lawrence L. Langer includes among testimonies of people who survived the Holocaust the account of a Hungarian Jesuit who became the witness of one of its countless episodes. Through a hole in the wooden fence surrounding a railroad station from where Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, the Jesuit sees an open wagon packed with people: a man who asks for something (maybe water) is dragged out of the wagon and beaten up by an SS guard; at this moment, the man peeping through the hole in the fence runs away, the sequence is interrupted, and the fate of the tortured man remains for the observer forever unknown. The psychoanalyst13 accompanying the recording of this testimony immediately discovers the point of greatest denial when he asks the Jesuit why either then, or later, he said nothing to anyone about this incident – why he denied his experience as a witness. Since it was not the incident itself, according to the therapist, that provoked denial, but the situation of being an observer: the obscene circumstances of watching someone else’s humiliation through a hole in a fence, the embarrassing state of passivity, a feeling of impotence – in other words, the status of a curious gaper. The witness’s long silence, which followed this question, is preserved on the video tape. ‘Suddenly before our eyes he is wrestling with the deep memory of his own inaction, which common memory clearly disapproves of today and he is trying inwardly to explain to himself before he can explain it to us – and so far, he does not have an explanation.’14 Langer analyses the breaking down of the safe ‘staged-ness’ of that situation during the giving of

26

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

testimony: the fence and a suitable distance from the observed event cease to protect the observer; the event eliminates the distance, consumes the observer, relocates him from his hiding place to the very centre of the scene, and brings to a crisis the notions of man that had hitherto guided his life. Such were the irremovable results of being in the position of an observer of the Holocaust and accepting the rule of theatricality (according to which a witness ceases to be a witness and becomes a spectator, and therefore doesn’t have to take action). Langer sees only two resolutions to this crisis: either hitherto existing visions of humanity succumb to total breakdown, or they are consolidated in the form of delusions, sustained despite the reality of lived experience. He does not explain, however, what inclined the Hungarian Jesuit to bear witness. We do not find out either why Langer chose precisely this testimony (the only testimony of an observer analysed by him) in order to discuss the position of the bystanders. One can only surmise that the fact that it involved a priest, a representative of the Catholic Church, was not without significance to him. As Elaine Scarry asserts in her book The Body in Pain, it is not only the person upon whom pain is inflicted who loses the linguistic tools to describe their situation: the same is true of the witness to the torture – the stable frames for perceiving the world succumb to weakening and frustration. Pain, before totally destroying the powers of language, colonizes them. The lack of appropriate descriptive tools makes a witness of someone else’s suffering prepared to accept the descriptions provided by authorities or ‘priests of an angry God’.15 Thanks to someone else’s pain, authority justifies its ideologies, filling them with the reality of someone else’s experience, while the ‘priests of an angry God’ represent a pain event that the human mind is incapable of assimilating as a manifestation of the ‘higher morality’ of the divine order.

3. When we apply Hilberg’s triad of participants in the Holocaust to Polish witnesses, a vision of Polish post-war culture as one of ‘witnesses’, ‘observers’ or simply ‘gapers’ becomes immediately apparent. Czesław Miłosz’s poem ‘Campo di Fiori’ remains paradigmatic in this respect, written under the direct impression of Polish indifference to the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. But we find this same motif of Polish witnesses to the extermination of the Jews in the stories of Tadeusz Borowski, in Zofia Nałkowska’s novella ‘Przy torze kolejowym’ (‘By the Railway Track’) from her Medallions, in Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Wielki Tydzień (Holy Week), Seweryna Szmaglewska’s Dymy nad Birkenau (Smoke over Birkenau), Stefan Otwinowski’s play Wielkanoc (Easter), Aleksander Ford’s film Ulica Graniczna (Border Street), in the volume of journalistic articles Martwa fala (Dead Wave) edited by

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

27

Andrzejewski, and also subtly resonant in Tadeusz Różewicz’s first book of poetry – to mention only works written still during wartime or just after the war, under the direct impact of events, or immediately following them. Literature, film and journalism were governed by the ubiquitous procedure of eyewitness account: ‘I saw it’, ‘we saw it’. Michał Głowiński associates this immediate post-war phenomenon of ‘hot testimonies’ with ‘the need to express sympathy, outrage, shock’.16 Automatic identification of this kind with the position of the witness-observer is highly justified from the historical point of view; it was imposed by the perpetrators of the Holocaust themselves, and simultaneously by ethical obligations towards the victims (although in social practice, such obligation was subject to rather too much flexible negotiation). Under the formidable pressure of collective emotions, political ideology and cultural reworking, this paradigm of the culture of eyewitness testimony succumbed to many deformations, and as a consequence – to denial. And in the still longer perspective – to exclusion. Let us try to assemble the arguments. Polish post-war culture connected with the Holocaust was not created exclusively from the position of the observers. To make such an assumption, even if it is motivated by the morally noble attempt to come to terms with one’s own collective attitude of passivity, results in the exclusion of other testimonies and marginalizes those phenomena of Polish culture that should be included among the Jewish testimonies. We can therefore point either to the inadequate assimilation of many crucial phenomena arising within the space of Polish culture, or to a total unawareness of Jewish experience inscribed into many outstanding works of art. Playing typical roles in the ‘work’ of the Holocaust, as mentioned by Hilberg, was subject to various disturbances. This is the first thing to note. Second, we should critically examine all deformations with which Polish testimonies to the Holocaust are marked, if only in order to be able to also relate to the accusations of antisemitism experienced by many Polish writers (especially if artistic works were read through the prism of Western Holocaust discourses and evaluated as antisemitic because of the nationality of their authors – as happened with Andrzejewski’s Holy Week, Andrzej Wajda’s film Korczak and Artur Żmijewski’s video Berek). Finally, third, it should be emphasized that the position of ‘witness’ became in Polish culture a risky stance, subject to different processes of denial and various strategies of encoding. In postwar Poland therefore, it was often unclear who was bearing witness and from what position; it was difficult to grasp the sources of the disturbances to which an act of witness was subjected; and finally – the position of witness underwent gradual denial. In addition, we should indicate at once that the reasons for this silence were complex, and by no means unambiguous. They could well have been evidence of indifference towards the Jewish fate, but they could also have been prompted by discretion, or simply been an attempt to protect from further stigmatization people who had been through hell.

28

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Polish literature (and more broadly, Polish culture) brought with it abundant testimony to victims of the Holocaust. And also to victims who thanks to their ‘good appearance’, the help of friends, their own resourcefulness and courage, as well as to lucky coincidence, could have found themselves among the group of witness-observers, observing events precisely from this position, while experiencing them entirely differently at the same time because of their total identification with the victims. Polish culture, including post-war, was after all created jointly by assimilated Jews, Poles with Jewish roots, which means that trying to capture a monolithic perspective is not possible and that different factors for denying the past should be taken into consideration – not only a feeling of guilt on the part of the passive observers, but also the need, for example, to overcome memory of one’s own humiliation. In the case of literary texts, this generally led more or less directly to the appearance of authors specifically living on the cusp of two cultures and observing the Holocaust from two positions, which enabled Jan Błoński to identify a post-war ‘Jewish school in Polish literature’. Not, however, without a feeling of discomfort. Since Błoński was well aware that Jewish experience was often ‘obscured or glossed over’ by authors themselves: Researching the participation of Jews in the creation of Polish culture is not however, strictly speaking, the task of the literary historian. He ought rather to employ an historian of culture. Meanwhile, I am overlooking the fact that inquiry into who was a Jew and how much he was a Jew, has no good tradition in Europe. More importantly, in literature, a work counts more than the fate of its author. Jewish experience (like any experience) must be visibly recorded in it, even if partially or indirectly. In Polish literature, novels sometimes appear, where only a reader conversant with the period can properly recognize the milieu or social mentality of the heroes. This is the case, for example, with Adam Ważyk’s Mity rodzinne (Family Myths, 1938) or Stanisław Lem’s Wysoki Zamek (Highcastle, 1966). A researcher does not have to share, obviously, the author’s discretion. It is hard, however, to examine such accounts alongside Julian Stryjkowski’s Głosy w ciemności (Voices in the Dark, 1956), whose exoticism is not only shown but also named.17 If we transfer Błoński’s reservations to the theatre, the situation stands out even more dramatically: theatre is an art that is mediated many times over; the ‘obscuring or glossing over’ of Jewish experience is performed as if by the very nature of the stage medium; while investigating ‘who was and who was how much a Jew’ may seem even more inappropriate, threatening and unjustified. This does not alter the fact, however, that in attempting to inscribe Polish theatre into the framework of the culture of witness, we must take into consideration the differentiated, variable and often masked

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

29

position of the witness, which without elementary biographical knowledge is difficult to achieve. Błoński, albeit with reservations, consents to this in the end, pointing (after Aleksander Hertz) to the model of American culture, where public acknowledgement of one’s own roots and historical experiences had given rise to a uniquely rich blend of cultural phenomena. An important conclusion emerges from Błoński’s reflections: Polish literature associated thematically with the Holocaust cannot be exclusively positioned on the side of the testimony of observers, yet neither is it possible to always locate the position of the narrator unambiguously at an appropriate point in Hilberg’s triad. The positions of witness and victim often overlap, which had led to ideological practices – rightly condemned today – of appropriating Jewish suffering as the suffering of Poles (especially since Polishness in post-war Poland was often defined according to ethnic, nationalistic and not cultural or consciousness criteria). This does not alter the fact that Polish culture contains two distinct and separate poles: on the one hand, there are attempts to confront the ‘suffering and death of the Other’, while on the other, there is ‘the direct experience of those condemned to death’.18 Polish literature not only brings itself to perform acts of sympathy towards someone else’s suffering, it also expresses the experience of the Holocaust from its very epicentre, from the position of the victims. This fissure, which created the phenomenon of two separate languages, became the deep and fundamental experience of Polish culture following the Holocaust. As Władysław Panas puts it: Through the work of these writers [of Jewish origin], Polish literature opens up directly toward the Jewish perspective on the extermination. It expresses the truth about the Shoah without the need to ‘feel oneself into’ the situation of the Other, without the necessity of engaging the imagination, erudition, and so on. The direct experience of those condemned to death. That is one internal pole of our literature.19 This same pole also exists in the sphere of Polish theatre. Polish theatre after 1945, for several decades, was created by artists (directors, playwrights, actors, scenographers) who had been direct witnesses of the Holocaust or were Holocaust survivors. I shall quote one, especially eloquent, example: that of Henryk Grynberg, who appeared as a child on location in Aleksander Ford’s 1948 film Border Street, enunciating one issue: ‘It’s those SS dogs … !’, and then in 1950 on the stage of the Teatr Powszechny (Universal Theatre) in Łódź as a Jewish boy in a performance of Leon Kruczkowski’s play Niemcy (Germans). ‘In Łódź, women in the auditorium sometimes fainted when I recounted: “They had already killed all of them, mama, grandpa, little Esther, I alone still …”’20 Several years later, Grynberg made his debut at the Teatr Żydowski (Jewish Theatre) in Warsaw, introduced by actress and director Ida Kamińska, in Szymon Diamant’s play W noc zimową (On a Winter’s Night), which tells of a Jewish boy who had

30

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

hidden among Polish peasants. In his Życie osobiste (Private Life, 1979), Grynberg writes about his part in this production as a situation of bearing witness to his personal experiences: ‘I was not an actor and I didn’t have to be one. I did not play a part and did not have to play a part. It played itself within me. I walked towards the footlights, stretched out my arms in the direction of the black void, opened wide my eyes and mouth – and told my story.’21 We might ask whether it was these ‘acting’ experiences that enabled Grynberg to frame in Żydowska wojna (The Jewish War, 1965) his own experiences from the time of the Holocaust in metaphors of theatre, or whether it was the other way around: that childhood experience was the impulse to join the Jewish Theatre? We can say that Grynberg’s case is extreme and exceptional. However, we might also conjecture that this kind of situation of bearing witness shaped many theatrical performances in undisclosed yet implicit ways. A surprising example may be the avant-garde production of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s play Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen) created by Cricot 2, which forces us to pose the question as to what extent Tadeusz Kantor reconstructed in this production his own position as a witness to the Holocaust, at the same time rendering impossible its deciphering and inclusion in any order of collective memory. The problem of bearing witness also affects theatre critics, privileged by their right as the public voice of the spectators. Many were Holocaust survivors (Jan Kott, Leonia Jabłonkówna, Bogdan Wojdowski, Roman Szydłowski, Andrzej Wróblewski); some of their theatre reviews (even of performances that had no direct reference to the Holocaust) can be read today as evidence of their experiences connected with the Holocaust.22 Applying the biographical formula, however, encounters a series of difficulties and obstacles. For example, the fact of their Jewish background was not revealed by many artists and critics (the reasons were complex: a sense of being completely assimilated, fear of antisemitism, the need to forget traumatic exclusion from the community), and by the same token, their wartime experiences were often unknown or known only fragmentarily. What is more, the strategy of bearing witness through theatrical performance, or through writing a commentary about it, does not only apply to artists and critics of Jewish origin directly affected by the Holocaust. Does the lack of adequate documentation, however, or fear of undue attention to biography in art, justify the exclusion of such widespread and painful experience from reflections about Polish post-war theatre? Especially since it affects the whole society of witnesses, and therefore also embraces the audience. Precisely for this reason, Polish theatre after 1945 became a venue for the circulation of affects linked to historical experiences and hidden cultural transactions, in which images of the Holocaust were subjected to various procedures of appropriation and deformation. It is difficult to point, in my opinion, to an equivalent phenomenon in post-war European art. The phenomenon was determined especially by the audience, prepared to carry on a complicated game with its own denials, with areas of forgetfulness, but also to drastically

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

31

break down defence mechanisms. When investigating the theatre as a medium for recording memory of the Holocaust as an irrefutable assumption, the existence should be accepted of complex processes of traumatic repetition, therapeutic transference, defensive denial, in which all participants in the staged event that is theatrical performance were entangled. This complicated situation is clearly visible, for example, in the reception of the intentionally political drama by Peter Weiss entitled Die Ermittlung (The Investigation, 1965) about the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963– 1965), which was to expose the still unbroken ties between the Nazi past and the capitalist reality of contemporary West Germany. Staged in 1966 by director Erwin Axer at the Teatr Współczesny (Contemporary Theatre) in Warsaw as Dochodzenie, it provoked, on the one hand, deep emotional shock amongst the audience, but also made visible, on the other, typical defensive mechanisms operating in the field of Polish culture, which could be called after Freud a case of déja raconté (something already recounted and heard earlier, and therefore universally known and reworked). Almost all the reviewers agreed: we learn nothing new from this play (we being: we – the audience; we – Poles). The Warsaw production exposed the defensive mechanisms lurking behind this attitude.23 People were moved not so much by what the witnesses in Weiss’s play had to say, as by the state of paralysis in which the witnesses found themselves in Axer’s production – the uncompromising visibility of this state of numbness being recognized by the audience as their mirror image. In looking at the specific characteristics of Polish theatre, revived after 1945 within a society of witnesses to the Holocaust, we have to accept as an uncontested fact the existence of social memory of particular concrete events: the extermination of the communities of Jewish towns and shtetls, the creation and liquidation of the ghettos, the concealment or denunciation of acquaintances and strangers, scenes of public humiliation and death. We should also recognize as axiomatic their sufficient and sometimes total visibility, and as a consequence, the very strong and reactive sensibility to all attempts to refer to this memory, which, especially in the conditions of the ‘here and now’ of theatrical performance, always possessed a momentous emotional significance, shaping the reception of the performance, but also erecting obstacles to its reception. Forms of representation of past events rendered too historically concrete often condemned theatrical productions to marginalization: since we already know everything about it, why are they telling us again? A lack of sufficient empathy in Polish society condemned to failure almost all theatrical performances that directly referred to the extermination of the Jews. Let us remind ourselves that no play arose in the Polish language, whose staging would have aroused such emotion and such discussion as Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy in Germany, The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett in the United States, or Aharon Megged’s Hanna Senesh in Israel. Leon Schiller’s production, staged at

32

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

the Teatr Wojska Polskiego (Polish Army Theatre) in Łódź immediately after the war, of Stefan Otwinowski’s drama Wielkanoc (Easter), which tells of the extermination of Jews in one small Polish provincial town, was received with icy indifference, even though it had been the director’s intention to appeal to the empathy of spectators. Several decades later, in 1989, a similar fate was to greet the drama Słuchaj, Izraelu! (Hear, O Israel!) by Jerzy S. Sito about the Warsaw Ghetto, directed by Jerzy Jarocki at the Stary Teatr (Old Theatre) in Kraków. On the other hand, all forms of deformation, messages strongly mediatized or encoded, operating with tropes of displacement and condensation, with mechanisms of déjà vu, would provoke in the auditorium a deep and intense emotional response. The zealous confirmation by reviewers of the flop of Jerzy Jarocki and players of the Stary Teatr in connection with their production of Hear, O Israel! contained a strong undercurrent of ressentiment. Since Polish ressentiment in relation to the Holocaust spoke out in full and unashamed voice in these reviews,24 there is no reason to wager that it did not go hand in hand with its general reception. Yet one image provoked deathly silence in the auditorium, evidence of which we find in almost all the reviews: In the Prologue, the setting is the interior of the Nożyk Synagogue in Warsaw. On the eve of the Day of Atonement a handful of Jews gather to recite the prayers. The stage is covered in black cloth, on which are written in Hebrew letters the Jewish names of anonymous victims of the Holocaust. In the middle of the stage hangs a curtain concealing the Ark of the Covenant. Across the centre of the set runs a wooden walkway. At the back, the synagogue’s enormous doors. When it transpires that a tenth Jew is lacking in order for the prayers to be recited, the tsaddik orders a dead man to be brought from the cemetery. Then the doors are opened and the black curtain on the proscenium is rent, while across the wooden walkway there flows a host of dead Jews in white burial shrouds, with prayer shawls over their heads. Tens, hundreds glide across. There could be thousands, millions. This procession goes on and on, as if it would never end. With this uncanny scene, Jarocki visualizes the difficult to grasp dimensions of the crime.25 The genuine power of theatre is revealed in only one scene, when an unending file of Jews walks across a gangway suspended above the set; with white prayer shawls thrown over their heads, they disappear one after one into the darkness, into the ‘night and fog’, and the auditorium fills with singing from the synagogue. Then the singing breaks off, the gangway is empty and the theatre falls silent. This is no longer mere stylization; this gangway is not the one from Swinarski’s production of Forefathers’ Eve. A similar gangway was built by the Germans during the war in Warsaw. Jews incarcerated in the Ghetto walked across it,

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

33

above a street belonging to the ‘Aryan’ part of the city. Someone who did not see it, will certainly never understand the mechanism of the crime that was taking place there. Now here, in the theatre, for a moment, we can feel the same as those who watched the people condemned to death crossing above them. For a moment of such hush in the Stary auditorium, it was worth addressing the most difficult of topics.26 I would like to draw attention to the moment in which the legendary stage device from Konrad Swinarski’s production of Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), performed in the Stary Teatr for more than ten years following its premiere in 1973, is transformed in Jan Kłossowicz’s review into an after-image of the Warsaw Ghetto. Behind this sudden act of another vision stands the individual memory of the critic, who saw and remembered the footbridge linking two parts of the Ghetto (or perhaps he had seen it only in photographs). Jarocki’s dramatic idea was universally interpreted as an attempt to inscribe Holocaust memory into the ritualistic and theatrical framework of Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, a Romantic drama regarded in Poland as a foundation myth of an enslaved society struggling for independence (hence the reference to Swinarski’s production, still well remembered by the audience). The idea proved affectively lifeless: it did not provoke the objection of the spectators; nor did it influence their greater emotional engagement. The safe situation of the audience in Jarocki’s production was well captured by Agnieszka Baranowska’s review: ‘It is also not a production that is controversial, like certain books on Jewish topics that have appeared recently in Poland, because its account relies on the historical layer, on the opposition between executioner and victim, between Germans and Jews gathered in the Ghetto. We, Poles, are in the audience.’27 ‘As usual!’ one feels tempted to say. This clear distribution of roles reassures the conscience, and, as emerges from Kłossowicz’s review, only the reference to the denied and forgotten visibility of the Holocaust prompted by the device transplanted by Jarocki from the Romantic theatre (the overhead walkway) made a strong impression. The above example teaches us that theatre should not be excluded from the range of practices bearing witness. And in addition, that the act of bearing witness does not have to happen only on stage but may also be seen in the mechanisms of reception (as in Kłossowicz’s review). By way of a hypothesis, I would like to introduce a model of affective influence, which shaped many theatrical phenomena in Polish post-war culture. In this model, the refusal of empathy (‘I’ve heard it all before’) turns into an experience of shock (‘I saw it!’). The source of the shock is not the traumatic event itself, but recognition of one’s indifference towards it. As in Freud’s analyses of dreams about the dead, the most shocking message conveyed by this experience may be formulated as follows: It eventually occurred to me that this alteration between life and death [of the dead person in the dream] is intended to represent indifference on the

34

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

part of the dreamer. (‘It’s all the same to me whether he’s alive or dead.’) This indifference is, of course, not real but merely desired; it is intended to help the dreamer to repudiate his very intense and often contradictory emotional attitudes and it thus becomes a dream-representation of his ambivalence.28 To the rituals of mourning elaborated by Polish culture (especially Romantic culture erected on dramatic structures and theatrical forms), recognition of this kind constitutes a real threat; it can totally paralyse their functioning. Therefore, a theatrical spectacle must accept as the basis of its efficacious, affective influence, the spectator’s own witness to his (or her) own indifference towards the shocking event of Jewish death and extermination. This mechanism of shattered indifference and liberated shock may be traced in many outstanding post-war Polish theatrical productions. Jerzy Jedlicki, pointing out the return of literature of witness in the 1960s, described a process linked to it, of the disintegration of any kind of common symbolic space capable of encompassing all war experiences (even if we were to remain solely in the sphere of victims).29 Any unifying ‘we’ had become a fiction. Even if Jewish experience is revealed, and not ‘obscured or glossed over’, it cannot strip bare its conflicted position within Polish history and Polish culture. If it is to be expressed openly, it should have a ‘universal’ character. It has to be performed within the bounds of a carefully prepared ideological contract. If it provokes conflict, then its historical concreteness should be effaced. The degree to which one’s own dissimilarity may be expressed is subject to rigorous negotiations and restrictions. We can say immediately that this situation of partial denial and ideological restriction was extraordinarily favourable to theatre. During the phase of ‘hot testimonies’ immediately after the war, theatre was in fact silent; the 1960s, on the other hand, saw many important productions, which address the topic of the Holocaust sometimes head-on, though often at the limits of visibility and utterability. Or also – which is most interesting – within the field of total visibility, but at the cost of referentiality, i.e. of losing the essential frame of reference. This mechanism may be summarized as follows: we know not what we are seeing. The attitude of complete denial or concealment, which intensified with the years, of the position of witness to someone else’s suffering has a complex genealogy, which can be described here only in the most general terms. The first powerful impulse sprang from the need to direct society’s energy towards the work of rebuilding the country, which came at the price of remembering the wartime past. Socialist realism was not simply an ideological, top-down manœuvre; it was also endowed with authentic social energy, usually generated by various mechanisms of denial and imposed forgetting. This is why it is so difficult to differentiate between what is symptomatic and what is ideological. We could say that Polish socialist realism had a solid, libidinal, social support base; it was not solely

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

35

an imposed ideological construction, the realization of a doctrine alien to Polish culture. However, it is worth noting immediately that Polish postwar culture arose from the interaction of a number of different ideologies, shaped not only by state institutions but also by the Catholic Church and the political opposition. In actual artistic practice, not even socialist realism was able to achieve ideological uniformity. Another impulse for denial emanated from the attempt to reconstruct traditional models of Polish culture, especially those inspired by Romantic myths: at stake above all was the rescuing of their narcissistic defence mechanism. The first post-war paradigm of the literature of witness, as mentioned above, opened up Polish culture to someone else’s experience, to another’s suffering, exposed the dissimilarity in Polish and Jewish fates during the Occupation, challenged Polish society to examine its guilt and demonstrate sympathy. In addition, this appeal was directed at a society that had suffered intensely during the war and had genuine reasons for identifying with the position of victim. The model of cultural victimhood shaped by Romanticism demanded instead something quite contrary: suppression of this experience, concealment of the other’s suffering within one’s own or universal experience. The eagerness for masochistic revindication of Romantic myths paradoxically consolidated and, as it were, intensified the position of victim, setting in motion a dubious dialectic wherein any gesture of self-abasement required moral recognition – and by the same token, affirmation and sublimation. The narcissistic stance was therefore supported by masochistic inclinations. The paradigm of the culture of witness underwent denial under pressure from the masochistic-narcissistic Romantic paradigm. This process was fundamentally examined and brought to light in his theatre, by Jerzy Grotowski. We should emphasize the existence in the 1960s of a powerful tension between a mocking trend in Polish culture and ideological attempts to revitalize Polish nationalism – mutually goading each other on. Neither the mocking artists nor the nationalist politicians were interested in unmasking the historical baggage feeding their own attitudes. In the derisive trend, the self-torment of victims condemned to parody their own collective sufferings was exhibited; in Communist Party nationalism, on the other hand, the German perpetrators of crimes committed during the war on Polish soil were foregrounded, thereby sustaining the vitality of collective ressentiments, the currency of injuries inflicted, and the fact of insufficient compensation. A self-perpetuating closed circuit was established (advantageous to the defensive mechanisms of the collective libido): mocking art was attacked by nationalist circles among the Party agitators, while nationalist myths released into social circulation were subjected to merciless unmasking by artists, though in reality both sides worked to keep alive the collective mythology. Within this closed circuit, there was no place for the experience of bystanders. The object of profoundest denial was the position of witness

36

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

to someone else’s suffering; an experience that had become part of Polish society’s recent past was therefore negated and suppressed. As Jedlicki explains, the literature of witness brings a vision of a ‘world without guarantees’ which finds no ‘safeguard in transcendence or in the laws of history, or in legal codices’.30 Therefore, over and above all other factors calling into question the culture of bearing witness, Jedlicki mentions the denial of its recipients: it was because of them that this ‘communicative situation’ came to be interrupted; they were the ones refusing to listen to the testimonies.

4. Proof that precisely the position of eyewitness and the responsibilities flowing from it, and not just specific content of collective memory, underwent denial in Polish public life may be found in the Polish reaction to Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, as well as the article by Jan Błoński entitled ‘Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’.31 Both happened in the second half of the 1980s, forty years after the end of the war. Both prompted an unexpected reaction, unseating the established lines of social and political division (official and underground circulations of published materials, official political power and the underground, the Party and the Church, the home and émigré communities). Lanzmann’s film provoked such a powerful shock in Poland mainly for one reason: Polish society was confronted once again (similarly to immediately after the war) with its own position as witness to the Holocaust, taken aback by the vividness of remembered images as well as by their terrifying content. It would seem that a significant part of that society had wanted to believe that the work of forgetting had been irreversibly accomplished. Lanzmann gave a voice to eyewitnesses, whose testimonies no one in Poland or in emigration had dared to listen to after the war. He himself, as a result of his visit to Poland and conversations with witnesses, felt very strongly the actual presence of the Holocaust – its lasting presence in people, places, landscapes, houses and objects. This confrontation with Polish observers of the Holocaust determined the final conception of the film, the need to return to the places of the Holocaust and its witnesses who were still alive. In the film, the position of eyewitness was revealed to the Polish public in a horrifying and obscene form. Lanzmann set before the camera people whose memory had been condemned within the framework of Polish culture to total absence in the public space. Therefore no one in Poland dared to express any gratitude to the French director for rescuing this fragment of Polish experience, which without the film Shoah might have sunk forever into oblivion. Lanzmann was perfectly well aware of this; this is how he describes his first meeting with Henryk Gawkowski, a train driver employed on the transports to Treblinka:

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

37

He had neither forgotten nor recovered from the horrifying past in which he had played a role, and he found it entirely just that he should have to answer any demands made on him at any hour. In fact, I was the first person to ever question him; I had arrived in the night like a ghost, no one before me having troubled to hear what he had to say.32 Without the Polish reaction to Lanzmann’s work, followed by the Jewish reaction to the Polish reactions, Błoński’s famous article, originally published in the weekly newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny in 1987, would surely not have arisen, at least not in the form it did. Błoński may have been especially acutely struck by the vision, suggested in the film, of Poland as a country tainted by past crime. He explained how the positions of eyewitness and passive observer of the Holocaust continued to define Polish society, while in its long-standing denial effective for so many years, he perceived a sense of guilt secretly at work. He realized that one had to go back to the beginning, to Czesław Miłosz’s poems, and pose once again the question: ‘Have you looked with acquiescence at the death of Jews?’ Błoński referred to two poems by Miłosz. The poem ‘Campo di Fiori’ describes an historical event: Polish indifference to the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto. The poem ‘Biedny chrześcijanin patrzy na getto’ (‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’) exposes the moral and psychological effects of that indifference; the position of the silent and hiding witnesses. By returning to these issues, Błoński indicated the task that Polish society and Polish culture would undertake over the course of the next two decades, albeit with resistance, tempestuously, not without anger and ressentiment: the recovery of the position of eyewitness to the Holocaust. During these two coming decades, attempts would be made not only to answer the question as to whether Poles watched calmly as Jews went to their deaths, but also: what did they really see? Błoński knew that this process would be painful for Polish society. Therefore, he included it in advance, as it were, within the experience of sublimity that informs several of its constituent elements: unconditional recognition of the facts and admission of one’s own guilt (even if the historical circumstances might have justified such a mass phenomenon as social passivity towards someone else’s suffering); confirmation of the Christian foundations of Polish collective life; and the fundamentally sacral gesture of collective cleansing. It was Miłosz’s poetry that supplied the language for reviving witness to the Holocaust – Błoński deliberately set the speech register thus high for the confession of guilt. This variant of taking upon oneself the position of witness to the Holocaust was to shelter Poles from Lanzmann’s drastic lesson, from the obscenity of remembered images. Błoński did not revive questions about the visibility of the Holocaust (he recognized it as an obvious fact, historically documented and closed); he enquired rather about the possibility of collective catharsis: ‘The desecration of the Polish soil has taken place and we have not yet discharged our duty

38

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

of seeking expiation.’33 If, in the last sentence of his article, he mentions the ‘duty to face up to our duty of viewing our past truthfully’, then the act of ‘viewing’ would seem to have a solely metaphorical and ethical meaning. It turned out to be impossible, however, either to maintain such a high register of speech, or to shelter Polish society from the less metaphysical visibility of past events. It is hard not to ask how we are to understand ‘desecration of the Polish soil’. Should it be in categories of pollution or stain, as a material and simultaneously metaphysical event, which requires rituals of purification and leads us straight to the idea of tragic spectacle? Constructing the position of witness in terms of sublimity, as postulated by Błoński, allows the observer of the Holocaust to approximate the victim; it allows the observer to be positioned likewise within the space of the traumatic event, and by this very fact, in my opinion, to be too eagerly reconciled to the invisibility or fragmentary visibility of the Holocaust. By the same token, commencing towards the end of the 1940s, the denial over many years of the witnesses’ experiences could now be explained in categories of traumatic effect. And hence visibility of the Holocaust eventually found itself outside the observer’s range of possibilities to bear witness, because he (or she) was also marked by a traumatized paralysis of speech … Therefore, ennoblement or sublimation of the position of Polish witnesses to the Holocaust may appear to be a doubtful solution. In the same year, 1987, Roman Zimand warned against attempts to sacralize the experiences of witnesses to the Holocaust, when he protested the transplantation at this time of this very term to Polish soil, since the etymology of the Greek word refers to a burnt offering: I am at a loss to comprehend how it could have entered anyone’s head that allowing several million Jews to pass through the crematoria could be any kind of offering to any kind of god. The moment we encroach into the semantic field of offerings, we automatically raise the murderer to the dignity of priest and the indifferent spectator to the dignity of participant in the ritual.34 Zimand indicated precisely the tendency of Polish culture to ritualize historical experiences and uphold the illusion of purifying rituals. We might add that this was a very powerful temptation in Polish theatre, and we will return later to further analyse the ritualization of social indifference. It quickly transpired that admission of guilt was not enough, although it was obviously essential; Błoński was not wrong about this. It was also necessary, however, to recover the visibility of past events and place them within the order of collective memory, understood just as much as the memory of witnesses as the collection of discourses sustaining it, falsifying it or simply wiping it from the field of social visibility. Looking at this from today’s perspective, we should recognize that making too close an approximation between the

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

39

position of the victims and the witnesses, who experienced the trauma of the Holocaust in different ways, should not be unduly universalized (though this cannot, obviously, be totally excluded either). It must remain one possibility, all the more so since in the ten to fifteen years following the appearance of Błoński’s article, Polish society did confront – for the first time in such open public debate – its own participation in the work of the Holocaust. If we bring closer together in Hilberg’s triad the positions of witnesses and perpetrators, the sublime effect inevitably disappears. Instead, there appears something that Hannah Arendt called, when analysing the attitude of German society towards the Holocaust, ‘outrageous stupidity’.35 Her observations may be extended to cover other – including Polish – observerwitnesses of the Holocaust. Defining stupidity in such a context, Arendt refers to Immanuel Kant and the imperative formulated by him to ‘think in the place of every other person’. For stupidity is ‘simply the reluctance to ever imagine what the other person is experiencing’. No one will surely deny that this kind of reluctance was shared by a significant proportion of Polish society in relation to the persecution and extermination of Jews. In order to embrace the whole spectrum of witnesses, some of whom use the invisibility and unimaginability of the Holocaust as an alibi, it is therefore necessary to move between the extreme pole of sublimity and the extreme pole of stupidity, between the poles of trauma and indifference, between the position of victim and the position of perpetrator. Michał Głowiński, the distinguished literary historian, who was rescued as a child from the Holocaust, recalled many years later a journey he made by train from Warsaw to Kazimierz in the second half of the 1950s. He became then the observer of a situation of bearing witness, but a situation that was totally spontaneous, not controlled by anyone. His fellow passengers, the majority of whom were peasants, began to remember the Occupation years. ‘Memories of the war years were then […] more vividly and – if I may put it like this – still very fresh in people’s minds.’ One of the women told about the extermination of Jews in a small Polish town, about events that she had witnessed, as an eyewitness and – so Głowiński asserts – a sympathizing witness. ‘She related her story in a concrete and graphic manner, gave no direct vent to her emotions, but her intense feeling and sympathy left their mark on every sentence.’36 Her account bore witness to the visibility of the Holocaust in Polish experience: ‘She spoke of street executions, of people being dragged from their hiding places and murdered on the spot, finally of the deportation of those who remained to certain death, deportation accompanied by cruelty and humiliation.’37 The woman recalled that the Jews herded into the cattle trucks had hurled the most dreadful curses at their German executioners. She ended her account with an unexpected conclusion: ‘oy, these Jews are full of vengeance, full of vengeance.’ Głowiński continues: The narrator thus proclaimed her opinion, as if she had forgotten what she had related only a few minutes before, as if she didn’t want to

40

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

acknowledge in what situation these curses had been uttered. She herself simply became another person. Nobility vanished from her face; anger appeared, and perhaps even – contempt. In what she said there was that distinct sense of superiority that appears when people talk about others whom they consider worse by nature or simply despise.38 The unexpected climax to this tale, as well as the female narrator’s change in attitude, Głowiński puts down to the power of antisemitic stereotypes, to the division between the world of facts and the world of well-established clichés. His commentary may however be supplemented by other conclusions. It is not merely a question of conflict between facts and stereotypes, but of conflict between affects and attitudes: empathy and hostility, shock and indifference. This type of conflict undermines an entire society that has not made the effort to assimilate its own role as witness to someone else’s suffering. Her thoughtless and cruel punchline allows the narrator to absolve herself of any responsibility emerging from her assumption of that role. But we should also not overlook the silence of Głowiński, who listened to this account. His silence is also a witness: this is the silence of a man who survived the Holocaust and who in the post-war reality does not want to talk about it, because he lives in the conviction that no one is waiting for his account, or that his account may be used against him. The woman recounting her memories of the Occupation is not aware that not all her listeners are ‘her own sort’, that there is a ‘stranger’ among them who feels profoundly moved by her story and at the same time touched to the quick. The shock he experiences does not come so much from the account itself, as from the ‘drastic shift’ that takes place within it. The greatest enigma is once again the audience, who receive the account in silence. We have no insight into their reactions and feelings, which remain obscure.

5. Writing from the American perspective, Geoffrey H. Hartman39 identifies three periods of increased interest in testimonies to the Holocaust: in the 1940s, immediately after the war when the camps were disclosed; at the beginning of the 1960s, created by the Adolf Eichmann trial; and at the end of the 1970s, when the television series Holocaust was released. From the Polish perspective, things look different. Following the wave of testimonies that appeared immediately after the war, anxiety as to the perspective from which Poles ought to regard the extermination of Jews (whether as observers, or as victims, or as also cooperating with the perpetrators) paralysed for decades the possibility of addressing the topic of the Holocaust as well as the social circulation of testimonies, including artistic. The political turning point of 1989 opened up in Poland, as it did in other countries of Central Europe – that is, in the locations where the

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

41

final and most brutal phases of the extermination of European Jews took place – the possibility of historical research on a grand scale and the public exposure of facts long well concealed. The experiences of observers of the Holocaust had found themselves for a long time at the margins of Holocaust research, as many historians today confirm. Therefore, the bystanders, as Raul Hilberg described them, find themselves today at the centre of increased attention. This shift in the field of interest has brought with it many serious consequences. The first is the need for research into local circumstances. The Holocaust proceeded in different ways depending on the locality, on local historical traditions of coexistence between different ethnic and national communities and on the way in which Jews were perceived in a given culture. The position of the bystanders, irrespective of appearances, is not static, passive and uniform. It should be described in categories of process, within the sphere of influence of various agencies. What is known as ‘indifference’ to the persecution and extermination of Jews, had its differentiated dynamics and could not assume any neutral form. Crucial to the establishment of the social position of the bystanders is the moment when a certain group of people becomes for others unpersons, meaning that their lives cease to be worthy of protection, while the norms pertaining within the orbit of one’s own community no longer apply to them.40 The potential for creating this kind of social situation was an essential condition rendering possible the work of the Holocaust. The process of severing bonds with persecuted people has a complex nature. Often, it is associated with violation of the notions a given community creates about itself. Even small tensions between groups of people can lead to indifference towards the suffering of others, and such indifference in turn makes possible the extermination of one of these groups. Research into the situation of the bystanders often leads to the undermining or suspension of overly universal and overly ‘philosophical’ discourses on the topic of the Holocaust and attaches greater weight to the establishment of detailed historical facts, to local conditions and to the legal trials associated with Holocaust events. Such research often combines historical scrupulousness with psychoanalytic hypotheses. One object of research is the media, for example the press, as tools for constructing images of reality: not only in the reporting of specific facts, but also in the formation of specific attitudes.41 Every piece of press information is usually the work of many people (the journalist, editor, publisher, the established expectations of readers); therefore, inscribing it into any kind of generalized ideological framework (‘Polish antisemitism’, for example) ought to take into consideration the complexity of such a process. This leads, also, to the demand for biographical research into individuals regarded as the ‘manufacturers’ of press information. The next powerful impulse leading to increased interest in the position of bystanders and scrutiny of the direction taken by ethical reflection on the ‘representation of the Holocaust’ grew precisely out of research into

42

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

the present-day media, which transmit and distribute on a massive scale images of someone else’s suffering, thus making the condition of bystander a universal and transhistorical experience. They have created media flows liberated from the mechanisms of denial.42 To the global mass streaming of images of someone else’s suffering have been added images associated with the Holocaust. Feliks Tych’s reflections on the unresolvability as to whether Polish society’s silence on the subject of the Holocaust came from the traumatic nature of the experience of being observers of someone else’s suffering, or whether it also sprang from indifference, embrace today all globalized societies. His thoughts may be reformulated from the point of view of research into the media and phenomena associated with postmemory. The main points in this debate concern the ability of images to transmit trauma, or the consolidation of attitudes of indifference towards such images; next, the duty to document the history or the danger of fictionalizing reality in media records; and finally, the disintegration of traditional paradigms of collective and individual memory. And also, critical suspicion of those who exploit these images or use them to construct some kind of artistic utterance on the subject of the Holocaust. Analysis of adopted forms of representation usually provokes questions about their libidinal underpinning. This is the case in the film Shoah, when the object of interest ultimately became the position of Lanzmann himself, interpreted by Dominick LaCapra as aggressive identification with the victims or simply the wish to self-destruct.43 This type of approach is obviously risky, and may appear excessively suspicious. For once we start to investigate libidinal entanglements, there is a danger we will place Lanzmann, who devoted fifteen years of his life to realizing Shoah, alongside Binjamin Wilkomirski, who falsified his own biography by pretending to be a victim of the Holocaust. However, it is also difficult to completely exclude this kind of perspective, especially when we are dealing with historical events with such a powerful affective impact. Suffice it to give as an example, the theatrical output of Krzysztof Warlikowski, in which the theme of the Holocaust always appears from the perspective of problems of identity. Even if ‘being a Jew’, ‘being gay’, ‘being black’ or ‘being a woman’, are not models of one and the same situation of ‘being other’, it is very probable that without this personal sensitization to social forms of aggression against otherness, the theme of the extermination of the Jews would not have become such an important and vivid motif in Warlikowski’s productions. The first scholar to formulate these questions in relation to the Holocaust from the perspective of bystanders in a systematic and profound way, was Geoffrey H. Hartman. His fundamental question concerns the possibilities for transmitting knowledge and experience of the past, especially such traumatic knowledge and experience as the Holocaust, in an age of expanding media, such as film, television and the internet. Instead of opposing art to witness, Hartman makes both forms of activity allies in the struggle against

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

43

the mass production of bystanders. He speaks out against any form of totalizing public memory in the social dimension. On the one hand, there is the phenomenon named by Hartman as ‘public memory’: it is created by the uncontrolled, impersonal flow of media images. Here, no one is responsible for their presence, no one is able to control the context in which they appear; their source usually remains unknown to the viewer. On the other hand, there is ‘collective memory’, a construct built upon nationalist and Romantic ideologies, emphasizing the autarky of collective cultural codes that cannot exist without a concept of otherness. Art requires the participation of the imagination, protects against a depersonalized attitude to the images, reconstructs positions of empathy. Testimony, meanwhile, establishes a critical attitude towards every corporate idea, individualizes experiences, pinpoints the exceptions, exposes the hidden conflicts. Furthermore, Hartman perceives art as yet another form of witness – and the basis for building this affinity is precisely the affective and critical potential of both forms for communicating the past. Their main task becomes the reconstruction of the position of witness in place of the widespread position of gaper or bystander. Hartman points precisely to theatre as the medium capable of recovering lost powers of affective reaction and of liberating audiences from positions of indifference towards images of someone else’s suffering, thanks to forms of highly mediated representation and unmediated presence. Hartman refers, on the one hand, to the ‘wisdom of a classical poetics’,44 which instead of literal images of suffering introduces on stage a ‘powerful language of witness’, but also, on the other hand, to the ‘genius’ of Shakespeare which, in the scene of Gloucester’s blinding (in King Lear) on stage, breaches the principles of decorum and overcomes the abhorrence of the spectators. Analysing Schindler’s List, Hartman criticizes the organization of the field of visibility in Spielberg’s film, and identifies the too easy accessibility of every image of suffering with the perspective of the perpetrators: only they were equipped with this kind of panoptic knowledge of the incidents. No viewer of Schindler’s List can assert, like the chorus in Aeschylus’s Oresteia: ‘What happened next I saw not, neither speak it.’ The traditional, not to say conventional, notions of theatre to which Hartman refers enable us to resist the universally available spectacle of someone else’s suffering as portrayed by the mass media. Along with the attempt to regain the potential for empathy, Polish theatre went full circle: it returned to the initial post-war testimonies to the Holocaust and attempts made then in those circumstances to call upon the sympathizing attitude of the spectators. This return was accomplished, however, after decades of ideological manipulation and social denial; after the fall of the communist system in Poland and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe; in a situation of generational differences in memory and historical knowledge; in the context of media might and its compulsion to transmit images of the past; and in the context of the assimilation in

44

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

public debates of Holocaust discourses elaborated elsewhere, especially in North America. Kept under vigilant ideological and social control for years, the image of Poles as observers, who were indifferent or hostilely disposed towards victims of the Holocaust, returns not only as an obscene collective secret, but also as a universal theme of present-day globalized and mediatized culture. Any attempt to speak about the Holocaust must take into account the devastation wrought on Polish collective memory by the consequences above all of 1968 (the mass emigration of Poles of Jewish origin, the mendacity and concealment of the facts in school education, the impact of censorship).45 Polish culture is confronted not only by the task of reminding society of its ‘forgotten’ history, but also by the restoration to society of its status as witnesses: witnesses of the second and third generations, witnesses of the generation of postmemory. In this sense, the creation on a mass scale of the position of bystanders within public memory, as critically appraised by Hartman, proves to be a mechanism conducive to this late return to the situation of being a witness to someone else’s suffering, and to the resuscitation of the past not only in historical research but also in the affective order. Although, this time, the latter is almost entirely conditional on the former: being affected or emotionally moved is only possible thanks to the acquired knowledge. One could argue that Polish experience runs counter to what Hartman describes. Not from ethical control over testimonies and the imperative to separate facts from fiction to subversive forms of infiltrating artistic strategies, documents, memory and imagination, but the reverse. Patterns of ‘incorrect’ reactions to the events of the Holocaust were profoundly scrutinized in Polish culture, and especially theatre, already very early on. The period 1962–1975, between Grotowski and Szajna’s Akropolis (Acropolis) and Kantor’s Umarła klasa (The Dead Class), in particular is full of risky treatments concerning collective memory. All kinds of subversive, politically incorrect, ethically risky forms of invoking past experiences were tried and tested: tools of artistic provocation often helped recovery of the denied experience of being a witness to someone else’s suffering. On the other hand, the historical debate over the facts was suspended, curtailed or distorted. In his production Studium o Hamlecie (Hamlet Study, 1964), Jerzy Grotowski invoked the memory of Polish antisemitism at the time of the Holocaust, confronting the figure of the Jew in the role of Hamlet with a unit of Polish insurrectionary fighters of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), who treat him brutally – in other words, a topic that Polish historians began to research only as late as the 1990s.46 Tony Judt, despite the postmodern tendency to deconstruct overly coherent historical narratives and undermine their credibility, proposed the project of a common history,47 difficult to elaborate, but essential to undertake in conditions of aggressive and contentious identity narratives post-1989, following the breakdown of the pact of collective forgetting

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

45

that had conditioned the European political order since 1945. In fact, this kind of work is being done by historians in Poland.48 Therefore, the project of postmemory,49 seized upon by various institutions of memory, may be regarded not so much as a method for deconstructing ‘objective’ narratives (for which it often passes) but as a strategy for equipping retrieved knowledge with the power of affective influence. Originating in research into the intimate communication to younger generations of traumatic experiences within families, the project of postmemory has gradually acquired the status of an ideological and methodological foundation to the politics of memory, cultivated on a massive scale by research activities and commemorative institutions. In various ways, imaginative fictions are construed, which are meant to introduce our historical knowledge into the area of artificially provoked – but ideologically controlled – affects. Historical knowledge about the Holocaust provides artistic projects with a kind of corrective persuasion. Here is an example. In the middle section of the production Nic co ludzkie (Nothing that is Human), performed by Scena Prapremier InVitro, Lublin 2008, entitled ‘Świadek’ (‘Witness’), fragments are used from Jan Tomasz Gross’s Fear: AntiSemitism in Poland after Auschwitz (2006; also published in Polish translation as Strach in 2008), a book describing pogroms and murders of Jews perpetrated by Poles immediately after the end of the war. The actors, spaced at intervals across the stage, voiced shocking accounts of the Kielce pogrom: we were spared no description of the brutal murders and shameful behaviours of the perpetrators and of the passive observers. On a large screen, the audience saw itself listening to these texts. The camera was positioned in such a way that we did not look ourselves in the eye: we saw ourselves obliquely, watched with the gaze of the Other. The impression was made not so much by the accounts themselves, which were known to a large proportion of the audience from Gross’s book or from ‘abridgements’ made available in the media (the book was widely discussed), as by the focused, motionless, intently listening community of onlookers on the screen. More involved than the real one. Mediated by the video image, the reception situation provided the listened-to accounts with affective energy, and not the other way around. The audience received an image of affected and moved witnesses. However, the medium of the image did not so much reveal the reactions of the spectators, as create them. Like in Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, we had acquired not a portrait of the Real but an imagined identity that enables us to live. The accounts of the aggressive or indifferent attitude of Poles towards Jewish survivors of the Holocaust received immediate compensation in the morally and emotionally appropriate reaction – albeit several decades overdue – of the descendants sitting in the audience of that indifferent and wicked society, which had cornered Jakub Gold in the Warsaw street in 1943. The recovery of the position of witness to someone else’s suffering,  so

46

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

long denied, and which became for Polish culture after 1989 one of the main threads in working through the wartime and post-war reality, remained devoid in this case, however, of the burden of real cultural negotiation. It turned into a trompe l’oeil. For at work was a mechanism that reinforced the narcissistic mechanisms mentioned above by affecting one’s own image of the witness. Indifference (or, as Arendt would have it, ‘stupidity’) is transformed into an illusion of trauma, thanks to narcissistic contemplation of the reflection in the Lacanian mirror of the projected identifications. Speaking about Polish culture in terms of post-traumatic reactions can therefore turn out to be a trap of imagined illusions and symbolic compensations. This is what happened during the debate about events in Jedwabne and Gross’s other book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001; published in the previous year in Poland as Sąsiedzi), in which Poles played the role no longer of observers, but of perpetrators. Generated by this debate, the discourse of taking responsibility for the past was interpreted in the wider social context as ‘admission of guilt’. Meanwhile, the hidden meaning of this gesture was not interpreted: by taking guilt upon ourselves, we can liberate ourselves from the obscene position of bystanders. Contemporary conceptions of trauma open up the perspective of sublimity and allow empty frames of collective memory to be played with in altered affective arrangements. This happens because trauma is not the opposite of indifference. Indifference belongs to the field of traumatic experience known as numbing and of the devastations wrought by trauma with delay. In this way, the rhetoric of trauma creates descriptive models for experiences that are not necessarily found, or frankly should not be found, within the domain of trauma. Therefore, Hannah Arendt’s proposition is so valuable: ‘stupidity’ is not so neutrally negative as ‘indifference’; it is not inscribed into every lost frame of memory. It requires an arena of visibility and historical investigation rather than a rhetorical combination of concepts. Stupidity arouses terror, disgust, laughter (it therefore contains a libidinal surplus), whereas indifference at most releases a sense of guilt. Indifference may easily be accommodated within the dialectics of trauma; stupidity is located totally outside it, although it can intensify someone else’s trauma. Theatre takes into account the libidinal excess of stupidity, revealing in the direct experience of audience reception the impulses and resistances accompanying cultural negotiation of the past.

6. In their production Sztuka dla dziecka (A Play for a Child), performed at the Cyprian Norwid Theatre in Jelenia Góra in 2009, Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski created a lopsided world, where memory is god and where

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

47

there is no memory at all. There are its figures, mechanisms, strategies, props, but memory itself as the basis of human experience and identity has evaporated, leaving behind bustling, garrulous, comic and humiliated beings, hired to take part in a game that runs on and on interruptedly, since the empty place left by memory demands relentlessly to be filled. Fortunately, there do exist archives, museums, libraries, cinemas and theatres, that is, institutions for collecting, falsifying and proliferating the resources of other people’s memories. Loss of memory enables the playing of a game called ‘trauma’, which, from the perspective shown by the creators of the performance, is transformed into a spectacle of ‘stupidity’. In the alternative version of history proposed by Demirski, it is the Nazis who won the war. The victory of the Nazis signifies in Strzępka and Demirski’s production the triumph of a paradigm of guilt that encompasses everyone – irrespective of their place in Hilberg’s triad. The new, knocked-together version of European history draws the audience – in an obscene manner – into the experience of falsified memory, other people’s memory, memory deliberately altered. Casting the audience’s reactions into the sphere of obscenity is part of the political dimension to the performance; it enables attachment to that version of historical events that protects the playing of sublime roles to be ridiculed, including the most sublime: the role of perpetrator who feels an inconsolable sense of guilt. No one wants to play the role of the ‘stupid idiots’, that is, the bystanders. Centre stage stands a stone catafalque, tombstone or sacrificial altar  – splattered with blood, paint or raspberry juice. Below it are stocks of refills for cemetery candle lanterns. The black wall at the back with its row of doors might equally well recall the Ancient Greek skene as cubicles in bigcity sex clubs, sanctuaries of masturbation. In the backdrop hangs a neon sign: ‘Never Again’ (in English), as if tempting and inviting guests into regions of semi-legal pleasure. Grotesque figures gather here with a sole aim: ‘to remember that former torment’. A banquet takes place beside the stone catafalque. Fatty chicken thighs are eaten with fingers off plastic plates, onto which ash is flicked from constantly smoked cigarettes. The revolting feast is in fact an extreme ritual of memory: the Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) ceremony in the graveyard, both the archaic banquet on the ancestral graves and simultaneously, obviously, its vulgar parody. However, it is not so much the rituals of mourning that are profaned, as their sublime postmodern forms. Here, memory is not reduced to a melancholy trace, but exposes its hidden, illicit, pornographic vitality. Today, the drama of postmemory no longer goes on within intimate family circles (as in Marianne Hirsch’s research), but rather in the space of public memory, as described by Hartman. The technologies of postmemory have become a strategy in social education, applied at least in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, where every visitor receives the ‘identity’ of a concrete person, gets to know their fate, feels himself or

48

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

herself into that individual’s experiences. The message is clear: the personal names of Holocaust victims should be restored and opposed to the totalizing power of numbers that depersonalizes individual suffering. The question immediately arises, however, as to the psychological and, as a result, social consequences of aggressive technologies of postmemory. One of the spectacle’s patrons might have been Friedrich Nietzsche, on account of his desperate attempt to defend European youth from being summoned too early out of its state of forgetfulness by the historical knowledge imposed by previous generations.50 In Strzępka and Demirski’s production, the action revolves around the figure of a child, who is discovered in a tree hanging from a parachute following one of the games reconstructing events of the war, and who ‘in the midst of Nazi Europe’ does not have, so it transpires, his ‘patron’. Obviously, a patron will be found, while attempts to defend the child from forced initiation will come to nothing. The strategy familiar from Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum has become a social ritual in post-Nazi Europe. Therefore, every child should have a patron, know their biography off by heart as well as the terrifying circumstances of their death. This is without doubt the most upsetting thread in the performance, yet it is hard not to admit that its creators refer to real facts and experiences. Above all, they attempt to ridicule the discourse of feeling guilty (along with its tools of persuasion), which was created in Poland during the debate about Jedwabne. The famous art installation Po Jedwabnem (After Jedwabne) by Zofia Lipecka,51 for example, may be interpreted as a model for applying aggressive technologies of postmemory (even if such an interpretation is contrary to the artist’s intentions). On projections reproduced many times over by mirrored reflections, we see the faces of people to whom is read (by distinguished Polish actor Andrzej Seweryn) the shocking account of Samuel Wasersztajn, a witness to the extermination of Jews in Jedwabne. The faces of the listeners are concentrated, serious, express shock, intensity, disbelief: they therefore do not portray more than the anticipated cliché of their emotional reactions. Although the artist did everything she could to move us with the sight of stripped-bare faces, as in Bergman’s films, this does not alter the fact that the ‘critical’ moment of the installation is the reaction of empathy, provoked by means of a strategy of shock or rather mimetic demand, delayed for over half a century, now endlessly reproduced, which assumes the shape – shamelessly instilled – of a new memory, collective and individual. In this memory, there is no longer any place for the experience of the bystanders, so troublesome to Poles. Unconditional demand for empathy can also lead therefore to denial of the position of indifferent witness to someone else’s suffering. The phenomenon of postmemory, as analysed and defined by Marianne Hirsch, rests on three things: living connection with people burdened with the memory of traumatic events (more important here is the affective impact

THE THEATRE OF GAPERS

49

than transmission of the actual memories, where Hirsch focuses above all on family situations and intergenerational communications); the presence in accessible archives or in the social space of signs of ‘indexical’ nature (these being actual traces of the past, and not solely images or symbols of it); and the ability to provoke an imaginative shock that explodes the symbolic order of an existing culture (often with the aid of stratagems considered improper, scandalous or transgressive).52 One could say, somewhat riskily, that the phenomenon of postmemory or mechanisms related to it have shaped Polish culture throughout the entire post-war period, not only since 1989. As I have emphasized many times, Polish culture evolved within a community of witnesses (observers, victims, perpetrators) in a space satiated with indexical signs of the Holocaust, within the framework of an ideologically contracted forgetfulness, which often allowed shocking appropriations of the past in the sphere of artistic activity. Therefore, all factors determining postmemory were part of an almost ubiquitous social and artistic practice, especially if we acknowledge that every transfer of ‘someone else’s’ memory, not only intergenerational transfer, is an essential condition for it. In the theatre, this model of migrating experience, the risky affective moment of handing over one’s ‘own’ experience into the control of ‘someone else’s’ imagination, was often exploited and updated, renewed and reiterated in different political and evolving cultural contexts.

2 Who was not in Auschwitz?

1. Claude Schumacher, in his introduction to Staging the Holocaust, writes: ‘To bear witness is one thing, but to “perform” the testimony is another. The staging of a theatrical text requires the physical presence of the actor, that “other”, that “imposter” who was not in Auschwitz.’1 It is astonishing that the author of a theatrical text is recognized here as having the exclusive right to be a direct witness and participant of history; only he can bear witness. As if only he could have been in Auschwitz. All the others: actors, directors, spectators, remain prisoners in Plato’s cave, and can only attempt to recreate someone else’s experience from the outline of its shadow, grappling when the opportunity arises with the ethically dubious status of ‘imposter’ – a thief of other people’s experiences and other people’s identities, or a voyeur. The singular grammatical form associated with the ‘source’ situation of bearing witness is contrasted with the plural situation that characterizes the multiplicity of theatrical performances. Claude Schumacher tries to create out of this ‘weakness’ the ‘real strength’ of theatre, without considering at all what a limited model of theatre he is proposing. The actor’s body, according to Schumacher, should therefore proclaim only ‘absence’, while the spectator must ‘reconstruct in his own mind the missing reality’. Behind Schumacher’s way of thinking lies the ideology of collective mourning, which theatre always willingly serves. Those things in theatre that are most material and unpredictable (the real actor, the real spectator, the real affect) are subject to repression, subordinated to defined tasks and anticipated reactions. Theatre is therefore left to confirm, due to the innate imperfection of this medium, the dogma of the ‘unrepresentability’ of the Holocaust. Or, in other words: theatre receives safe conduct to show a deformed ‘representability’ because of the marginality and ontological imperfection of the medium itself. Theatre is conceived here solely in terms of its very limited possibilities for creating representations of concrete historical experiences, while other possibilities for communicating experience are not taken into consideration at all.

WHO WAS NOT IN AUSCHWITZ?

51

In this conception, the link between the act of representation and the situation of bearing witness is irretrievably broken, even though the latter has a highly theatrical dimension (there is an ‘actor’ and there is a ‘spectator’). It is precisely theatrical discourse that allows us to grasp the complex processes of bearing witness to survived traumatic experiences, in which categories of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ are not configured as an unambiguous binary opposition (where ‘presence’ is understood as being on the side of the person bearing witness, and ‘absence’ is ascribed to the theatrical situation of representing the testimony). For Schumacher, the source of theatrical representation is always somewhere else, outside the physical, intersubjective and libidinal space of theatre – therefore, the ‘source’ is somehow automatically identified with an author who possesses experience inaccessible directly to theatre and who occupies, thanks to this fact, the position of an exterior authority in relation to the theatrical situation. Claude Schumacher sees theatre exclusively from the point of view of strategies of representation, and does not even take into account the rift, characteristic of theatre, between synopsis and opsis2 – between what it is possible to relate and represent, and what is revealed in the field of vision as a concrete experience, in which both actors and spectators are embroiled and which may be called the order of repetition. Anything that belongs to the first order may be interpreted, understood and inscribed into the frameworks of cultural competence and historical memory. That which takes place in the second (the order of repetition) usually remains uninterpreted, though it is precisely here where there is greatest potential for producing affects. The separation of these two orders points to the existence in culture of a fundamental mechanism of denial, whose moment of initiation is always the separation between representation and affect. This is an event from which any active search for meaning must begin, as well as the attempt to reunite it with the experience of seeing and the experience of the body. Excessive exposure of the first order, behind whose practice stands the cultural authority of Aristotle and his reflections on tragedy, leads to effacement of the distinctiveness of the theatrical medium and its confusion with other media, for example epic poetry. The medium of theatre, Samuel Weber explains,3 is characterized by materiality, uncertainty as to meanings and fragmentariness. An important element of repetition is forgetfulness, and a necessary condition for it is the loss of referentiality. (Repetition and memory, according to Freud, are two mutually exclusive modalities for returning to past experiences; remembering something puts a stop to repeating it in action). In the order of repetition, the spectator’s reception becomes fragmentary and individualized; it cannot stabilize itself within any common frame of narration, does not trust itself and yet, on the other hand, is inclined to take risks. It can liberate compulsive reactions, because it engages the unconscious mind and repressed experience.4 But it can also initiate risky projects for reconfiguring painful and denied experiences.

52

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

According to Gilles Deleuze, ‘repetition is the thought of the future: it is opposed to both the ancient category of reminiscence and the modern category of habitus. It is in repetition and by repetition that Forgetfulness becomes a positive power’.5 In the conception of Vivian M. Patraka, author of the book Spectacular Suffering,6 theatre is a medium which, confronted by the impossibility of invoking a past event, produces an excess of discourses striving to reconstruct it (theatre is again inscribed in the order of plurality; its cultural value depends on the multiplicity of the attempts undertaken). The Holocaust is defined in the theatrical space as something that has ‘gone’, and so once again as a singularity. It is precisely this consciousness of ‘goneness’, according to Patraka, that liberates the critical potential of theatre and allows the Holocaust to be rethought through renewed attempts to represent it. The category of repetition appears here as the idea of ‘reiteration’, of performative ritualizations of experience belonging to the past – but directed towards the future as attempts to work through trauma. Although Patraka is keen to demonstrate the material and physical aspect of theatre, the objects of his analysis are above all dramas about the Holocaust or of its institutional representations (such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC). Yet behind the word ‘experience’ is concealed an ideologically regulated knowledge of the Holocaust rather than denied memory in action. In this conception too, just as in Schumacher’s text, the medium of theatre is irretrievably separated from the object of its representation (and at the same time subordinated to it ideologically and ontologically), while the idea of the Holocaust, trying to stabilize social memory, appears as the ethically obligatory and corrective framework for any theatrical activity. The desired element of subversiveness associated with the performative aspect of theatre therefore seems to be at bottom a highly ideologized category, while all forms of critical attitude are subject to an undiscussable demand to preserve accountability. An authentic process of repetition cannot be accomplished without the phenomenon of forgetfulness, and this forgetfulness in the discourse proposed by Patraka can be justified solely through the mechanism of trauma. In discourse on the limits of representation, a powerful signifier called the ‘Holocaust’ stands guard over the efficacy of referentiality understood in this way. It legitimizes discourses of the sublime and trauma, and in so doing controls everything that belongs to the imaginary order. And it is not difficult to notice that precisely this order can best be described in terms of the traditionally understood medium of theatre. Dylan Evans defines the theatricality of the imaginary in Lacanian psychoanalysis: ‘From the beginning, the term has connotations of illusion, fascination and seduction, and relates specifically to the dual relation between the ego and the specular image. […] The principal illusions of the imaginary are those of wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality and, above all, similarity.’7 Mechanisms of identification, alienation and aggression are in control here. A scene of

WHO WAS NOT IN AUSCHWITZ?

53

something imagined becomes threatening if it does not submit to the control of the symbolic order, if it is not subjugated to it. It is well known that Lacanian psychoanalysis has had an enormous influence on the development of discourse associated with the Holocaust.8 An attempt to re-evaluate this tradition was central to the dispute between Georges Didi-Huberman and Claude Lanzmann. Didi-Huberman calls for Lacan’s conception of the imaginary order to be reconsidered; it remains after all fundamental to processes of remembering, participation in life, reciprocal relationships and attitudes of empathy. In discourse on the limits of representation of the Holocaust, this kind of work of the imagination, though possible, is forbidden (it must always be done already in advance; we cannot allow ourselves to be caught unawares); meaning is exclusively controlled by the monumental signifier always written with a capital letter: Holocaust, Extermination of the Jews, Shoah. Even if certain historical facts are subjected in a fictional narrative to deliberate artistic deformation or omission, they will be corrected and supplemented in the act of reception. All occurrences of ‘misreading’ are excluded or ethically censured. Only the principle of sublimity is protected. In precisely this way, Berel Lang reads Aharon Appelfeld’s novel Badenheim 1939, in which the historical facts are not fully stated but revealed in oneiric transformation: so it is the act of reading, Lang postulates, which should, in such a case, introduce the work of literary fiction to the stream of narrative history.9 Incorrect representation of the Holocaust, according to Lang, should be a reason for invoking correct representation: only within such dialectical tension can incorrect representation be acceptable.10 Hence the historical obligation to correct the image placed before him (or her), rests with the reader.11 According to this conception, historical testimony fulfils the function of controlling the credibility of artistic representation (the conflict between ‘fictional’ texts and historical documents forms part of the rules of this discourse). It happens like this because such commentators conceive of art solely in terms of representation, and not repetition: experiences of lack or loss are emphasized, acts of mourning are enforced, but the affective logic of aesthetic experience is overlooked. Artistic representation of the Holocaust is therefore always perceived as a potential threat to historically verified testimonies, as well as to the postulated framework of complete social memory. Conceived in this way, art becomes a potential enemy, which has to be kept under constant surveillance. But is this because art, in the order of representation, distorts the historical facts, or on the contrary: because, in the order of repetition, it exposes the real affects? Of course, we should also question the legitimacy of an ethical discourse understood in such restrictive terms, and which clearly claims the right to speak in the name of the victims, even if it explicitly forbids adopting such a position (especially in relation to artists, who were ‘not in Auschwitz’). Definitions of this kind are totally unhelpful in presenting Polish theatre as a medium for remembering the Holocaust. They overemphasize the

54

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

‘fissure’ between the source experience and its representation, while at the same time consolidating the superiority of ethically controlled discourse over all other symptomatic, affectively and libidinally vital forms. Polish theatre functioned for nearly half a century (1945–1989) beyond the reach of this discourse, in the social and geographical space that was the epicentre of the Holocaust. Even were we to accept the category of ‘goneness’ proposed by Patraka, we still have to remember all the material, affective and ethical traces of the great crime that were registered here in people’s memory, language, artistic texts, material reality. Both their preservation and their effacement were so deeply embedded in everyday social practices that the sublime goneness is incapable of describing such complex processes. Attempts to fully grasp forms of memory of the Holocaust through the medium of theatre (and through the practices of post-war Polish theatre) force us also to reformulate many research strategies elaborated within the space of other arts (especially literature, film and the visual arts) as well as on the basis of another culture, other social experiences and other ideologies. In research on the Holocaust, theatre as a rule has been marginalized, while the distinctiveness of the stage medium has rarely been taken fully into consideration, just like the historical conditions in which the said theatrical phenomena arose. And yet it is not possible to elaborate any coherent and universal model for describing post-traumatic reactions and performative strategies in the sphere of Polish theatre or, for that matter, American theatre, without ignoring specific traditions of stage practice and specific ideological cultural discourses (at least those connected with the Second World War and the extermination of European Jews), and also without the possibility of taking into consideration collective experience, which had its influence not only on artistic forms of representation but also on the economy of affects shaping the relationship between stage and auditorium, between actors and the public. Especially if we accept the thesis, difficult to refute, that Polish theatre operated for a long time within a community of direct witnesses to the Holocaust. The Diary of Anne Frank (a drama based on Anne Frank’s diary by two American screenplay writers, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett) was planned by the writers and interpreted by the Broadway audience as an act of working through the wartime trauma as well as of support for American optimistic ideologies of everyday life. When this same play was staged in Poland in 1957 (at the Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw, built on the former boundary line of the Ghetto), it provoked a shocking impression of the return of the dead.12 Consciously effaced by the writers of the drama and by the directors of the New York staged version (aimed at universalizing the significance of the spectacle), the Jewishness of the heroes was shockingly obvious to the Polish onlookers – both because of their memory of the extermination of the Jews and because of the once again evident, in the atmosphere of the political Thaw of 1956, expressions of antisemitism.

WHO WAS NOT IN AUSCHWITZ?

55

Maybe precisely because of its ‘weakness’, its powerlessness to create ‘full’ representations (which always reveal their conventional and fragmentary nature), the medium of theatre has not found itself within the reach of the more in-depth research; it has been marginalized, though considered of some significance within the far-reaching and influential dispute on the limits of representation. The cause seems simple: no one perceived in theatre the threat of excessive visibility, which in other media had been subject to ethical control: in photography, film, literature. As Berel Lang puts it rather dogmatically: ‘the subject of the Nazi genocide would resist dramatic representation’.13 That’s the first point. The second is that philosophical, ethical and aesthetic categories elaborated on the basis of discourse surrounding the limits to representation of the Holocaust rarely conceal their universalist aspirations, even if they make individual experience the object of study, while individuality itself is defined as the fundamental ethical paradigm of such research. Thorough examination of theatre as a medium of memory, on the other hand, requires methodologies applied in cultural poetics, sensitized to the concrete reality of material objects, contexts and traces, in which the past comes to light. Therefore, we should not ignore or underestimate the fact that Polish theatre existed and functioned in the very space where the Holocaust had been carried out. In this connection, questions need to be asked about the theatrical dimension of returning not only to traumatic experiences, but also, and even more crucially, to attitudes of indifference towards those experiences. Theatre became an especially receptive and open medium for this kind of compulsive behaviour – it absorbed and transformed it, replayed it in many different variations. Though maybe the very word ‘compulsive’ is already too rigid a term, since it establishes the presence of trauma as the basis of the mechanism of repetition, whereas the social situation of Polish theatre compelled it to weigh up a greater variety of attitudes, including total indifference or fear when confronted by someone else’s trauma. In research on the history of Polish post-war theatre, there is a prevailing tendency to refer to two models of repetition. One is connected with repetition understood as the revival of communal myth, with repetition as the paradigm of collective experiences. In this conception of repetition, patterns are provided most frequently by Polish Romantic drama (especially Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve) and the ritualistic structure it contains (rites of the dead, the cult of the ancestors, the Dziady ceremony as a ritualistic model) – a pattern of collective behaviours performed in moments of crisis. The idea of repetition understood in this way prevents Polish theatre from being interpreted outside of the Romantic tradition; powerful exclusions are therefore made, or excluded elements are interpreted in dialectical confrontation with this tradition (as rebellion, polemics or provocation, but not as difference).14 A different model of repetition is associated with the idea of traumatic repetition, the compulsive re-enactment of painful experiences through the medium of theatre. This model is based on the

56

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

vision of a community deeply wounded by its experiences, of a collectivity that is suffering. Included within this is also the vision of a community of witnesses forced to watch the suffering of others and interpreting this experience as their own trauma. The supposed trauma experienced by observers of the Holocaust becomes in fact a defensive mechanism. Polish culture strove to elaborate this deceit even in relation to memory of Jedwabne. In this sense, the traumatic model of repetition also becomes, ultimately, a variant of the narcissistic Romantic paradigm. If, then, I reach for the conception of repetition elaborated by Deleuze, it is solely in order to free the idea of repetition from this kind of determinism and generalization. And so as to reflect upon Romantic models of the Polish theatre not from the perspective of archetypes (and linked to these, the idea of the collective unconscious as the basis of identity), but above all as narcissistic projections, which have a complex, individualized and always historical genealogy. And second, so as to liberate subversive, risky, creative and individualistic potential, which cannot be captured by the mechanisms of self-staging collective trauma. At the centre of attention should be repetition of the situation of the indifferent or jeering witness (‘the poor Christian looking at the Ghetto’), which aptly defines the situation of the spectator both in the theatre of Jerzy Grotowski and of Tadeusz Kantor. What matters, however, is not the repetition of a defined model of experience, the reliving yet again of ‘the same thing’, but the inclusion of this experience – thanks to theatre and the principle of repetition – within the sphere of unpredictable affective outcomes. Experience of paralysis and shock was often described by spectators of Grotowski’s Acropolis and Kantor’s The Dead Class as painfully real and difficult to explain. Grotowski and Kantor treated the spectator as a witness, involved him or her in situations of extreme visibility, leading to deep discrepancies in reactions (shock and indifference; the concrete physicality of an observed act of violence, and inability to understand what was going on). Grotowski strove from the beginning, however, for a dialectical overcoming of historical trauma: he would order the range of dilemmas and conflicts, guiding the spectacle along the trajectory of an emotional curve, where the spectator would cross from the attitude imposed upon him or her of presumed indifference towards someone else’s suffering, towards the affective reactions of pity and horror, discernible as religious experience. Kantor, especially before The Dead Class, would operate the other way around: he would break down all patterns of affective reaction, put his audiences on the wrong scent, register experiences of horror as comedy acts, and set in motion processes for exposing the ‘uncanny’. Grotowski created the illusion of an act of working through, thanks to the power of the experienced affect. Kantor entangled the spectator in a system of repetitions that left him or her disorientated, where the possibility of working through experiences of the past disappeared from the field of vision.

WHO WAS NOT IN AUSCHWITZ?

57

2. In connection with Polish post-war theatre, we should speak not so much about the limits of representation, as about limits to the interpretability of testimonies included in theatre productions – about the experience of forgetfulness that sets in motion the work of repetition. Mechanisms blocking or muddying acts of correct interpretation of the included historical experience were extraordinarily complex. Obviously, these could have been the effect of artistic strategies themselves, which aimed at strongly metaphorized theatrical forms (as in the theatre of Józef Szajna) or consciously ruptured mechanisms of referentiality (as in Kantor’s theatre). Another source of this kind of muddied interpretation was the ideological manipulation of collective memories of the war and of the extermination of the Jews. Active here were mechanisms of denial associated with the feelings of guilt of the indifferent or hostile witnesses to the Holocaust, as well as forms of authentic forgetfulness (between 1968 and 1980 the subject of the extermination of Jews was almost totally removed from school textbooks; in other words, at least one generation was educated in conditions of complete historical amnesia). Therefore, it is difficult to accept any kind of monolithic, unambiguous horizon of knowledge or memory about the Holocaust represented by creators of Polish theatre and their audiences. Writing about memory of the Holocaust in post-war Polish theatre is therefore in fact a striking anachronism, which does not allow for the complex play to be captured between memory and forgetfulness, knowledge and ignorance, activization of memory and its manufacture, defensive mechanisms and the shock of their breaking down. Especially if we recognize that the term ‘Holocaust’ both refers to the historical event of the extermination of European Jews and creates a set of complex and often internally contradictory rules for interpreting this event; constructs various strategies for accommodating it in collective memory; formulates ethical prescriptions of witness; and reflects on all forms of their representation (including in art).15 Polish theatre, functioning throughout several postwar decades in circumstances of excess and deficit of memory, found itself outside the reach of this historical and ideological construction. Research on theatre, which always exists for a particular public audience, in a concrete time and place, must reject this kind of ethical rigour. Otherwise the mechanism of repetition, crucial to my portrayal of the formation of Polish post-war theatre, will disappear from the field of vision. Aleksandra Ubertowska states that from the perspective of Polish culture, the Holocaust is ‘poorly visible’. We could, however, turn this thesis on its head. From the perspective of the Holocaust (understood above all as a form of discourse about historical events), Polish culture is poorly visible. Shoshana Felman, inspired by Dori Laub’s research on testimonies to the Holocaust from the perspective of psychoanalytic practice, has sought out structures of hidden or denied testimony in texts that do not refer to it

58

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

directly. From this point of view, she analysed two novels by Albert Camus – La Peste (The Plague, 1947) and La Chute (The Fall, 1953) – as well as theoretical works by Paul de Man.16 The simplest structural model of hidden testimony, according to her, is that in The Plague. Felman interprets Camus’s metaphor of the plague solely in negative terms: she does not seek an analogy between the situation of the city infected by plague and the Holocaust but tries to demonstrate a technique of sublimation for concealing the true theme of the novel. No metaphor is able to accommodate the historical event of the Holocaust. The plague does not appear therefore in Camus’s novel in the powerful, universalizing function of a metaphor, but in the weaker position of a metonymic trace, indicating rather helplessness and the inability to find a literary equivalent for the invoked event. Furthermore, Felman asserts that the vanishing of the actual historical occurrence – a vanishing such as every allegory brings with it (wishing to replace the concrete fact with universal meaning) – expresses a truth about the character of the very event to which the allegory in this case refers. Allegory makes unreality out of reality; and precisely this kind of experience of reality being made unreal was given to observers of the Holocaust. Felman thus formulates her thesis of the ‘event without a referent’, thereby referring to Laub’s thesis of the ‘event without a witness’. Laub, however, analysed first and foremost testimonies of victims and the traumatic effect of the loss of reality; Felman, on the other hand, is interested in the literary testimonies of observers of the Holocaust as well as the disintegration of the narrative model of history – hence her ideas are worth serious reflection in the context of research on post-war Polish theatre seen from the perspective of Holocaust memory. Felman explains: ‘I propose here to examine the impact of history as holocaust on those subjects of history who were, however, neither its perpetrators nor its most immediate and most devastated victims, but its historical onlookers: its witnesses [emphases in original].’17 Since the historical event itself is impossible to imagine, the witness seeks imaginary trails, but also strives to grasp in this way the fundamental feature of the event’s ‘unimaginability’. It is necessary, in place of historical fact, to present a different narrative and reveal their mutual incompatibility. Felman therefore examines under a magnifying glass traces of a disappearing event. She includes this fragment, for example, from The Plague: ‘When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast across history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.’18 The metaphorical ‘smoke in the imagination’ points, according to Felman, to the real smoke from the crematoria; it is its textual trace and at the same time a record of the very process of its disappearing. A remnant of the image and effect of the work of forgetfulness. The most powerful thesis proposed by Felman in her analysis of The Plague concerns the reader as delayed witness, who acquires in the act of reading the imaginative capacity to experience in his (or her) own body

WHO WAS NOT IN AUSCHWITZ?

59

what had happened to others. The reader experiences the act of reading as a state of direct, physical involvement in reality. Precisely for this reason, I wish to relate Felman’s proposal to the theatre – as that area of Polish postwar culture which set in motion the most powerful defence mechanisms against accepting the position of witness to the Holocaust, and within whose scope, at the same time, the position of witness was recreated in almost hallucinatory intensity as direct affective experience. Likewise, the category introduced by Felman of an ‘event without a referent’ would seem to be crucial in this context. A more methodical explanation for the mechanism of affective involvement in the act of reading was attempted by Ernst van Alphen,19 with reference to Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain, in which physical pain is presented as an ‘intentional state without an intentional object’. Pain is a pure state; it always precedes thought about its cause, disturbs and, in extreme cases, even totally destroys the referential possibilities of language. At the opposite extreme to pain stands the imagination, whose work can be grasped only through the mechanism of referentiality: since one cannot objectivize the imagination in a pure state, without any referential object, without an ‘object of imagination’. The imagination is graspable only through the condition of imagining ‘something’. Scarry, in order to better explain the described phenomena, refers to the situation of touching some object (for example, grains of wheat). The more we feel the touch itself, and the object itself disappears in the act of perception, the closer we are to the extreme of pain. Whereas the more our perception is concentrated on the object, the sensory experiences weaken directly, and the closer we are to the extreme of imagination. Van Alphen admits that the act of reading is closer to imagination than pain; yet there are, in his opinion, exceptions. If the reader experiences more strongly her own affects and loses consciousness of the objects that provoked them – then the more the act of perception becomes objectless, autoreferential, so that the act of reading draws us closer to the extreme of pain. Van Alphen closes his reflections with a radical conclusion regarding the two different situations in relation to cultural objects: I would like to distinguish affective reading from more object-orientated reading […]. Instead of identifying the object, grasping it, pinning it down, absorbing it in our understanding, affective reading establishes a relationship by touching the cultural object. This act constitutes a challenge to the inside-outside opposition which so often regulates epistemological questions. Touching takes place on the undecidable edge between inside and outside. And that, I contend, is precisely what makes such acts of reading a practice of cultural analysis. For, whereas a reader, at least in a literal and concrete sense, stands outside the book she reads, she stands inside the culture within which that book makes sense. Touching the object, then, is a way of taking part in that culture, in the strongest possible sense.20

60

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Affective reading finds itself, according to van Alphen, on the side of the body, pain, touch, the loss of ‘I’ and the disappearance of the ability to understand.

3. Robert Eaglestone21 cites the account of Charlotte Delbo about her friend from Auschwitz and her husband, who, wishing to draw close to his wife’s experiences, absorbed all kinds of historical works, accounts of witnesses and literary texts, and went to Poland in order to see ‘that place’ with his own eyes. In the end, he knew ‘more’ about Auschwitz than his wife. He was able to ‘correct’ some of her memories, for example certain topographical details. Delbo is unable to bear this situation; she denies her friend’s husband the right to any kind of knowledge on the subject of Auschwitz, cuts short a visit to their home and departs. There is no knowledge about Auschwitz without experience of Auschwitz: such is the position of Delbo, a woman who survived Auschwitz. The strict ethics of testimony set the limits to unwanted identifications, dislocations, transformations, abuses and mystifications, perceived as ethically reprehensible appropriation of someone else’s experience. Furthermore, the theatrical situation becomes to a certain extent the model for such appropriation, based on the uncontrolled act of repetition. Robert Eaglestone uses the idea of ‘over-identification’, which depends on mobilizing an internal theatre, in which we cast ourselves in various roles connected with the violent scene portrayed in the testimony. This model, of course, is branded by Eaglestone as ethically inappropriate. Complex mechanisms of appropriation connected with the position of the victim are central today to research interests focused on the idea of trauma. Also taking into consideration the ethical dimension, these have been investigated perhaps most discerningly by Dominick LaCapra,22 who adopts a critical attitude towards the conception of trauma dominated by Lacanian discourse and the idea of a constitutive lack, loss or absence. Precisely the cases stigmatized and marginalized in discourse analysing the ethical limits to representation of the Holocaust become here objects of intensified attention. Therefore, ethical reflection on the limits of representing the Holocaust must also undergo modification. Ernst van Alphen23 rightly observes that discourse on the ethical limits to representation of the Holocaust usually takes as its point of departure two ideas with too rigidly defined meanings: one is ‘representation’, and the other – ‘Holocaust’. Thanks to this, the relationship between them may be subject to ethical surveillance, while the inexpressibility of the Holocaust becomes an indication of the insufficiency of traditional, stable systems of representation when faced by such an extreme and drastic historical event. Van Alphen proposes a different formulation: he recognizes as his point of departure the historical

WHO WAS NOT IN AUSCHWITZ?

61

changeability of categories of representation, while he recognizes the rift between experience and the forms of its representation as paradigmatic, impossible to overcome, initiating the element of repetition. All sorts of problems associated with the representation of the Holocaust in a work of art are therefore, according to van Alphen, a repetition of the situation of the witness trying to express discursively the survived experience, and unable either to recover a stable subject position within the discourse or to establish a narrative framework for his or her account. Hence the need for theatre as a model for such experience. Van Alphen’s thesis therefore undermines that formulated by Claude Schumacher in his introduction to Staging the Holocaust. The ethical position in this case is not so much readiness to moralize in the name of the victims, as willingness to accept all consequences flowing from the fundamental uncertainty surrounding our own subjective and objective positions within the conducted discourse, as well as from the loss of stable narrative frameworks within which the represented experience might be accommodated. Neither a ‘wrong’ situating of the subject nor a ‘wrong’ interpretation of the event should be ethically stigmatized and rejected but should be included within the discourse of changed rules. Therefore, van Alphen proposes using the concept ‘symptom of discursivity’. The symptom indicates the work of the libido. Without this work, experience becomes nothing but a figure constructed by the selfconscious subject, and hence an ideological figure.

3 Playing the Jew

1. In discourse about the ethical limits to representation of the Holocaust, theatre metaphors are morally ambivalent: without them, it is not possible to express the exceptionality and uniqueness of the Holocaust, yet at the same time, as models of uncontrolled processes of transmission, they become objects of ideological surveillance (especially since theatrical metaphors have the power to deconstruct all forms of dogmatism). The medium of theatre is incapable of submitting to such ideological rigour, while the adoption of the position of victim cannot be excluded from the repertoire of potential roles. In particular, the situation of Polish theatre after 1945, as it reassessed the sacrificial myths upon which its identity had been founded, seems to be an extreme case of misappropriating the victim’s perspective. This is not done, however, with the aim of perpetuating traditional identifications, but precisely to undermine them by providing spectators with a portrait of human suffering, which they are unable to accept or include within the horizon of cultural norms guaranteeing the possibility of identification or empathy. The marginalization of theatre as a medium for memory about the Holocaust may seem surprising, since theatrical metaphors – obvious or concealed – have been central to almost every kind of discourse devoted to the events of the Holocaust and memory of them. As if theatre somehow existed only as a metaphor for itself, as a medium devoid of cultural significance, useful only as a tool for describing mediated forms of experience. This colonizing subjugation of theatre as the purveyor of convenient metaphors let loose a kind of contempt for the medium itself, forced it to the sidelines of aesthetic transformation and overlooked its part in the process of negotiating meanings of the past. And it also excluded theatre from the order of cultural history, removing from the field of vision the changeability of this medium, its polymorphism, and its ability to undermine its own rules

PLAYING THE JEW

63

(since definitions of theatricality had to demonstrate a certain universality and constancy in order for them to be used in a negative sense to describe exceptional and watershed historical events). In connection with these reflections, I would like to indicate four groups of theatrical metaphors. The first relates to the distribution of roles; the second to the question of identity; the third to the problem of visibility; and the fourth to the idea of repetition.1 They all point towards theatre as a place where dividing lines are drawn: between the participants in the theatrical happening (that is, between the actors on the stage and the audience); between the facts and their representation (that is, between the interior and exterior sides to the theatre); between the actor and the figure he or she is playing; and between the field of visibility and the space located beyond the range of visibility (which always exists in the consciousness of the spectator – as this is where the actors disappear to). I should begin my brief presentation of these with Raul Hilberg, who introduced the division of roles in the process of the Holocaust as perpetrators, victims and bystanders, a division that distinguished between levels of active involvement, possibilities for direct intervention and perspectives of seeing.2 Through the use of theatrical metaphors, radically conceived issues of identity are also analysed: identity that is imposed, performed, split, denied – associated precisely with the situation of theatrical play, actors’ improvisations and self-knowledge acquired through performing roles. Already at the time of the Holocaust, a rich vocabulary had arisen of definitions for Jews living in hiding: academic, actor, artist, Bedouin, Chinaman, Częstochovian, Englishman, dyed (farbowany), Frenchman, Italian, Jacek, cadet, hatter, one such (podobny), Nigger [sic], Spaniard, skier, Romanian, Tyrolean, yokel, Italian.3 Many of them (and all taken together) indicate a procedure of dissimulation, the playing of roles, the cultivation of pretence. We can find this motif in the writings of Henryk Grynberg or the wartime diaries of Tadeusz Peiper. Małgorzata Melchior’s book Zagłada a tożsamość (The Holocaust and Identity) is also devoted to it.4 Within the framework of theatrical imagery, issues also appear associated with the social visibility and invisibility of the facts of the Holocaust, above all its obscenity, in other words – its unwelcome intrusion into the sphere of visibility. Slavoj Žižek has written many times about the obscene nature of the Holocaust.5 Also, analysis of traumatic experience – both on the social and individual scale – is not possible without reference to theatrical metaphors; and especially crucial to studies on trauma is the metaphor of performing, of repetition. This coincidence between the medium of theatre and its metaphors used in discourse about the Holocaust has perhaps been the very cause of the non-functionality of many cognitive tools in the analysis of strictly theatrical forms of memory about the Holocaust (the paradox of excessive contiguity), and also of the inappropriate use of such tools. It also seems to prove, however, that theatre is a medium particularly open and sensitive to the

64

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

phenomenon of repetition, appearing in forms that are obscure, ephemeral or deformed. We should not forget, however, the warning of James E. Young, who, in drawing attention to the richness of figurative language present in discourse about the Holocaust, observed that this figurative language is ‘never entirely innocent and is almost always complicit in the actions we take in our world’.6 This also affects theatrical metaphors. If we are to stick with the distribution of roles proposed by Hilberg, then we have to consider the distribution of metaphors associated with these roles. From the point of view of the perpetrators, theatre becomes first and foremost a model for managing visibility and creating mechanisms of illusion. Suffice it to remember that the first gas chamber used for extermination was not only called a ‘bathhouse’, but also visibly resembled a bathhouse. As for the observers, theatrical metaphors serve to justify passivity: there was nothing we could do, we had to watch. The dividing line between the stage and auditorium is demarcated in this case by loss of responsibility for what is seen. For the victims who survived, on the other hand, a crucial experience was their change in identity connected with the game for survival. The practices used for hiding Jews described by Małgorzata Melchior vividly recall the practices of nineteenthcentury character acting, including the whole spectrum of available tools (characterization, costumes, changes to ways of speaking and behaving). Despite the fact that these metaphors refer to the most traditional notions of theatre (creating illusions, the passivity of the spectators, assumption of someone else’s identity during the performance), in discourse about the Holocaust, they always appear in a transgressive form: in situations where boundaries are violated and transgressed: between the visible and invisible, between representation and the event, between the actor and the part he or she is playing, between actor and spectator, between passivity and action. Theatre as a model for demarcating boundaries, for restricting visibility as well as distributing active and passive positions, became the ominous matrix of the Holocaust. Definitions of theatrical phenomena no longer depend in this case on cultural mechanisms, but on political and physical violence. It is precisely this ominous and obscene theatricality of the Holocaust that prevents us from excising it from cultural history and treating it as if it were a kind of ‘night’, ‘eclipse’, ‘something unimaginable’, ‘barbarity’. As Stanisław Lem observed (or more precisely, Aspernicus – the fictional author of a non-existent book about the Endlösung discussed by Lem in his faux review), the non-material, spiritual aims were of greater importance to the perpetrators of the Holocaust than material ones: ‘Crime […], if it is not a sporadic infringement of norms but a rule that shapes life and death, creates its own autonomy, just like culture.’7 Lem wonders, for example, why victims of the Endlösung always had to perish naked (this appears to be different in the case of other victims of Nazism). Where did this need to create an eschatological effect, not necessary to the purely functional aspect of the Holocaust, come from? Lem explains: ‘it was not only about

PLAYING THE JEW

65

the benefit of the crime, but about the satisfaction flowing from the very act of committing it’.8 Even about something further: ‘The baseness of the deceit was an institutionalized form of pleasure for the Nazi extermination machine, and resigning from this additional wellspring of pleasure would simply have been a matter of regret.’9 Lem asserts, therefore, that masking, theatrical procedures that took the form of verbal euphemism or the creation of illusions (gas chambers as bathhouses) not only served the efficient functioning of the extermination machine, but also afforded the perpetrators additional pleasure. Casting responsibility onto the fictional Aspernicus, Lem goes further still in his conclusions: the theatricality of the Holocaust testifies, in his opinion, to ‘the attachment of the Germans to Christian culture’; ‘they were so impregnated with it that despite their best intentions to trespass outside the Gospel, they were not able to do so in everything’.10 They felt bound to conceal some of their operations, acknowledging them to be unduly obscene. The used euphemisms, masks and veils testified to their attempt to maintain cultural continuity as a series of mediational tools applied for the benefit of outside observers, in the face of their intention to murder all Jews. On the other hand, at the very heart of the obscenity, hidden from unwanted eyes, the perpetrators succumbed to the need to theatricalize their activities: Therefore some style, some patterns simply had to fill the unprecedented void left by the mass crime of the technological century, and so it was filled by those patterns and signs familiar to all, instilled in early childhood, of Christianity, which they had denied by their accession to Nazism; but that does not mean that they destroyed within themselves all traces of memory of them.11 The effect of this type of theatricalization was a kind of staged kitsch propagating at the epicentre of the crime. How do people stand before The Last Judgment? Naked. It was exactly that judgment: the Valley of Josaphat spread everywhere. Stripped of their clothes, the murdered people had to play the role of the condemned in a drama where everything was subject to mystification, from proof of guilt to the justice of the judgment, apart from the finale. This lie was however the truth, in that they really had to perish. […] Of course, when we describe it like this, we at once perceive the hideous farcicality of the mystery play performed in scores of European cities day after day for many years. […] Indeed, it was hard to play the role of God the Father in this play staged amid the squalid scenery of barracks and wire fencing […]. Performing this role without casual cuts, without mounting disdain, would simply have been too sterile, hopeless; the murderers felt the boredom, so they were satisfied with fragments of the action, bits of The

66

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Last Judgment, dress rehearsals, but always with the authentic epilogue. The performance got worse, the corpses did not want to burn, blood seeped from flattened graves. In summer, the stench of burning bodies could be felt even in the houses of camp staff located some distance away, but death at least was never botched.12 The convergence between the ‘theatre’ of the Holocaust outlined so suggestively by Lem and the vision of the Christian baroque theatre of ‘fallen history’ described by Walter Benjamin is striking. This was a vision built on the ruins of tragic theatre and of medieval passion plays: ‘History in a created world deprived of signs of transcendence, history devoid of all safety nets, is a catastrophic element, an element […] not so much of eternal life as of perpetual disintegration.’13 Reconstructing Benjamin’s vision of the theatre created in the 1920s, Adam Lipszyc endows it – consciously or not – with after-images of the Holocaust; in Benjamin’s book on German tragic drama, Lipszyc reads the outlines of ‘future’ catastrophe. The baroque theatre of ‘fallen history’ is gory and slapdash, painfully material and makeshift, while the destructive mechanisms of history turn people into puppets: ‘In this world, death contains nothing noble, life is merely a production line of corpses, which lasts in perpetuity along with the cutting of hair and nails, and does not end, at least not in any definitive way, with the moment of death, just as then too hair and nails did not stop growing.’14 How can we not see the connection between German baroque tragic theatre, described here, and the ‘theatre’ of the Holocaust described by Lem? How are we to cope with this kind of continuity of ‘tradition’, created in this case by the history of theatre and the history of theatrical metaphors (without allowing sublime exclusion of the Holocaust from the order of culture)? Was Lem familiar with Leon Weliczker’s Brygada śmierci (Death Brigade), the testimony of a young Jew from pre-war Lwów working in the Sonderkommando of the Janowska concentration camp, published in Łódź immediately after the war? It is difficult to resist the impression that he must have read it. What is more, Lem’s work would seem to be largely a commentary on Death Brigade. In Weliczker’s text, the image of people undressing above the mass grave for which they are destined, constantly returns. Again and again, we come across unending, monotonous descriptions of the same scenes of the incineration of corpses dragged from those same graves and stacked in heaps; of the stench of decomposing and burning bodies; of wading through puddles of blood; of an infernal landscape of eternally burning fire and thick black smoke. The burning of human bodies in concealed valleys and ravines in the suburbs of Lwów went on for weeks. ‘A veritable hell’, remarks one of Weliczker’s companions. In this isolated spot, there are only victims and their sadistic persecutors. There are no spectators, gapers, incidental observers.15 The perpetrators, however, cannot resist the need for theatre:

PLAYING THE JEW

67

The Untersturmführer […] orders the three leather craftsmen in the brigade to make the fire chief and his assistant two hats with horns, like those of a devil. From then on, we march to work with the fire chief and his assistant leading us, wearing their horns and carrying the hooks they used to stir the fire. The two men were always singed from the fire, and this gave them a charred, blackened look. They were tall and slim, and normally dressed in black fatigues and black shoes; and now, in their horned hats, they truly looked like devils.16 Their march past is accompanied by music performed by the camp orchestra. Weliczker notes the impression made by their devilish procession on other prisoners: ‘The inmates in the camp, seeing us march in their direction, run into their barracks. We feel hurt that everyone is afraid of the mere sight of us. We don’t look so awful. On the other hand, the two fire tenders, with their horned hats and their hooks in their hands, could scare anyone.’17 Christian medieval theatre-goers were familiar with the figure of the Jew being closely related to or directly identified with the Devil. Horns (whether in the form of the pileum cornutum, the ‘horned skullcap’ or ‘Jewish hat’, or the image of a horned figure on their garb) were worn by Jews as a mandatory emblem in Christian Europe.18 Weliczker, however, is not aware of these cultural affiliations. He receives the ghastly theatricalization of slave labour as just one more symptom of the absolute power of the executioners over their victims. He does not recognize ‘mystery play’, however, as the adequate expression for the situation of prisoners working in the Sonderkommando, nor for the most painful experiences of suffering and humiliation. Though he is perfectly cognizant of the fact that to the executioners, both the living prisoners and the corpses are merely puppets (Weliczker mentions several times how they were called Figuren by their persecutors). Throughout the entirety of his narrative, however, he tries to distance himself from this objectivizing theatricality, to prevent himself from being destroyed by the infernal ‘spectacle’ and the ‘role’ thrust upon him. Rachela Auerbach, who helped him edit his memoir after the war, says this: As transpires from his autobiography, the ability to save himself in difficult and dangerous situations is present in him to a high degree. Captured several times by the Germans, he knows how to escape from them every time. Even when he stands naked over the grave in a line of people waiting to be shot, and sick too, he does not surrender to defeat. He does not give up on life, does not submit to the fatalistic gravitation towards extinction, to which so many Jews succumbed like somnambulists. He tries to save himself and luck is kind to him.19 It emerges from Weliczker’s account that the art of survival required the donning of masks, becoming a play-actor:

68

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Untersturmführer Scherlack continually comes over to our bunker to ask if we are satisfied. Everybody knows that if one values his life, one cannot say ‘No’. Now and then the Untersturmführer asks someone why he doesn’t look happy; maybe he doesn’t like it here, and if that is the case he can be sent back to the concentration camp. But everyone knows what ‘going back’ to camp means – one would be shot, not returned there at all. We recall the advice of the Schupos to look ‘happy’. From now on, and increasingly, we have to act – to look happy.20 Theatre metaphors were therefore not used exclusively ex post for describing traumatic experiences, but often themselves determined the very experience of the Holocaust; they were metaphors in action. In this guise, the medium of theatre supplied tools and scenarios for the organization of the crime, but also belonged to strategies of rescue. Therefore, before images of the Holocaust made their way into the theatre, theatre had already provided ways for mediating it through language, as well as models for the actual procedures of its realization. The deconstruction project of Jacques Derrida, as we know, aimed to expose the participation of language and culture in executing the crime of the Holocaust.21 In my opinion, precisely this kind of deconstruction of the theatrical metaphors entangled in the ‘work’ of the Holocaust was performed by the most radical projects of Polish post-war theatre. Maybe it is for this reason that in all discourses about the Holocaust, metaphor is traditionally regarded as the least appropriate means of expression, as it carries with it the danger of effacing the exceptionality of the event itself, as well as of transferring its images into the sphere of other references. Alvin Rosenfeld asserts categorically: ‘there are no metaphors for Auschwitz, just as Auschwitz is not a metaphor for anything else’.22 Similarly, Cynthia Ozick writes that Jews are not metaphors for anything or anyone.23 These types of assertion, claiming to be descriptions of actual artistic and rhetorical practices yet in actual fact ethical postulates, have been subjected to critique many times over. They are an attempt to magic away and correct a reality that is governed by totally different rules. Even if we recognize the ethical reasons that lie behind this attitude as irrefutable, we should still ask whether it can really be defended on the basis of artistic practices. Do procedures of metaphorization vanish inside those practices, or are they also subject to complex mechanisms of masking and dissembling? For example, it is not possible to describe the history of post-war Polish theatre without considering theatrical metaphors for Auschwitz and the various forms of their reworking, to the point of damaging, suppressing or completely erasing them. Today we know that metaphor was not excluded from discourses about the Holocaust, but subject to strategies of repression or to the politics (and poetics) of oversight. The fact of the presence, brilliantly explicated by Hayden White, of literary tropes in the work of Primo Levi, put paid to many dogmatic attitudes hanging over the debate about literary means of expression in testimonies to the Holocaust.24

PLAYING THE JEW

69

Theatrical metaphors in discourses about the Holocaust would deserve, however, a separate commentary. They are not so much suppressed (they must, after all, retain their operability), as elaborated afresh: the medium of theatre manifests itself in them in radical forms of self-denial and transgression. Using linguistic metaphor, theatre opens up the perspective of surprise, scandal and shock. The dividing lines are drawn here by force of imperatives (for example, the imperative to preserve passivity when faced by the suffering of other people), and not on the basis of a contract or illusion of a contract. At the same time, boundaries demarcated in this way include the zone of activities interpreted as mechanical and inhuman (‘the Holocaust machine’ is the most widespread metaphor describing the character of this event25). Eventually, the whole of reality becomes a boundary line; there is no possibility of finding oneself beyond it, irrespective of one’s position in Hilberg’s triad. It is not mechanisms of representation on stage and its incompleteness that are central to these metaphors, but repetition as an element of theatre associated with the body, violence towards the spectator and the uniqueness of the once-only event. With the aid of such metaphors, Henryk Grynberg, for example, describes in his book Żydowska wojna (The Jewish War, 1965) his experience of hiding – as a state of constant improvisation and pressure to play a role that there was never time to learn, as a state of being besieged by spectators, as a constant feeling of being seen.26 We ought therefore to pose the question as to whether there exists any concurrence between theatrical metaphors serving cognition or the description of traumatic experiences, and the real and historically documented transformations to the medium of theatre in conditions of post-traumatic culture. Did metaphors of theatre, in its transgressive forms of recording real experiences, transform theatre itself? And was their participation, at the same time, in the ‘work’ of the Holocaust recognized and exposed? While discourse on the topic of the Holocaust subjected theatrical metaphors to strong ethical control, so too the medium of theatre absorbed (without any self-imposed limitations) those same metaphors in the form of concrete experiences. One condition for liberating the transgressive power of these metaphors in action was the careful negotiation of the degree to which their historical source would be revealed. Does the spectator have to know what the performance is actually about?

2. One of the most unusual testimonies to such transgressive elaboration of the metaphor of theatre within the very experience of the Holocaust is a section of the war diary of avant-garde poet Tadeusz Peiper entitled Pierwsze trzy miesiące (The First Three Months).27 Peiper’s account is in many respects unprecedented. It was insightfully analysed by Jarosław

70

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Fazan in his monograph on the Kraków poet.28 The extreme humiliation experienced by Peiper as a Jew during his attempt to flee eastward from Kraków following the German invasion of 1939, is presented in his diary as a theatrical spectacle with complex directing strategies as well as unstable mechanisms of reception. Interrogated by the Germans many times during his wanderings as to whether or not he was a Jew, Peiper always denied it, in keeping with his internal feeling of total assimilation and complete severing of ties with the Jewish community. At a certain moment, however, he decides to admit to his Jewish origins, in order to voluntarily play a leading role in the spectacle of humiliation, to experience violence perpetrated on himself, penetrate its mechanisms, examine the nature of the persecutors and the witnesses. ‘Voluntariness’ in this case is, of course, virtual, ‘staged’, since being assimilated did not protect Jews from Nazi violence. Peiper, however, is playing the role of someone whom he felt he was not – a role, in which he had been cast by the dispensers of new social scenarios. One could also say that he succumbs to the temptation of publicly performing his own denial, linked to his own rejection of his Jewish identity. Handing himself over into the power of the persecutors, he is forced to carry out humiliating work, and then to undress and hand over his clothes to a chance beggar, putting on instead the latter’s louse-ridden rags. But here the victim of violence enters into rivalry with his persecutors for control of the situation, as he realizes such ‘audacity’ carries the threat of escalating violence and even of losing his life. Peiper takes care that in this staged and performed experience everything is concrete and tangible. Participation in the ‘theatrical event’ surpasses in this respect overheard accounts: ‘And now too, when I heard from Jews whom I met tales of their experiences, I would come across rubbed out spots where, in my view, there should have been the most explicit illustration. I would ask questions and often very specific, intrusive ones, but to the answerers they seemed unimportant, superfluous, sometimes indecent.’29 Peiper wishes to experience precisely this ‘everything’ that is unimportant, superfluous and indecent, and normally excluded from accounts of suffered humiliation. Hence, first, staging rubs shoulders with obscenity, includes it within the range of visibility and knowability. Second, theatre here does not serve any literary forms of representation (dramas, plays); it does not illustrate them, but complements and exceeds them – just as Peiper’s own ‘dramatization’ complements and exceeds the tales heard from Jews he met. Only the mechanism of theatrical repetition (allowing him to experience being a Jew ‘for the first time’) allows Peiper to fully discern the situation of the Jew ‘under Nazi rule’. ‘Yet in the Nazi persecutions, in their oppressive cruelty, I am interested in every trifling detail that might signify something, every face that illuminates something, every word via which something hidden is voiced, every laugh, every manner of walking, in case they could be a commentary on their functioning.’30 The medium of theatrical repetition, so Peiper seems to claim, enables the meaning to be grasped of experience

PLAYING THE JEW

71

that escapes words; enables precisely that which leaves behind a gap in the narrative, to be experienced. Theatre becomes a way of rescuing experience threatened by loss. The medium of theatre is used by Peiper as a tool for counteracting trauma. He wishes to protect himself from trauma’s affective, destructive effects, preserve his full powers of cognition and memory. He outstrips the anticipated act of violence, provokes it himself and arranges the scenery. The act of consciousness alone is what counts: since events unfold according to a scenario familiar from numerous testimonies to the public humiliation of Jews. Peiper does not allow himself, however, to be taken by surprise (and, as is well known, the state of unpreparedness is a condition for trauma). Putting himself in the position of an actor, he does not allow a situation of loss, a missed encounter with the Real. Although, obviously, the matter is more complicated: theatre mobilized against trauma also becomes theatre full of the visibility of trauma. Does Peiper really seize power over the traumatic event, or does he simply allow its full visibility to be grasped? Trauma, after all, causes one’s own experience to be felt as if it were the experience of another. A consciously used antidote (distancing oneself from the event thanks to its theatricalization through consciousness) can therefore be interpreted as a symptom (traumatic dissociation of consciousness from the event). Does Peiper therefore, in his playing of the role of the Jew, simply reveal the theatrical, dissociative basis of trauma, or does he, in escaping into the metaphor of theatre, open up a perspective for combining separate subject positions: observer and player? The effect of such manipulation of consciousness is the phantasmal portrayal of the event, the excess of visibility, the unflagging state of feeling alien within the confines of the event. One’s own passivity allows the experience to be fully assimilated. But does a record of it exist – in memory, in the body, in literature? Already by this time, as Jarosław Fazan explains, Peiper was showing signs of psychosis. Perhaps it was precisely the mechanisms of psychosis, and the inability associated with them to create symbolic forms of representation, that enabled him to reveal in his diary the shocking (to us) theatricality of the acts of violence he describes. Psychosis knows no denial, no lack. Theatrical metaphors in Peiper’s account are therefore not suppressed; they work at full steam, leading the medium of theatre towards a transgressive position in place of reality itself. What is more, they cease to be metaphors; they construct a field of experience, which is felt by the psychotic subject entirely literally and as central to his existence. ‘As a consequence, he acquires the certainty that everything happens in relation to himself; meaning is realized on a scale relative to him and is transformed by him. As Master of the meaningful he has the duty to reinvent and reanimate the festering world.’31 And further: ‘the subject organizes the world, and everything, every event, immediately bends itself to this construction of the world.’32

72

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Here, the actors are at the same time spectators, while the spectators exert an influence on the course of events. The privilege of total visibility is taken away from the perpetrators. For Peiper, the auditorium becomes the stage: from the position of his own passivity, he wishes to see and register every reaction of the spectators. As we recall, Jakub Gold in Brandys’s Samson did not see the passers-by surrounding him on the street. In Peiper’s account, Hilberg’s triad of roles of perpetrator–victim–witness (bystander) cannot be stably recast as the theatrical functions of director–actor–spectator. But it is precisely their interchangeability, mobility in functions, that enables Peiper to conduct a cognitive experiment: on this stage, he is director, actor and spectator. There is also space here for open play with the auditorium. The spectators find themselves at the centre of the performance; they are the spectacle for the actor playing the leading role. Peiper perceives among the assembled gapers a conflict of attitudes: he knows he must put to shame that section of the public harbouring antisemitic prejudices, while gaining the solidarity of spectators who sympathize with him, reinforcing in them an active approach, arousing their fighting spirit. The spectacle is directed to an extent during the course of its performance. Theatre provides the tools for examining new experience, while at the same time, under its impact, it is totally transformed: everything that happens is soaked up by it. Peiper goes even further – he demolishes the self-sacrificial myth, within whose frame of reference he works with premeditation. He consciously engages the codes of Polish Romantic theatre: ‘I am reminded of The Constant Prince, who out of loyalty to his idea, was forced to carry out certain tasks, and suffered for them not only physically. I am not suffering. Not for a moment do I feel humiliated. For the idea of the experiment I wish to accomplish, I am prepared to bear significantly more.’33 Peiper refers to the play Książę niezłomny (1844), which portrays the torment of a Christian knight in Muslim captivity. The drama freely translated by Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki is a travesty of the original play by Calderón (El principe constante, 1629). The spectacle of suffering ‘performed’ by Peiper is shifted, however, outside the paradigm of Polish Romantic theatre and Christian drama. Peiper, from within the traumatic event, articulates the suspicion, important for Polish post-war theatre, that the symbolism of sacrifice is not able to embrace and order the new experience of the inordinate visibility of suffering. Peiper’s account belongs to those exceptional testimonies, which in their own way are scandalous (if only because they lack demand for empathy in relation to the spectacle of humiliation). Peiper experiences indignity and violence, yet analyses at the same time his own experience, articulates his phantasm while keeping it all the time on the side of reality. Between the situation of direct experience, the situation of bearing witness and the theatrical situation, boundaries have been abolished. Situations of extreme indignity and instances of passivity, similar to those described by Peiper, were central to the productions of Kantor

PLAYING THE JEW

73

and Grotowski,34 while transgressive theatrical metaphors shaped the mechanisms of the actual reception of those spectacles. Both artists were perfectly well aware from what area of concrete historical experience they drew their models of theatre. Both felt this fact as a transgression of ethical and cultural norms, as a hazardous play with denied collective experience. Hence the intensity, in the self-commentaries of both artists, of definitions relating to taboo, shame, transgression, scandal, shock, disturbance. Both exploited the affective power of images of extreme human humiliation, in order to strike at the spectator (which was precisely Peiper’s strategy!) and – what is more – neither concealed the historical sources of these images (they prompted, however, effective processes of denial and forgetfulness on the part of the audience). The idea of Poor Theatre was expressly formulated for the first time during Grotowski’s work on Acropolis (1962). The manifesto of Kantor’s Theatre of Death, meanwhile, arose during the process of realizing Umarła klasa (The Dead Class, 1975). In both spectacles, references to the extermination of Jews were shockingly visible, although the public at the same time was disinclined to interpret them.35 Moreover, playing with the forgetfulness of the spectators was part, in my opinion, of the strategy of both artists. Too strong a historicization of the image would have ruined its affective impact. Understanding (or, accurate referentiality) was sacrificed for the sake of increased affectiveness. On the surface, this is the opposite to Peiper, who demanded full self-awareness, reinforced the unrepeatable historicity of his own experience and anticipated its political effect. In this sense, Polish avant-garde theatre springs from the ruins of the metaphor mobilized by Peiper. However, Peiper also referred, as we recall, to the possibility of ‘performing’ what in written, narrational communication had undergone effacement or exclusion. This is exactly in the spirit of the conception of repetition elaborated by Deleuze: ‘unknown knowledge must be represented as bathing the whole scene, impregnating all elements of the play, and comprising in itself all the powers of mind and nature; but at the same time the hero cannot represent it to himself – on the contrary, he must enact it, play it and repeat it.’36 In his playing of the Jew, Peiper is already struggling with the future – with the principle of his own presence in the space of social visibility. Theatre played as metaphor in action returns in the form of metonymy – the breaking of the hermetic seal of the present. It is enough to invoke the numerous accounts of Jews who spent the war in hiding, and whose return to open life was received as unexpected and unwanted. The metaphor of theatre used by Peiper is therefore a metonymic trace of the reality marked by the Holocaust, a pattern of unexpected and unwanted discovery of oneself within the field of visibility. In this sense, the strategy of controlling his own fate proved ineffective: although Peiper declares that he does not suffer and does not feel humiliated, the scene described by him always returns as a painful and degrading event. We have to remember, however, that the metaphor of theatre has no meaning within

74

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

discourse on the Holocaust. It merely creates the illusion of regulating the field of knowledge and visibility, subjecting it to ideological control. Metonymy, on the other hand, is associated with the effect of surprise, of unwanted presence – it is a disturbance of the field of visibility, and not its regulation. It activates the affect. The image, whose historicity has been lost, elicits shock. Metonymy here is presence in place of the expected absence. It works against ideologies of mourning. It raises the question as to the non-obvious link between the present day and the past. Between rescue and Holocaust. Even if it lacks the faculty to create meanings like metaphor, it allows something to be indicated, something to be referred to.37 Relying on metonymy, Eelco Runia tries to establish today a paradigm for a new historiography: he wishes to investigate the complex distribution of presence and absence of the past in experience of the present. One could say that Polish post-war theatre was a testing ground for such a relationship with the past. A relationship based not on a feeling of absolute severance from and loss of access to meanings, but on the constantly revived question about the meaning of unexpectedly revealed presence – felt in the public space as unwanted presence. Runia refers to a novel by Balzac: A spectacular example of what I have in mind is Balzac’s Le colonel Chabert (1832). In that quintessential metonymical story, Chabert – who was supposedly killed at the battle of Eylau (1807) and who since then has been ‘absently present’ only as a name – surfaces as a dirty, smelly, disagreeable, but very living and very palpable, presence in Louis Philippe’s Paris. Balzac takes cares to contrast Chabert’s horrifying reemergence to the continuity-suggesting legalism of the period. The colonel, who was buried in a mass grave and has worked his way to the surface using a ‘Herculean’ bone as a lever, is a metonymical fistula who connects the sedate Restauration era with the grandeur et misère of the revolutionary period, the exploits of Napoleon, and the horrors of battles such as Eylau.38 To Grotowski and Kantor, theatre became a playing field for the experience of indifference: ‘the only dead who return are those whom one has buried too quickly and too deeply.’39 The main principle both of Poor Theatre and the Theatre of Death was to provoke in the spectators historically delayed shock and disturbance. The only question that remains is whether this was in place of former indifference, or also because of it. Confrontation with indifference was to become the source of shock. Is it possible, however, to construct an arch between former indifference and today’s shock, thereby indicating a genuine effort to confront the past? Or does it remain an endless performance of metonymic side-leaps within the field of staged visibility? Lawrence L. Langer draws attention to the difficult-to-overcome desire to include – by the recipients – the testimonies of victims of the Holocaust in the network of their own conceptions, experiences, values.40 He writes,

PLAYING THE JEW

75

however, about the impossibility of our assimilating the language of witness, which undermines and ridicules the vocabulary of heroism, and cannot be inscribed into any heroic narratives. It also does not allow any arch to be built between the past and the present. Therefore, the past is felt as something ‘alongside’, and not ‘before’ the present – like a kind of other stage and other identity. This other identity, this other ‘self’, speaks with a voice that does not observe the norms of the present-day world. In his analysis of testimonies, Langer employs what he describes as the impromptu self, which recreates the history of its rescue at the expense of liberating itself from the demands of currently binding and socially accepted language. He refers to carnivalesque and comedic conceptions of theatricality, within the framework of which actors can perform outside cultural censorship and reveal an amoral vitality in the drama of survival. Rescued is rather the playactor than the tragedy actor, especially in theatre governed by the principle of repetition, the central event of which becomes the metonymic situation of the appearance of the Jew. This kind of comedy must have struck at every spectator of Grotowski’s Acropolis or Kantor’s The Dead Class. In order that the person bearing witness might establish a libidinal bond with that ‘I’, to which it owes its life, he or she must suspend their own mechanisms of self-evaluation, which are dependent on the common language that they have relearned to use. Especially any vocabulary associated with transformation, rescue, redemption or resurrection, appears on this stage of the fight for survival as devoid of meaning, as absurd. Therefore, the process of bearing witness is accompanied by the constant frustration of the one doing the telling, since no audience is capable of understanding and accepting this account. Langer ends his reflections with the conclusion that on this other stage, the connection between the feeling of subjectivity and experience of ‘destiny’ has been totally severed. Also, the very category of ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’ completely loses meaning. It therefore comes as no surprise that Jewish experience of the Holocaust was received as a threat to the shared and theatricalized language of Polish culture.

4 Wrongly seen

1. Theatre is the place that best reveals the idea of the circulation of social energy in the cultural space, a model for all types of negotiation, and at the same time a concrete, one-off unrepeatable realization of these very processes. It is the model of an event and the event itself, the repetition and the event. So claims Stephen Greenblatt.1 Theatre, more powerfully than any other cultural medium, exposes its social hinterland: it formulates collective intentions, arises as a result of collective endeavour and addresses its utterances to an audience treated as a community. Theatre can never be interpreted as the work of a single author; even a dramatic text reveals on stage the manifold ways whereby it is mediated through other texts. In its daily practice (and not in its consciously formulated ideological transfer), theatre has the capacity to uncover half-hidden cultural transactions, to which the circulation and transmission of cultural energy is subject. Here too, is the easiest way to unveil the mechanisms that determine how traces of such transactions are effaced. Greenblatt points to the sources of these masking procedures. They include the conception of an author as the one and only creator of a work, as well as the conception of power as a monolithic and coherent system: theatre allows ideological constructions of this kind to be exposed, because both its basic principle and its essential reality is the circulation of energy. When defining the phenomenon of social energy as a force capable of connecting people, including with the dead, Greenblatt does not refer to physics or metaphysics, but to the rhetorical tradition and to the concept of energia. He looks for traces in cultural texts that preserve the ability to influence and liberate affects: We identify energia only indirectly, by its effects: it is manifested in the capacity of certain verbal, aural, and visual traces to produce, shape, and organize collective physical and mental experiences. Hence it is associated

WRONGLY SEEN

77

with repeatable forms of pleasure and interest, with the capacity to arouse disquiet, pain, fear, the beating of the heart, pity, laughter, tension, relief, wonder. In its aesthetic modes, social energy must have a minimal predictability – enough to make simple repetitions possible – and a minimal range: enough to reach out beyond a single creator or consumer to some community, however constricted.2 A group of persons must therefore exist who explode with laughter at the same moment, or suddenly fall silent, frightened. Furthermore, these reactions must be to a certain extent predictable and repeatable. We therefore look in the cultural space for traces capable of provoking such affects. The principle of repetition, the power to liberate repeatability, belongs to the order of speaking to the dead. Can the history of post-war Polish theatre be interpreted in a similar perspective, by analysing theatrical performances as a constellation of affective traces? Can we recover in documentation relating to theatrical productions (reviews, photographs, film recordings, diaries of creators and spectators, rehearsal scripts) traces of former life, or – as Greenblatt would have it – the circulation of social energy? For Greenblatt, Shakespearean theatre is a terrain of intensive cultural negotiations, where the objects of exchange may be everyday speech, universally familiar tales, historical events, material artefacts, social and religious rituals. The Shakespearean theatre functioned in a space of radical political, religious and cultural transformation, which Greenblatt interprets as a process of mourning for lost centres of charisma (associated with the Catholic Church in England); theatre takes over and gives new sense to the old tales, rituals, objects. Redundant objects once associated with religious rituals partially preserve their power to influence, a vestige of their libidinal investment. Theatre reconstructs in the new cultural order what was subject to the greatest destruction. It does not restore former meanings, however, or old forms, but examines their hidden life after the cultural cataclysm and negotiates the conditions for their renewed emergence on stage; that is, in the field of cultural visibility and in the sphere of the circulation of social energy. In order to do so with impunity, however, it must conceal their origin. Theatre reworks what has undergone the greatest catastrophe, what has disappeared from the field of visibility of collective life. It restores lost positions and objects, however, in an obscure form – in the shape of a symptom or sublimation, rescuing the desire, but concealing or deforming the object of desire. In Greenblatt’s model of the circulation of social energy, the well-known Freudian model of theatre is secretly at work – as a place for transcribing catastrophes of denial and loss into stage events that hypnotize the public, but whose real origin ought never to be revealed. Watching the tragedy of Oedipus, the spectator cannot know that he is watching the prehistory of his own subjectivity. Such is the basis of this contract. Only in

78

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

rare and undesirable circumstances may it be broken. Then in the field of the controlled and desired affects of pity and fear, disgust appears, a libidinal excess associated with too deep a breaking of the defence mechanism stabilizing the boundaries between subject and object. Greenblatt parenthesizes the concept of ‘libido’, so risky methodologically and difficult to define in categories of social experience, and employs the category of energy, whose circulation is confirmation of the fact of cultural negotiations and transactions (their object being discourses, images and rituals). This is why his conception is so useful and simultaneously insufficient. A theatrical event cannot be transcribed exclusively into procedures of cultural transaction; it often contains that excess of energy that tends to block negotiations rather than mobilize them. Post-war Polish theatre operated precisely in a situation where the symbolic order had collapsed, while at the same time it became a place for the reconstruction and defence of that order. A profound breakdown of the defence mechanism was accomplished in those Polish theatrical productions where the denied figure of the witness to someone else’s suffering appeared, and, associated with this figure’s testimony, also a vision of a ‘world without guarantees’,3 dangerous to the community and violating stable cultural identities. If Jerzy Jedlicki is right to observe that those responsible for the rupture in the communicative situation within the post-war culture of witness are the recipients and their refusal to accept testimony, then we need to reflect on the situation of violence projected by theatre onto the spectator, onto his or her identification, imposed by theatre, with this denied figure. Along with this type of violence, all other kinds of cultural negotiation conducted by theatre are also subject to devaluation. Faced by such powerful disturbance in the field of social energy and disruption of stabilized channels for its circulation, the reading of stage signs undergoes a profound transformation and comes under the control of a mode of reception that van Alphen calls affective reading,4 situated on the side of the body, pain, and the loss of ability to understand. Every such violent disturbance in the flow of energy can become established, however, as a new path of circulation, while traces of the violation of the former system may remain recorded in the symbolic order as a new model of reaction. In his early conception of memory, Freud describes two models of reaction.5 The first is linked to a ‘friendly memory image’ and the economy of desire, the second to a ‘hostile memory image’ and the economy of affects. Desire accumulates and collates psychic energy, investing it with the friendly memory image: as a result of its activation, or the degree of energetic investment, it exceeds the activation associated with the very perception on whose basis the memory image arose. In the second case – the hostile image – the memory system aims at the fastest possible deactivation. A fixed model of experience teaches us that in a situation of experiencing genuine pain, the appearance of another object in the field of perception indicates the disappearance of the pain; it is a signal that the pain is reaching its end

WRONGLY SEEN

79

(Freud describes the same mechanism as Elaine Scarry – here the pain is likewise characterized by a lack of ‘intentional object’, and so the appearance of another object indicates the pain’s weakening or demise). Memory is able to reproduce this mechanism. The increase in affective stimulation under the influence of a hostile memory image sets in motion a process, in which there follows a rapid drainage of psychic energy towards another object, and as a result, a violent deactivation of the hostile image. Loss of memories – this is one of Freud’s first definitions of denial. If Greenblatt writes about the circulation of social energy in Shakespearean theatre, then in our case we should speak about forms of excessive investment with the energy of hostile memory images, felt in categories of painful affect (according to Freudian definitions, there is in fact no other kind of affect: an affect is never a desire, but its energetic remnants, rescued following the catastrophe of denial – it is therefore painful or felt in forms similar to pain, where its object is, at best, a phantom). We are talking therefore about a blockade, an obstruction, an excessive accumulation of resources of energy, or about a violent discharging of accumulated energy, indicating a recent experience of pain. Psychic energy is political energy, according to Jean-François Lyotard. The libidinal economy determines the motor activity of life, the undertaking of action in the real world, or our abstention from it. Art also arises in the field of libidinal politics, since it is energy in action, energy that leaves behind traces of its work. Lyotard interprets every artistic gesture as an act of relocating libidinal energy, distancing us from or drawing us near to the experience of pain.6 In so far as Greenblatt locates theatre exclusively in the perspective of the pleasure principle, enabling substitution and exchange, Lyotard also links theatrical models to primary processes, but beyond the pleasure principle. The circulation of energy – psychic or social – exists in two orders, two modalities, two systems. In the first, it is channelled, seeks objects, invests in them or passes over them, aims to achieve equilibrium and stability, works in the interest of order and connections, establishes values, creates something and hence makes possible negotiations. Lyotard juxtaposes this system of libidinal economy with Marx’s theory of value, which is based on division, the ability to compare greatness, thereby creating the possibility of exchange. Such a model of the circulation of energy may be linked to rhetoric (as Greenblatt would like), since it produces meanings, sets them in motion, tests their social value and power to influence, and manages to renegotiate them – to restrict, broaden, deform or metaphorize them. Greenblatt creates his vision of Shakespearean theatre according to this model of energy circulation. The second system, on the other hand, cannot be expressed in rhetorical and discursive categories. Although the active energy here continues to be positive (it is in fact the same energy that feeds the first system), this time its operation can be described only in negative categories. It may be captured in such phenomena as return, repetition,

80

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

blockade, disfunction, stagnation, crisis, although its dynamics depend in fact on unstable forms of influx and discharge. From the perspective of the first system – one of equilibrium and circulation – this kind of uncontrolled influx of energy is associated with pain, since it reveals itself in the form of affect and not meaning. It cannot be expressed in categories of discourse, but of the symptom of discursiveness. It therefore comes as no surprise that the institution of the theatre became for Lyotard the best model for describing the regulation of the field of affects. Theatre is a form of dispositif, i.e. a mechanism, with whose aid various political and cultural controls on libidinal energy may be represented and realized. Lyotard argues furthermore for defining theatre as a field of especially intensified defensive mechanisms generated in the cultural space. The institution of the theatre requires the demarcation of three boundaries: between internal (theatre) and external (reality); between the auditorium (the passive observers of collective life) and the stage (the active subjects); between the stage (what is visible on stage) and the wings (what is behind the scenes and therefore not visible, but active in creating the field of visibility). Theatre becomes a model for describing the emergence of all forms of representation as well as all kinds of institutions governing the extent of visibility and activeness. The presence of these three dividing lines, however, opens up at the same time for a wide range of potential transgressions: the exposure of what is going on behind the scenes, violation of the boundary between stage and audience. The object of greatest deliberation for Lyotard, however, is the boundary dividing theatre from the outside world. Were we to assume the impenetrability of this boundary, we would have to admit that theatre could be a place only of representations, a form of art where the difference between an event and the testimony to it was constantly upheld (in this conception, theatre would become a place where nothing was represented except the reality existing outside the theatre walls). Mechanisms for generating theatrical representation do not stand in opposition, however, to the field of libidinal translocations in the social space, but continue to belong to them. Translocations of libidinal energy reveal themselves here in the form of ‘scandalous’ or ‘humorous’ effects – and hence instances classified as ‘disturbances’ or ‘impropriety’. Any kind of representation, according to Lyotard, is fundamentally libidinal, and is therefore one of the forms of repetition, and not its opposite. Theatricality is not exclusively an engine of mourning, the acting out of loss and suffering, since it continues to uphold the bond with ‘primordial processes’, which do not recognize such types of negative experience: they do not see ‘loss’, they register only the translocation of energy. Testimonies therefore cannot be separated from facts, fiction from reality, art from history and politics, the effect from the cause. Therefore, theatre can be not only a place for controlling libidinal processes, but also an instrument for registering any kind of disturbances, violations and translocations. A theatrical event does not only represent what is outside, it is also part of what is outside

WRONGLY SEEN

81

(rather like a Möbius strip), just as a testimony is not only an account of an event, but also a repetition of that event, a reaction to it, proof of the contemporaneity of events considered over and done with. The spectator is not only an observer of situations taking place on stage, but also a vital link in the influx of energy and the place of its discharging. Actors on stage not only perform instructions created by invisible controllers in the wings but are also active co-creators of the event on stage. Any system controlling affects, any dispositif, can succumb to destabilization or destruction under pressure from the libido. Therefore, theatre can equally well be an institution called to defend against this type of destruction, or the perfect tool for enabling its exposure. Lyotard proposes reinterpreting the space of the theatre as a place of affective influences, as a place for recording and erasing events, for the consolidation of dispositifs and their disintegration. In this way, new perspectives for participation open before the spectator. One of these is a critical stance, which enables the spectator to grasp the fact of the invisibility of behind-the-scenes narrators trying to steer our affects and the principles governing the circulation of social energy. The spectator, however, is not only a critical witness of the mechanisms summoning theatrical representations into being, but also a participator in the process of the circulation of social energy. Lyotard explains: When we say ‘effects’, these are not the effects of causes. It is not a matter of attributing the responsibility for the effect to the cause, of saying to oneself, ‘if such and such a discourse, such a face, such a piece of music produce such and such effects, this is because…’. It would precisely be a matter of not analysing (not even by ‘schizo-analysis’), in a discourse which will necessarily be one of knowledge, but rather to refine ourselves sufficiently, to make ourselves into bodies anonymous and conductive enough not to arrest the effects, to lead them to new metamorphoses, to wear out their metamorphic force, the force of effects traversing us.7 I see post-war Polish theatre as a site of defensive and at the same time explosive – precisely libidinal – activeness following particular historical experiences, at the centre of which is the impossible to ignore, yet simultaneously denied and forgotten, experience of being a witness to someone else’s suffering, humiliation and death (though we should remember that this experience cannot be recorded within one model, if only because of the very different positions adopted within Polish culture by witnesses to the events of the Holocaust, as I discussed in earlier chapters). Let us recall once more the scene from Kazimierz Brandys’s novel Samson. It is enough to direct attention to the ‘spectators’, the onlookers on the street, to see the ‘anonymous body’ traversed by a ‘metamorphic force’. Blinded by the sun, Jakub does not belong in their eyes to the world of the living; he is separated from them by an invisible, but impassable boundary. To the passers-by, he

82

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

represents a world that has already ceased to exist; he has become invisible. Like an actor in traditional theatre, therefore, he represents ‘absence’, while his fate is directed by hidden forces located in the wings. The three dividing lines described by Lyotard are highlighted at the moment when he appears on the street. This sudden theatricalization of someone else’s fate lets loose a double reaction among the bystanders or spectators: agitation and paralysis, an influx of energy and a lack of action. Theatre, as I have already suggested, is a site of the circulation of energy, both of deliberately organized circulations and of those unanticipated and uncontrolled relocations. The former, consciously programmed, can be analysed by reconstructing the artistic strategies of the creators of performances (hence we remain within the bounds of strategies of cause and effect, as described by Lyotard, within the confines of constructing a representation). And, what is more, like every subjective action, they can then be examined in terms of psychological defence. The latter, on the other hand, undergo processes either of forgetting (as arbitrary, unintentional, ‘scandalous’ or ‘humorous’ relocations, devoid of meaning) or, of already ex post – appropriation. There are many witness accounts, for example, stating that Tadeusz Kantor did not anticipate the shocking impression made by The Dead Class on the first spectators; the elicited affect, however, made him rethink his own artistic strategy. He caused the defensive mechanisms, which culture has at its disposal within the space of theatre, to be reconsidered. Until this time, Kantor had merely dismantled them, whether it was in his Zero Theatre or Impossible Theatre, involving the spectators in a game, the rules of which were unknown to them.8 One could say that every theatrical performance with strong affective influence is a field of unpredictable circulation of energy, recreated many times over. We ought therefore to reread and reinterpret existing documentation on theatrical productions from this point of view, searching for traces of such incidences. And in so doing, we should never presuppose what may be an unforeseeable accident, and what a constructed regularity. In processes of forgetting, a key role is played by the separation of the affect from the memory image, as a result of which the memory image loses the dynamics associated with the energetic potential of the affect, and by so doing also loses the ability to reach consciousness. Lyotard is right: the experience of loss is an illusion created by consciousness. The most ethically crucial (and threatening) mechanisms, according to Lyotard, are those that allow the fact of forgetting to be concealed from consciousness. To these belong, paradoxically, all forms of narrativization of memory, which appropriate for themselves the privilege of remembering, and more often than not cast a veil, not so much over what has been forgotten, as over the fact of forgetting. Lyotard’s principle commandment runs as follows: it is forbidden to forget about forgetting; we must remember what ‘never ceases to be forgotten’.9

WRONGLY SEEN

83

Liberated affects can attach themselves to other notions, while memory images deprived of the dynamics of affects await a secondary investment of libidinal energy. ‘The vicissitude of the quota of affect,’ as Freud emphasizes, ‘is far more important than the vicissitude of the idea.’10 Detached from their original notions, affects do not stop having an influence; they find new ideas for themselves or smuggle in the remnants of original ones, construct heterogeneous images that are then also subject to metamorphoses. The actual memory images, meanwhile, either remain hidden, or appear to be indifferent, neutral, ‘harmless’ – they mean very little or nothing at all to the subject and can sometimes surface in the field of consciousness unobstructed and without prompting any stronger reactions. I shall give a theatrical example. In Jerzy Grzegorzewski’s production Miasto liczy psie nosy (The Town Counts Dogs’ Noses), staged in 1991 at the Warsaw Studio Theatre (Teatr Studio w Warszawie) and based among other things on Shakespeare’s King Lear, the scene of Gloucester’s blinding was played as follows: Gloucester’s body slipped head first down a sloping slide and was tortured at the bottom. At the time of the premiere, Grzegorzewski claimed that his spectacle referred to the introduction of martial law in Poland in 1981 (despite alluding on the textual level to dramas by Shakespeare, Chekhov and T.S. Eliot). This was not particularly clear in performance, even though certain visual symbols distinctly related to memory of that time: the coke brazier, knights’ costumes that recalled the uniforms of the ZOMO military police, transparent shields, rubber truncheons. The scene where Gloucester is blinded appeared to be a form of stage fantasy, the work of a director’s imagination intended to emphasize the universal cruelty of the represented event. The stage image conceals within it, however, an historical after-image unconnected with the realities of martial law. The image of the body sliding head first down the narrow slope could be associated with one of the shocking images of the Warsaw Ghetto, preserved on a film tape: in precisely this way, dead bodies piled high on the streets of the ghetto were lowered into mass graves. We may assume that many of the spectators had seen this image somewhere (in the newspaper, on television, at the cinema, at an exhibition), but it is doubtful that anyone perceived it in the theatrical image. It is not therefore of the least importance whether or not Grzegorzewski was conscious of these connotations, since we are not enquiring about the artist’s intentions, but about the cultural and historical fact of the circulation of particular images and the erasure of their genealogy; about the possibility or impossibility of their being recognized. Forgetting results here precisely from the dissociation of the affect from the memory trace. Grzegorzewski’s production happened in 1991, in a space of apparently defunct, anaesthetized memory; it relied on contemplation of images of obscure origin. Now we find ourselves at the opposite pole of experiences of collective memory – not where theatre might defend against ‘bad’ images, but where ‘bad’ images lead with impunity the life of movable icons of

84

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

FIGURES 4.1–4.2  Frames from the documentation records of Miasto liczy psie nosy (The Town Counts Dogs’ Noses), directed by Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Teatr Studio im. Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza, Warsaw 1991. Video production by Jerzy Karpiński, Pracownia Filmowa Studio.

WRONGLY SEEN

85

unknown suffering. At the same time, we are unable to establish whether the weakening of the bond between the image and the event is the result of trauma or indifference, whether it stems from neurosis or psychosis. ‘Does our discovery document the persistence and stubborn, all-informing gravitational charge of reference, or, on the contrary, does it show the tendential historical process whereby reference is systematically processed, dismantled, textualized, and volatilized, leaving little more than some indigestible remnant.’11

2. The concept of the symptom revolutionized understanding of the principles underlying all interhuman communication, by exposing its hidden dimension. It also revolutionized the understanding of art and conceptions of the artistic image. This radical upheaval followed close on the heels of the reinterpretation of hysterical behaviours, of revision of the theatre of hysterical women carried out by Freud – this is the view at least of Georges Didi-Huberman.12 And here too we cannot get by without the metaphor of theatre, without the medium of theatricality. Jean-Martin Charcot, who initiated research into hysteria on a grand scale at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, attempted to create from the gestures of hysterical women a totally understandable and readable language, to systematize and organize it into iconographical patterns and tables: to identify its lexis, grammar and syntax. Charcot, according to Didi-Huberman, was the doctrinal heir of the theorists of French classical theatre: he relied on the principles of rhetoric and total visibility of the staged gesture. Freud, on the other hand, grasped a process in the behaviours of hysterical women aimed at eclipsing their actions, of making them incomprehensible and unintelligible. He achieved a revolution in the art of looking. Seeing is connected with desire and its blockades – this was his main thesis. What is shown to us in the hysterical spectacle intends just as much to conceal its meaning as reveal it. What is visible is not always seen. And that what is seen is not always present, in fact, in the field of visibility. The symptom realizes simultaneously both the desire and its prohibition. It contains within itself both the denied representation and the denying representation. The hysterical patient, in the moment of an attack, recreates the scene of traumatic seduction, playing at the same time both herself and her oppressor – hence she finds herself in this same moment in the position of both victim and persecutor. The memory image spurred into motion, embodied in action, also activates the actual libidinal situation. The hysterical woman seduces her spectator, unmasking at the same time his or her position as oppressor (who forces her to play the game, expects something and threatens her with something). Furthermore, the spectator becomes involved in the performed memory image, but is able to understand it only when he or she interprets its double challenge. For the spectator is

86

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

playing the role of another, absent spectator – the former perpetrator of the actual sufferings. The symptom belongs therefore to both diachronic and synchronic orders. It repeats an event from the past but locates it within the field of currently active libidinal processes. Without taking this mechanism into consideration, it is hard to comprehend the reasons for and nature of the aggression directed at the spectator in certain Polish theatrical performances, the aggression so well remembered by Polish theatre-goers from the productions, for example, of Grotowski, Kantor, Szajna, Swinarski and Warlikowski. The spectator found him- or herself in the position of a witness who had denied his or her own experience. The spectator was supposed to take on the guilt of that former indifferent witness, without questioning the reasons why. Didi-Huberman stresses that a symptom is not a symbol,13 although, importantly, the same image can be both a symbol and a symptom at the same time. For example, taking off your hat in the street may be a gesture (a symbol) of courtesy, but it can also be an intrusive action. A symptom is at the very most a symbol in a state of regression: it preserves its form but renders it incomprehensible and absurd; it becomes a visual vestige of some hidden past event, while serving at the same time as a defence against it. A symptom is singular; it contains no universal message and is always associated with a concrete situation. In developing Didi-Huberman’s idea, we should recognize that when a symptom is treated as a symbol, it is a sign of the presence of very powerful defensive structures masking not only denied contents but also the very fact of denial – and giving the illusion of control over meaning. As Didi-Huberman observes, the art historian makes a painting ‘confess’ that it is a symbol.14 A symptom interpreted as a symbol thus becomes an intensified symptom, a symptom squared. Therefore, we should not so much oppose the symbol to the symptom as treat the symptom as a critical mode of reading symbolic cultural texts, which makes possible the postmodern project of reworking hitherto existing attitudes and paradigms. An example of a symptom that gained symbolic meaning – and therefore left a profound and lasting trace in cultural memory as a symbol, and for that reason requires fresh critical reading – is a particular thread linked to the production of Stanisław Wyspiański’s play Powrót Odysa (The Return of Odysseus, 1907) realized by Tadeusz Kantor in 1944, in conditions of underground conspiracy against the Nazi occupiers. Kantor, perhaps for the first time so obviously in Polish theatrical history, activized the position of the spectator as a witness to what was happening on stage. According to surviving contemporary accounts, there was a warning posted on the door to the room in which the spectacle took place: ‘You do not enter the theatre with impunity.’ In a word: the spectator was to be not only a spectator, an impartial observer, but a witness involved in the event in some risky way – which under conditions of occupation, during a conspiratorial performance, felt very real indeed. The spectacle, performed in a private flat, took place in

WRONGLY SEEN

87

an atmosphere of threat and fear shared by both actors and spectators. In directing his wartime The Return of Odysseus, Kantor included the experience of the spectator as witness, as observer of unprecedented crimes carried out openly, in public, in the field of everyday social visibility. He intentionally unsealed the boundaries constituent of theatre, as defined by Lyotard. Many years later, Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, one of the spectators of the wartime The Return of Odysseus, tried to recreate this position of witness in Kantor’s production. I shall quote a substantial fragment of his statement in the exact same form in which it was recorded on tape, with all its hesitations and pauses (the Polish also contains syntactical errors). Kwiatkowski addressed his memoir directly to Kantor during a meeting at the Krzysztofory Palace on Kraków’s main square, thirty years after the premiere of the production: That theatre, despite your [Kwiatkowski uses the intimate form of address], as you put it, assumptions, and so on, and so on, it came out of some sort of subconscious and it was adequate for that reality, which was terribly realistic and terribly surrealistic, but not abstract. Where they find the beaten-up man by the fence, who was a kind of shapeless mass, right? – where before the war we were used to people dying in bed or in hospital, right? – somehow terribly pathetic, right? – with candles … But here a man is beaten on the street, he was an old rag, some bit of furniture, an object … That Odysseus sitting there motionless, right? … who … When this man was turned over, you could see the face. It was a man. And that … That … that something was in us … 15 No process of symbolization of realistic experiences is in operation here, no principle of representation, but the principle of the repetition of an affect. Kantor himself writes similarly about it. We can find the shock associated with seeing a human face in something that looks like a ‘shapeless mass’, in the author’s copy of the script: Odysseus with his back to the audience, shrunken, is a silent, formless, motionless lump, blending into other objects. The Shepherd speaks in vain to this ‘something’ more and more anxiously. The ‘something’ becomes more and more invisible. Lack of answer and terrifying silence. And then suddenly, at the mention of the word ‘Troy’, a human face appears above the formless mass. Odysseus makes himself known to the Shepherd.16 I have presented two records of the same opening scene of the spectacle. The second of these comes from its creator and recreates the spectacle’s independent reality, as it plans the anticipated shock on the part of the spectator, opening itself at this moment to the expected affect. The first record preserves the memory of a spectator, who recognizes in the spectacle his own experience, and locates it with the confines of this experience. But

88

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Kwiatkowski also attributes to the spectacle the power to make the spectator conscious of his or her role as a witness to someone else’s death; he does not allow the process set in motion by Kantor on the part of the audience to be separated from real historical experience. He precisely describes the moment when the ‘shapeless mass’ gains a face, becomes a human being. The indifferent observer becomes the shocked witness. Shock works in both directions: it is truly possible thanks to the reversibility of this particular act of seeing. Something shapeless becomes a human being, a human being becomes something shapeless. Shock appears in the perspective where the potential for adopting a position of indifference is constantly present. Indifference conditions the shock dialectically; it precedes it and succeeds it. This moment of awakening the spectator’s consciousness of being a witness, while upholding at the same time the impression that this consciousness is something temporary, easy to switch off, indicates an important trope in defining the figure of denied witness. Kantor profiles it very precisely in the performance. The Shepherd who ‘revives’ Odysseus adopts an attitude of complete indifference immediately afterwards: ‘The actor playing the Shepherd “exits”, i.e. he abandons Odysseus, stops taking an interest in him and sits down wherever he feels like it.’17 It is not hard to receive the impression that the Shepherd, walking away from his role, situates himself on the side of the spectators, becoming an example of their routine attitude to death. It is precisely the Shepherd who draws Odysseus onto the side of the audience, locates him on the side of reality. Here is how Kantor presents their next confrontation: ‘The actor playing the Shepherd starts a dialogue with Odysseus; they now stand next to each other among the spectators, converse like spectators, do not present a dialogue, talk “privately”, quickly, like on the street. Suddenly, the spectators notice the violent movement of Odysseus’s arm and the cudgel falling onto the Shepherd. The Shepherd drops down.’18 This is what Kantor’s ‘street scene’ looks like. All this happens in very swift sequence: all positions are fluid, unstable. A dead man comes back to life. An actor becomes a spectator. The action relocates to the audience. We go back in time: first we see the corpse, and only then the act of killing. At the same time, there is a change of roles: the victim becomes the perpetrator, the accidental witness – the victim. In addition, there is an attempt to give the spectators the impression that the murder scene takes place offstage, beyond the space of the theatrical fiction – ‘like on the street’. Among the spectators. Let us recall of how they were positioned during the spectacle: It was summer. A heat-wave, sultry and stuffy. In a room full of people. They sat on boxes, on chests, inside wardrobes and on top of them (the best seats), on the floor, among the actors in the very centre of the action. Through the very fact of entering that closed room, the spectator was obliged and to some extent forced to genuinely participate and take the shared risk.19

WRONGLY SEEN

89

All this would have remained no more than a director’s concept, however, were it not for the fact that the spectacle took place, as Kantor expressed it, ‘in an unprecedented period in the history of genocide and in the middle of the worst horror, cut off from the whole world’.20 The production sprang from the audience’s own experiences, exposed them in an extreme manner, and was reinforced by their energy. The experience of the spectators was at the same time the experience of the actors. Many years later, Kantor described the situation in plain words: ‘The feeling of being cornered was the direct result of the situation. At any moment the Germans could have entered; the audience was terribly agitated and fidgety.’21 Kantor was working on a concrete affect in a concrete situation; he uncovered its libidinal underpinning and drew on it. The precise topography was significant: the social energy, about which Greenblatt writes, is never abstract. In close proximity to the house where the performance took place (Grabowski Street, number 3) were a number of German police and military checkpoints: on Grabowski itself, there was a small German police station; on a side street off Grabowski (today’s Pawlikowski Street), a unit of the motorized soldiers; and at Michałowski Street, number 12, the barracks of the Turkmen police, as well as an air force training school. In addition, the external threat had its obscene aspect; the spectators crossing Michałowski Street were greeted by the following sight: ‘all the windows stood open and every one contained the naked, sun-baked, pot-bellied torso of a military policeman’.22 Therefore, maybe, one of the most important testimonies to this spectacle is in the nature of a symptom, of disturbance in the field of visibility. The object in question is Odysseus’s helmet. It is well known that Kantor decided to disguise Odysseus in the uniform of a contemporary soldier and wanted to make him a participant in the war that was then being waged. Odysseus’s greatcoat looked more like old rags, tatters, in which ‘something’, i.e. Odysseus, was wrapped. In an interview with Wiesław Borowski, many years later, Kantor mentioned that a stolen uniform had appeared in the play – but he did not state precisely what sort of uniform (other testimonies say nothing about a uniform). The helmet (‘falling low over his eyes’) enabled Odysseus to be identified as a Wehrmacht soldier returning from Stalingrad. From 1943 onwards, such soldiers were seen on the streets of Kraków. The information that Kantor’s Odysseus was a Wehrmacht soldier we find in many sources, books and statements. The most important testimonies are the texts and memories of Mieczysław Porębski, one of the spectators of the 1944 production (Kantor even recalled that Porębski helped him ‘furnish’ Odysseus’s room before the performance), an art historian and critic, at that time a close collaborator of Kantor, and therefore a highly credible witness. Porębski confirms this fact and comments on it in many of his texts: Odysseus was a war criminal, returning home only to renew his criminal activity. The earliest testimony is from 1957: ‘In The Return of Odysseus, the smiling white masks of the

90

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Greek kouroi are contrasted with the filthy greatcoat and Wehrmacht helmet [my emphases] of the protagonist infected by war. When Odysseus took up his bow and turned it on the suitors, the rattle of a machine gun burst from a megaphone.’23 We should add that the megaphone was an authentic German propaganda loudspeaker stolen from Kraków’s Planty Park. Odysseus in Kantor’s production did not, however, wear a Wehrmacht helmet – this is a myth. In photographs of the performance, the shape of Odysseus’s headgear looks completely different. Juliusz Kydryński, recalling the 1946 performance, two years after the premiere, does not identify precisely what kind of helmet appeared: ‘Odysseus, dressed in a contemporary soldier’s helmet and a greatcoat covered in mud’.24 The above-mentioned Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, writing about the spectacle already in 1945, was more precise: ‘Odysseus returned in a soldier’s greatcoat and helmet from 1939.’25 Other testimonies also confirm that the helmet used in the performance was produced according to the design of the helmet worn by Polish soldiers fighting in the September 1939 campaign. But in 1963, the same Tadeusz Kwiatkowski wrote: ‘Odysseus was played by Tadeusz Brzozowski. He was dressed in the uniform of a German general.’26 Porębski’s mistake would therefore seem to be something more than a mistake: it is a symptom raised to the status of a symbol. Odysseus as a soldier of the Wehrmacht lived to see symbolic commemoration as an important Polish cultural figure. Piotr Piotrowski states that ‘precisely here, in the underground theatre of Tadeusz Kantor, its participants, watching Odysseus’s return from Stalingrad, experienced the boundless primordiality of repression, became aware of the utter baseness of terror’.27 According to Piotrowski, Kantor enabled the spectators to touch the very depths of their wartime injury by intensifying the theatrical reality. Kantor’s Odysseus was also (but not exclusively) a Wehrmacht soldier: his words were broadcast by the stolen loudspeaker, via which German wartime announcements were communicated on the street to the people of Kraków, whilst the appearance of Odysseus was accompanied by the strains of a German military march. Odysseus appeared in the context of such obvious signals and such strong emotions on the part of the viewers, that it is difficult not to see the German soldier in him. He was wearing, however, a Polish helmet – he could therefore equally be identified also with a Polish soldier. Franciszek Bunsch remembered the wartime The Return of Odysseus as a tale of ‘a wandering soldier in a Polish helmet and military greatcoat without belt – like a prisoner of war after the catastrophe’.28 It would therefore be the tale of a Polish soldier, a Polish father, who appears after the wartime catastrophe as a human wreck threatening those closest to him. ‘All Odysseus can offer his son are his cynicism and his emptiness’, Kantor noted on his script for the performance.29 In Kantor’s spectacle, Odysseus was both a victim of war and a criminal, mortal remains lying by a fence and a menacing persecutor, a corpse and a living person, someone totally excluded from the human order and

WRONGLY SEEN

91

someone instituting that order. A Jew, a Pole and a German. He embodied the experience of fear, humiliation and complete objectification, as well as aggression, cruelty, violence. It is not surprising that his figure could provoke such powerful disturbance in the field of visibility. Kantor’s Odysseus is a figure producing symptoms, rather than a symbolic figure. He invests in all positions of the traumatic event, mobilizes powerful mechanisms of transference in the theatrical space, enables the spectators to project onto the theatrical reality their own imaginaries and in so doing to constantly shift their imaginative positions in relation to the events on stage. Kwiatkowski, in his memoir, identified Odysseus as a victim of ruthless oppression. Bunsch saw in him a prisoner of war. Porębski made him the wretched, yet menacing, figure of a wartime murderer. It was precisely this version, portraying Odysseus as a soldier of the Wehrmacht, that became most strongly ingrained and acquired symbolcarrying capacity. Kantor never did anything to rectify it; perhaps he even silently contributed to it, although he never described it in his notes in such concrete terms – at any rate, he did not mention what the helmet looked like. Wyspiański’s Odysseus as a Wehrmacht soldier, appearing in a Polish underground production and performed in the moment when the German army was retreating from the Eastern front, is certainly the stuff of a great theatrical legend. Maybe in the period leading up to the spectacle, Kantor was tempted to invoke precisely this figure, but it was not captured by the performance in any unambiguous form. On the contrary, Odysseus seems to have been a blurred, obscure figure, remembered differently by the various individual spectators. A symptom arises where there are unresolved contradictions: it both conceals and reveals, is part of denied experience as well as serves mechanisms of denial. Just as we may count incorrect vision or a poorly remembered image among the symptoms, so too we may interpret the polyvalent figure of Odysseus as a place of imaginary excess (no individual image can harness this surplus of energy). Let us follow the trope of anamorphosis – i.e. of an object deprived of recognizable shape. Only a change in the perspective of looking enables something to be seen in the object that might make sense to the viewer. We have to accept, however, that the seen image becomes an object of desire; it defines the subject, not only the object. Yet behind all possibilities adopted by the anamorphic image lies death – in other words, something that can never be found in the symbolic order but which instead sets the symbolic order in perpetual motion. Kantor’s Odysseus contained something obscene: the obscenity of fear, the obscenity of the corpse, the obscenity of unjustified violence. The scene where the suitors are murdered was a scene of great humiliating fear, making Odysseus into a terrified creature soaked in sweat. The meaning of the event and its affective transmission was aimed in two different directions. The image of revenge and crime belonged to the sphere of theatrical fiction, to the tale of a hero returning from Troy and avenging himself on the enemies

92

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

of his house. Fear, as a genuine affect, encompassed both actor and audience. The melody of a parade march,30 and then the sound of the machine gun reaching the audience’s ears from the loudspeaker, prompted the memory of everyday menace and at the same time reiterated its actuality (spectators and actors could be exposed). Years later, Tadeusz Brzozowski, the actor playing Odysseus, recalled his terror during this scene, when he became literally covered in sweat. Jan Józef Szczepański, one of the spectators, mentions the state that Brzozowski was in following the performance: ‘I found him lying on the kitchen floor, where the female owner of the flat was trying to revive him with water.’31 By pursuing the ambiguity of Odysseus’s figure in Kantor’s production as well as remembering the affect stimulated during the performance, it is possible to recognize it as a phobic object – i.e. as an object that lets loose unbridled fear. For young Hans, whose case was discussed in detail by Freud,32 the phobic object was a horse, a creature from outside the human order that aroused a feeling of dread. Hans was freed from his fear when he understood that, for him, the horse symbolized the father figure functioning in the most threatening, castrating way. This solution was suggested to him by Freud, operating through the intermediary of Hans’s father. The threatening father figure was clearly also present in Kantor’s Odysseus. Perhaps this is why he was identified, in conditions of wartime terror, so unambiguously with one image: the German war criminal. Therefore, it is worth reminding ourselves in this context of Lacan’s proposed revision of the case of little Hans.33 In Lacan’s interpretation, the horse was not only a figure of his castrating father, but also represented for Hans, at different moments, different persons: his father, mother, sister, himself, his friends. And the therapy was a process that relied on playing out in imagination all possible permutations with the participation of the phobic object. Only exhaustion of these imaginary possibilities opened for Hans the perspective of participating in the symbolic order and enabled him to establish a more stable relationship with the world. Let us recall in this context the final image noted by Kantor on his script: ‘The actor playing Odysseus remains alone, cornered on all sides by the spectators.’34 Here, aggression already appears to belong exclusively to the onlookers. Treating Odysseus as a Wehrmacht soldier, as an enemy, brought order to the affective dimension of the spectacle: it justified the spectators’ fear and aggression. It made possible the defusion of affects, since fear and aggression towards an enemy are something entirely comprehensible. In addition, the soldier returning from Stalingrad was a wretched, defeated figure capable of arousing pity. Maybe this wrongly seen image was a veil for another situation, more difficult to accept. Kantor situated the onlooker before someone terrifying, an objectified someone, excluded from the order of the human: a victim, who appears as a monster and acquires phantasmal aspects. Many years later, when Kantor returned to his wartime spectacle The Return of Odysseus in his last completed production Nigdy tu już nie

WRONGLY SEEN

93

powrócę (I Shall Never Return, 1988), the spectre of the returning Odysseus was to be associated with a different spectre: a father murdered in Auschwitz. At the core of the theatrical situation mobilized by Kantor lurked the impossibility of seeing correctly and of naming that which was seen. The spectators became witnesses to something which made a powerful impression on them, which aroused fear, provoked shock, but which could not be accommodated within familiar, assimilated patterns of reaction or frameworks of understanding. It is hard in this case to speak of the circulation of energy; it would be better to speak rather of a vain attempt to harness a too powerful affect and, as a consequence – of excessive visibility and at the same time, of the impossibility of seeing correctly. Here is another example, also indicative of disruption in the field of visibility. In 1962, a production of Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve was staged at the People’s Theatre (Teatr Ludowy) in Nowa Huta, directed by Jerzy Krasowski and Krystyna Skuszanka, recognized by critics as an important artistic and social event, and received by the public in an atmosphere of great emotional tension.35 The stage sets, or the artistic aspects of the production, were the work of Józef Szajna. Years later, Maria Czanerle noted down Szajna’s strange, somewhat hermetic, associational, unpunctuated monologue, in which the artist recalled the spectacle of which he clearly felt himself to be the author (perhaps not without reason): because theatre lacks observation of things that happen and penetration of life I did not see Dejmek’s Forefathers’ Eve people said it was great I won’t see Swinarski’s Forefathers’ Eve because it’s too far for me to travel to Kraków I myself did the Improvisation on a great ladder like on the track of History the ladder pierced the backcloth and led nowhere therefore I ask because I don’t understand what is national art that art which can achieve international recognition because for me national theatre is not historical declarations but the contemporary situation life has become theatre what is theatre in relation to life? 36 In this monologue, Szajna invoked but one image from the spectacle, evidently for him the most significant. In the Improvisation scene in the Nowa Huta production, the crucial element of the stage set was a large flight of stairs, a ladder pointing upwards in a sharply curtailed perspective, and resting on a backcloth painted in thick red streaks, readily associated with the fires of Hell. Almost all critics interpreted this element as a ladder or staircase. ‘The set veers upwards – it emerges from the auditorium, but is not turned towards it: Szajna’s scenography, which does not end with the uneven ladder-staircase, achieves perfect harmony with the intentions of the production, suggesting by its arrangement the conversation conducted [by the hero] with the God of the future.’37 In this description, the verticality of the stage image is emphasized, the dynamics directed upwards, as well as the religious symbolism. In this way, Szajna’s set became yet another variation

94

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

on the mystery-play element in Polish Romantic ‘Monumental Theatre’. The multi-layeredness, verticality and symbolism of the staircase as a spiritual process of transformation, belong to the fundamental indicators of this form. The manner in which this image was interpreted by reviewers proves how cultural habits and the symbolic furniture of the imagination always weigh heavily on the act of seeing. In a colour photograph taken by Tadeusz Rolke, the image of the stage produces a totally different impression: the object in question (the ladder or staircase) leans heavily towards the ground, while at its foot there lie three motionless (dead? sleeping?) male figures, one looking like an upturned (abandoned?) crucifix. The first impression is of railway tracks violently torn up. Szajna himself spoke of the ‘track of History’ in the above passage; in his memory, the stage image is a combination of two conceptions: railway tracks and a ladder. He mentions how the ladder pierces the backcloth and leads nowhere. As in the image itself, the symbolic in Szajna’s memoir is intermingled with the real (he speaks after all of the ‘observation of things that happen and penetration of life’). The ‘track of History’ is a clichéd metaphor, but behind the image of the ladder that leads nowhere, another image lurks: the railway tracks that lead nowhere, railway tracks leading to death. The word ‘nowhere’ in this context still contains an anti-metaphysical declaration, but becomes associated at the same time with a concrete historical image. It is difficult not to imagine that Szajna, a former prisoner of Auschwitz, while reading the passage in Mickiewicz’s text, in Konrad’s Improvisation, about millions of people crying out for help, did not remember the scenes of which he had been an eyewitness: Nineteen forty-three. Day and night the transports arrived for the gas. They were still being unloaded on the old ramp, not in the vicinity of the crematoria, as happened later. The smoke spread everywhere, settled on the whole camp in the evenings. The stench of the burned bodies and flesh and – and – and bones was immense – its sweet odour invaded our throats, stung our eyes. We asked ourselves what hell, what tragedy, we found ourselves in. That black smoke, that coiling thick smoke, emerging above the ovens almost with the fire, made us aware of the tragedy that was going on all around us, of which we too were participants, and for which we were destined perhaps only tomorrow.38 Szajna’s testimony, lodged in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, contains yet another memory image of people walking from the railway ramp towards death in the gas chamber. It happened at night, in fog, in the light of car headlights: ‘We saw a vast, vast procession, something that might be called the Last Judgement of people disembarking from the ramp.’39 He continues:

WRONGLY SEEN

95

They were as though walking on air – driven on, the surroundings were all destroyed and, as I remember it today, in the light of car headlights, they were lit up by the light from the cars, by the headlights, it was the transport, black people were walking, dark, colourless, a black-and-white image. They walked away into that nothingness, where they further lost their way. It was frightening, and so serious, and so, as it were, strangely fascinating, that this Last Judgement was being decided here, that maybe, maybe, we would all also depart in that image.40 Even in this linguistically ragged fragment, Szajna resorts to cultural associations; the image has its beautiful side – language and imagination work on the possibility of attaching it to some kind of symbolic universe. In the stage set of Forefathers’ Eve, images of Auschwitz remembered by Szajna remain visible: the railway track that led nowhere, the fire from the crematoria, discarded dead bodies. It is enough to imagine that the so-called ladder is a railway track seen from the perspective of a man lying down.

FIGURE 4.3  Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), directed by Krystyna Skuszanka and Jerzy Krasowski, Teatr Ludowy (The Ludowy Theatre), KrakówNowa Huta, 1962. Photograph Tadeusz Rolke. Agencja Gazeta.

96

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

But the memory traces are swallowed up by the powerful symbolism: the staircase, the sky, the metaphysical void. Verticality supplants horizontality, strongly marked nevertheless in the image; the upward thrust prevents the downward pull from being seen; the symbolic transfer effaces the legibility of the historical reminiscences. But the symbolic interpretation thereby becomes the symptom: because it overlooks something, does not see something, does not want to see. Verticality here is after all only a form of distorted horizontality, an illusion. Although, at the same time, what is denied in the act of seeing has an impact on the interpretation of the stage image. The triumph of the symbol is imbued with the possibility of its negation, but the possibility of negation in turn mobilizes the need to rescue the symbol. Once again, we encounter a trace of the dialectic described above. Excessive visibility of the remembered image fatally threatens the symbol. Only denial of the situation of being a witness rescues the symbol. Not only do we fail to see something, we also strive not to know that we fail to see it. The reviews of the Nowa Huta Forefathers’ Eve are proof of the perfect functioning of this mechanism. Referring again to Didi-Huberman, the image was forced by the critics to ‘confess’ that it was a symbol. In this sense, Mieczysław Jastrun was right when he wrote that Forefathers’ Eve was able to absorb the experience of the Holocaust, the death of ‘millions’.41 Wacław Kubacki saw on the stage a ‘half mystery-play, half circus ladder’;42 Zygmunt Greń, ‘a gigantic staircase’;43 Leonia Jabłonkówna, ‘the ill-fated ladder which Konrad is forced to climb during his contest with Heaven’;44 and Bronisław Mamoń, ‘stairs leading nowhere’.45 Any association with railway tracks is absent. Was it because they might have appeared inappropriate, difficult to explain in the context of Mickiewicz’s drama, and demanding too radical an interpretation of the performance? Each of the reviewers, however, senses the weakness of the symbolic transmission; hence the ladder is described as ‘wobbly’, ‘circus’ and ‘ill-fated’, and the staircase as ‘uneven’. Behind such epithets lurks the experience of distorted visibility. Some years later, Elżbieta Morawiec saw not only the ‘Jacob’s ladder of Konrad’s dreams’, but equally the railway tracks torn up by an explosion.46 She saw the tracks but interpreted them above all as the Promethean dynamics of rebellion, heroism, struggle – therefore, we may continue to speak of distorted vision. Only more than thirty years after the premiere of the Nowa Huta production of Forefathers’ Eve, did Zbigniew Majchrowski see in the ‘circus ladder’ an image of the railway ramp at Auschwitz. Although this did not prevent him from interpreting it symbolically, as ‘the track of Romantic wandering up the rungs of (auto-) cognition, the Romantic gradations of the soul’.47 The fact is: it is hard to maintain a balance between the symbolic and historical interpretations of the image constructed by Szajna, since what is at work here is the mechanism of a symptom located in a territory of insurmountable contradictions. Of a symptom that undermines the symbol, and points towards memory traces lost from the field of visibility.

WRONGLY SEEN

97

In the production of The Return of Odysseus, something was remembered that wasn’t there (Odysseus’s Wehrmacht helmet); in the production of Forefathers’ Eve, in turn, something escaped the notice of the spectators even though it was sufficiently visible (the railway ramp at Auschwitz). In both cases, however, the visual error enabled the affective impact of the performance to be put into some kind of acceptable order, and revealed the power of defence mechanisms in theatrical situations. Either we are talking about something that is not in the image, or we do not see what is actually there. This indicates a rupture in the act of seeing: a rupture between the act of perception and the affect. A pure act of perception would establish rootedness, or the perceiving body’s feeling of being fully settled or at home in the world. The affect undermines such a state of domestication; it indicates the insecurity and conflicted nature of our bond with the world, it distorts the act of perception, as it were, from within. This rupture records itself in the discourse trying to register acts of perception. For this reason, inconsistencies between the image preserved in discourse and the image preserved by another medium (in this case, in a photograph) should not be treated as errors, but as events worthy of reflection. Rosalind Krauss, drawing inspiration from Freud, Lacan and Lyotard, created the idea of the optical unconscious.48 Vision is created not thanks to mechanisms of perception, but thanks to its distortions. Acts of seeing arise thanks to what is invisible, what has been subject to denial, and what appears in the field of consciousness as negation. This process of denial requires some material vestige, which remains in the plane of visibility, but which may simultaneously be overlooked. An example of such a phenomenon is Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. A coloured shadow in the picture resembling the shape of a vulture completely alters the rules of looking: it destroys the illusory three-dimensionality of the painting, makes it into a surface of libidinal recording and undermines the religious theme of the work. The image of the vulture was Leonardo da Vinci’s earliest childhood memory: ‘I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle, a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.’49 It was an image that meant nothing (it indicated nothing ‘more’ and was not associated with anything in particular), and yet it left a very strong impression on his imagination and emotions (‘I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures’). Only the image and the affect prompted by it remain; the meaning of the image is obscure and its origin subject to falsification. Freud attempted to elucidate the real genealogy of an image that was neither memory nor dream: ‘On this view the scene with the vulture would not be a memory of Leonardo’s but a phantasy, which he formed at a later date and transposed to his childhood.’50 A twofold, dialectically coupled displacement in time is accomplished here, characteristic of Freud’s genealogical conceptions: the remembered image is both a reaction to denied experience and a veil shielding

98

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

from its potentially destructive impact; for the subject, it is associated with a particular source but also delayed, actively shaping the subject’s destiny while being written into it retrospectively – it points to something, while at the same time masking that ‘something’. It both threatens and protects. Freud shows, following Oskar Pfister, that the contours of the vulture may be found in the composition of one of the larger coloured fields (part of Mary’s robe). The picture with religious content therefore contains a powerful memory trace – constantly present on the surface, fully visible, and yet existing on the borderline of visibility. This memory trace becomes visible only when we alter the paradigm of looking. Only a change in his strategy for interacting with a picture (reading it as a text, a puzzle, a montage of heterogeneous conceptions, as surface and not as illusory depths) enabled Freud to expand the possibilities for seeing the painted work, which thereby became a record of the subject’s (the artist’s) complex libidinal genealogy. The type of heterogeneous montage discovered by Freud in Leonardo’s picture is not only a trace of forgotten contents, but also a trace of the forgotten process of forgetting. The complex genealogy of the picture indicates both suffering (connected with the loss of one of Leonardo’s two mothers) and the need to resolve the internal conflict (arising from having forgotten his first mother) and portray it in a harmonious form, namely the non-conflictual vision of two saintly women. Every religious picture, according to Lyotard, stabilizes libidinal energy in the form of lasting dispositifs. ‘The artist seems to have used the blissful smile of Saint Anne to disavow and cloak the envy felt by the unfortunate woman when she was forced to give up her son to her better-born rival, as she had once given up his father as well,’ writes Freud.51 This new experience of seeing pulsates between two possibilities: the exposure of the genealogy of guilt and a vision of the total meeting of psychological needs. A similar kind of double vision shaped the theatrical events I discussed above. In writing about the optical unconscious, Rosalind Krauss treats the figure of the vulture as a ready-made, an object retrieved by the unconscious in order to distort and at the same time create the plane of vision. In fact, the object is not a disturbance but a condition of seeing. It is a trace of traumatic experience, which seeks working-through in the image of the two mothers tending with feeling the one child. Krauss’s correction here is crucial: it incorporates into Freudian theory of the image, the theory of the trace understood from the material perspective, and treated as a vestige, residue, remnant. Epiphanic and metonymic spatial structures of this sort likewise underpin the creation of theatrical spaces that refer to images, memory and experience of historical cataclysm.

5 Without mourning

Let us return to the theme of shock and indifference, trauma and stupidity, to the insolubility of questions relating to Polish reactions to the extermination of Jews. It is time to verify certain assumptions. Hannah Arendt wrote about the stupidity of German society, the inability to feel oneself into someone else’s experience. The situation of the Polish observers, however, was different: the almighty pressure of visibility came into play, which was capable of breaking (albeit in very delayed reactions) the indifference ingrained in society – but not necessarily breaking it in a positive, empathetic sense. Following Saul Friedlander, Geoffrey H. Hartman asserts: ‘even as bystanders – as nonparticipant observers, either during the events or in the fifty years since – we suffer something like a trauma, a breach in the normal thinking about human and civilized nature; and this breach needs more time to heal’.1 Here I would emphasize the definition ‘something like’, which tries to uphold the difference between the experiences of the victim and onlooker, but at the same time erases it. The incident of unexpected visibility on the street, described by Brandys in Samson, became the secret of ‘anonymous bodies’, recorded in their memory as something excluded from social communication. Lack of help did not mean lack of reaction. Indifference can assume forms that are aggressive as well as fearful. Was this however traumatic experience? Or only ‘something like’ traumatic experience? Experience of ‘mangled life’ does not create a community of fate, as Jerzy Jedlicki soberly diagnosed: ‘before that comes about, “exclusive worlds” arise, fenced off from one another with separate rules of life and death’.2 The sight of someone else’s extreme suffering, by now inhuman suffering, perceived as animal suffering, destroys any kind of ‘we’, annihilates the collective illusion of ‘humanity’, as Susan Sontag explains.3 Unless, in our defensive reflex reaction, we appeal to theatricality and distance ourselves through its mechanisms from the image of someone else’s suffering. Judith Butler thinks similarly: she treats sensitivization to the precariousness of human life more as a postulate, as a political project in a time of extraordinary visibility of suffering inflicted on other people,

100

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

rather than as a fundamental and irrefutable law of humanity. She reminds us of the warnings of Hegel and of Melanie Klein: ‘the apprehension of precariousness leads to a heightening of violence, an insight into the physical vulnerability of some set of others that incites the desire to destroy them’.4 Butler speaks, on the one hand, of the possibility of shaking the monolith of ideology with the aid of an affect (terror at the precariousness of human life), but shows, on the other hand, how ideologies control and limit the possibility for affective experience. The mass production of death requires a distribution of grieving, an acknowledgement of the fact that the life of certain populations is not a totally human one and that their death does not impose the obligation to grieve. By the same token, the boundary between a living human being and a dead human being succumbs to erasure or dislocation. Butler therefore treats the possibility of affective experience of other people’s sufferings and deaths as a form of political working through of our own attitudes, and not as the ability to feel imparted to us naturally. One way or another, indifference (moral, mental or practical, indicating a lack of action) combined with aggression towards the totally defenceless victims of mass and organized violence is an affect that is difficult to accept and work through, and actually precludes processes of mourning. Mourning must assume a feeling of loss, while in the case of Polish experiences it is often more appropriate to speak of a difficult-to-defuse surplus of affects reinforcing the inability to perceive the extermination of the Jews in categories of loss (this often occurred even in the case of compassionate witnesses). Feliks Tych observed that alongside the intensification of the extermination, attitudes towards Jews in Polish society also intensified, linked partly perhaps to feelings of helplessness, but resulting also from many other impulses (impunity, material gain, stupidity, ingrained discriminatory attitudes, social envy).5 The visibility of Jews in the social space at the time of the Holocaust was often felt in categories of excess, trouble and discomfort; their disappearance therefore did not trigger feelings of loss and lacking, but rather a sense of restored equilibrium, reassurance, and being rid of something superfluous and burdensome. This same mechanism also operated later on. Jews who survived the war and tried to return to their homes experienced it. And almost every Polish film about the Holocaust provoked the same question: Why talk about it again? Why show it yet again?6 Cultural and political projects (of assimilation, expulsion, extermination) connected with any attempt to ‘solve the Jewish question’, appealed precisely to notions of superfluity, excess, redundancy. Therefore, both the category of mourning and the category of melancholy try to introduce a kind of political correctness into the sphere of the always politically incorrect libidinal economy of primal processes, identified by Lyotard. Therefore, social persuasion, the rhetorical figure of which is the concept of ‘neighbours’ (and thus people close to us, those who are like us and therefore worthy of ‘mourning’), falls apart when confronted by the still vital phantasms about

WITHOUT MOURNING

101

Jews (or, as Lyotard would have it, ‘jews’), which disturb the state of desired libidinal equilibrium. Periods of intensified memory of the Holocaust tend to be described not so much with the aid of processes of mourning, but rather of libidinal excess – of the unwanted reminder, which mobilizes that collective narcissism able to absorb a dangerous surplus of aggressive collective libido. A profound expert on these mechanisms in Polish post-war culture was Jerzy Grotowski, since only the medium of theatre was capable of revealing the complexity of processes involved. The object of traumatizing anxiety became – in consequence – the very possibility of becoming aware of the actual fact of having forgotten, and not the content of the forgotten images. A paradoxical situation arose: remembered images were exploited in other contexts of memory, while any suspicion of forgetfulness was rejected with indignation. The topic of the extermination of the Jews was taken up and images associated with it in the appropriate historical context were invoked, often triggering precisely a sense of excess, of surfeit, redundancy. ‘We have already seen it, we already know: what’s the point of discussing it yet again?’ came the answer from the auditorium. Although, on the other hand, the sudden eruption of collective energy was eagerly incorporated into the process of creating a narrative about the ‘tragic’ experience of the community. Here again we should refer to Grotowski, who restored to both Polish and European theatre shocking forms of tragic spectacle at the cost of acknowledging social forgetfulness. On the various forms assumed by grieving, Butler writes that not every death in the field of social visibility prompts the need to grieve. Butler does not pose the question, however, as to whether delayed grieving still counts as grieving, or whether it is also an act of social compensation or identificatory about-turn of a completely different libidinal nature. Although her thought may be founded on the idea that ‘grieving’ is one of the ‘fictions’ we create – which does not detract, however, from its political efficacy; precisely the space of mourning becomes the place of radical violation of the symbolic order (as in Butler’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone).7 Forbidden grieving requires the deformation of meanings within a given culture and makes use of forms of catachresis. Therefore, we ought not to console ourselves with belated mourning, but rather examine the manner in which its redundancy is manifested. In 1988, Andrzej Wajda staged, in the Old Theatre (Stary Teatr) in Kraków, The Dybbuk (1913–1916) by Yiddish folklorist and playwright S. Ansky (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport). The spectacle was meant to be just such a form of belated mourning: during the preview the actors appeared in the finale holding lighted votive candles. Wajda, however, swiftly removed this element from the final scene; he must have perceived its falsity – not so much the falsity of his own intentions (there is no reason to impute this to an artist who, since his debut in 1955, had always been sensitive to Holocaust memory) as the falsity manifested in the process of the spectacle’s reception. Those people who understood the reason for summoning the Polish public to mourn perceived  the  incompatibility of

102

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

the proposed ritual with the scale and nature of the death that was being grieved for in this way. Those, on the other hand, who treated the summons to mourn as unnecessary and misguided, saw in Wajda’s gesture merely a form of political opportunism associated with the commemorative function of the spectacle (its premiere was associated in the reviews with the forty-fifth anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto). Almost twenty years later, The Dybbuk was staged by Krzysztof Warlikowski; he too placed An-sky’s drama within the framework of Polish memory of the Holocaust. It is difficult to regard Warlikowski’s production as a summons to the audience to mourn. On the contrary: he employed rather a strategy of ‘conflict’, provoked anxiety, induced spectators to rethink their own identity and enjoined them to come to terms with the surfeit of experiences. Butler again: Our affect is never merely our own: affect is, from the start, communicated from elsewhere. It disposes us to perceive the world in a certain way, to let certain dimensions of the world in and resist others. […] How do we re-approach this question of affective response and moral evaluation by considering those already operative frameworks within which certain lives are regarded worthy of protection while others are not, precisely because they are not quite ‘lives’ according to prevailing norms of recognizability? Affect depends upon social supports for feeling: we come to feel only in relation to a perceivable loss, one that depends on social structures of perception.8 Binary models of mourning and melancholy therefore seem totally ineffectual as tools for analysing the affective events that undoubtedly took place in Polish society in connection with the Holocaust. Mourning and melancholy belong among the strategies of simulation in post-war Polish culture; they create beautified images and should therefore be examined with particular distrust. Polish theatrical culture, employing ritualistic models of mourning, is accustomed to creating its own ideologies. For example, the beautiful melancholy image of the Jewish cemetery, created by Krystyna Zachwatowicz for the Stary Teatr’s scenery in The Dybbuk, was frequently applauded by audiences as soon as the curtain rose. The imposing beauty of the image, however, may reveal fear on the part of the creators of the performance; fear of the hostility or indifference of the spectators towards the Jewish world invoked on stage. Provoking admiration would allow such unwelcome attitudes to be disarmed. Wajda treated Ansky’s play as a Jewish Forefathers’ Eve; the beginning of the performance makes reference to Stanisław Wyspiański’s production of Mickiewicz’s drama in 1901. I will refer again to an example from Kantor’s theatre. The inclusion of his The Dead Class by critics in the paradigm of the Romantic tradition, especially the ritual and mourning model of theatre exemplified by Forefathers’ Eve, profoundly falsifies the nature of this spectacle (as well as its affective

WITHOUT MOURNING

103

impact, often defined by spectators as shock), even if Kantor himself in later spectacles attempted to include his own theatre within the Romantic tradition of ritualistic mourning. Polish theatre, perhaps more than any other area of artistic creativity, became the space of powerful declarations relating to collective memory. At one extreme, therefore, we have the declaration of complete and absolute memory: we are a society heavily affected by historical experience; we remember everything; the past, especially the traumatic past, is familiar to everyone; the task of theatre is to convey the resources of this collective memory in a supragenerational fashion. This indicates that we are a society always ready to mourn. At the other extreme, there appears instead the accusation of amnesia: we remember nothing; the past has become an enigma to us, because it is more comfortable not to remember. Eternal melancholy is therefore our destiny. This type of generalized frame of social self-awareness is in both cases (the mourning society and the melancholy society) the condition for the constant provocation of catharsis, shock, bewilderment. One could say: this is an ideological trick, which guarantees libidinal movement within the community of spectators treated here as a social microcosm of the national community. And it always confirms the same experience of communality: both in the sphere of absolute memory and of absolute amnesia. Both ideological models have their historical and transhistorical dimension, both have already been inscribed into the Romantic tradition, and as such have been revived many times over. Both paralyse the work of memory based on proper diagnosis of the past. Either we remember ‘everything’, or we remember ‘nothing’, since the idea of social amnesia relates to some kind of ‘whole’, which is clearly known to those who have forgotten ‘everything’ – and is not intended to genuinely waken memory, but to constantly mobilize the sense of communality, thanks, among other things, to an undefined sense of guilt. The theme of the lost possibility of mourning (and the consequences of this fact for theatre as a medium for mourning) was grasped perhaps most profoundly by Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014) in his play Przyrost naturalny (Birth Rate). Published originally in 1966, the drama is a critical examination of post-war strategies of forgetting. Abandonment of his initial idea of writing a comedy could be interpreted as recognition of the impossibility of sustaining any longer the stipulated state of forgetfulness as a condition for social activeness. The spirit of the times, Różewicz explains, demands something else. The play’s narrator calls himself ‘an inhabitant of the greatest cemetery in the history of mankind’.9 This is both at once the truth and a platitude – the ideological efforts of the Polish state, as well as numerous films, literary works and theatrical productions, cemented this type of individual and collective self-identification, yet at the same time any over-individualized historical testimony was subject to vigilant ideological control in the whole period between 1945 and 1989. The challenge to

104

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

memory, resulting from the fact of being ‘an inhabitant of the greatest cemetery in the history of mankind’, takes an astonishing turn in Różewicz’s text. The image haunting the artist’s imagination is the growing mass of people filling an ever more confined space. Gradually more and more people enter the train compartment: ‘Old men, women, and children’.10 The forms of civilized behaviour undergo metamorphosis. ‘The living mass is so tightly packed together that it begins to boil over. […] Movement blends with shouting. Finally everything comes to a standstill.’11 Różewicz treats this image as a metaphor for the uncontrolled growth in the birth rate, as an apocalyptic vision of the imminent future. He operates, however, with a concrete image, associated not so much with the mass production of life as the mass production of death: with people packed into trains transporting them to extermination camps, people crammed into gas chambers. The apocalypse of the future rests on images of the apocalypse that has already taken place, right here in Poland, ‘in the greatest cemetery in the history of mankind’. The time vectors may be changed in this case, since Różewicz creates a vision of excessive life as superfluous life, mass produced, deprived of value. Life unworthy of mourning, in Butler’s sense. The experience of loss changes, therefore, with the experience of excess – so a process of mourning is out of the question. The traumatic event remains inaccessible to consciousness in the historical dimension (it is not interpreted as something that has already happened). In Różewicz’s intention, formulated openly, excess expresses the apocalyptic fear of a demographic explosion.12 This fear, however, feeds – in a concealed way – on the past. We could say that images of destruction are saturated with vitality. Instead of mourning, there is another experience here, which is difficult to capture and express. ‘In my plays the moments of silence are filled with the thoughts of an anonymous inhabitant of a big city, a nameless figure living in a metropolis, a faceless human being whose life has unfolded between the gigantic necropolis and the constantly growing polis.’13 We do not gain, however, any insight into this experience, which appears in the place of mourning and instead of mourning. The trace that leads us to what is surrounded by silence (not only on stage but also socially) may be the scene where Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim, one of Różewicz’s favourite books during the Nazi occupation, is cited in the final section of Birth Rate. This is the incident in the courthouse after the courtroom has been vacated, when Jim interprets the accidentally overheard words about a ‘mangy dog’ as an insult directed at himself (‘Did you speak to me?’). Let us recall that the fault that lands Jim in court is his escape from a drowning ship, leaving the passengers to certain death, refusing to help or take any part in what happens to them. These people – Malay pilgrims – are to Jim merely a mass, a collectivity, an anonymous and alien crowd, which Jim in the moment of catastrophe regards as condemned to inevitable extermination and which it is impossible to help in any way. Already at the beginning of the

WITHOUT MOURNING

105

novel, they are referred to as ‘cattle’. For some reason, Różewicz is unable to compose this experience, consisting in elements of mourning, fear, guilt, silence and indifference, into any kind of coherent dramatic whole. He therefore uses a strategy of dismantlement: he compiles images, quotations, formulates doubts. He exposes yet at the same time conceals the historical sources of the experience about which he would like to write. The only hope – when confronted by the impossibility of writing a drama – becomes the medium of theatre as a place of action, of an artistic act that depends on the creativity of many persons: ‘I’m alone and I’m compelled to write a literary work, to describe what would be easier to transmit in direct contact with living people.’14 ‘I think this is the first time since I started writing plays for the theatre that I have felt such an overpowering need to talk with the director, designer, composer, actors … with the whole theatre.’15 For Różewicz, theatre ceases to be a place of performances (the staging of dramas), and becomes instead a place for the circulation and exchange of experiences, a place of repetition, the enacting of something that is surrounded by social silence. Theatre replaces the ritual of societal mourning. It admits flawed, mutilated, incomplete forms, or simply those that cannot be identified with any cultural models. Theatre is at one and the same time a living process and a space where existing symbolic structures can be dismantled. The project presented by Różewicz in Birth Rate was not fundamentally a utopian one; the play was revived and performed many times by post-war Polish theatres. Różewicz was perfectly aware of the potential of theatre as a place for half-revealed, half-concealed negotiations, the exchange of experiences, the circulation of individual testimonies and collective energy, for both conscious and unconscious work. He did not so much propose a new form of theatre as alert us to what the exceptional nature of this medium in post-Holocaust reality depended upon.

106

PART TWO

The theatre and the Holocaust

108

6 This shameful Jewish war

1. On 18 March 1945 in the recently liberated and undestroyed city of Kraków, before the end of the war, there appeared in the Sunday edition of Dziennik Polski (Polish Daily), in the column entitled ‘U pisarzy’ (‘Among the Writers’), a short informational sketch about Stefan Otwinowski (1910–1976) and his work to date, both before and during the Occupation. From this we learn that his novel Wniebowzięcie (Assumption) is ‘an image of the internal terror and external threat which the heroes go through during Hitler’s rule in Poland’.1 The final sentence of the newspaper article announces a new play for the theatre (Otwinowski’s first was a comedy entitled Odwiedziny (The Visit), ‘read many times in Warsaw at underground literary gatherings’). ‘Now the author is completing his second play: Wielkanoc (Easter), a Romantic drama about an uprising in a small Jewish shtetl – a drama from the memorable Easter days of 1943.’2 Information about the play must have come from the author himself. It was most likely he who defined the theme and called it ‘a Romantic drama about an uprising’. Evidently, it was important to Otwinowski to locate his play about the extermination of Jews in a provincial Polish shtetl within the parameters of an easily recognizable cliché – since there is perhaps no more banal literary paradigm in Polish culture. Also, the description ‘from the memorable Easter days of 1943’ (my emphasis) must have come from the author and makes an obvious supposition concerning collective memory. The reference, clearly, is to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. That short phrase is a powerful attempt to set the extermination of the Jews and memory of it within the frames of Polish history and Polish culture. The best way of doing so, it seemed to Otwinowski, was to refer to Romanticism. The author of the novel about ‘internal terror and external threat’ (‘terror’ was not one of the themes of Polish Romanticism) must have treated the ‘Romanticism’ of his own play as the most effective means of symbolic

110

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

persuasion in relation to a society that was never inclined to situate the Ghetto Rising within its own memory of ‘uprisings’. The events of April 1943 have often been denied even the designation ‘uprising’. Otwinowski, reacting animatedly to events connected with the extermination of Jews,3 must have been aware of this. Hence, for example, the naïve references in his play to Stanisław Wyspiański’s Warszawianka (The Varsovienne, 1898), a drama about the November Uprising (1830–1831). Otwinowski’s strategy could be formulated as follows: let us exploit the traditional and extraordinarily vital paradigms of our culture, so that Polish society does not deny the events to which it was a witness and includes memory of them within the domain of this same culture. In this same issue of Dziennik Polski – on the very same page and in the very same column – in the feuilleton entitled ‘Resztki i początki’ (‘Remains and Beginnings’), from the regular cycle ‘Przejażdżki literackie’ (‘Literary Rides’), Czesław Miłosz called for the protection of the rescued material effects of Polish culture, for a fundamental rethink by writers of what new literary works they wished to offer Polish readers after the war, and for a revolt against Romantic traditions, which he considered to be anachronistic and ineffectual in relation to the events of recent years. Is it not worth fundamentally rethinking our cult of the Romantics and finally nailing this Romantic conception of life, which has made [here Miłosz surely meant ‘uczyniła’ (‘made’) and not the printed ‘uczciła’ (‘honoured’)] out of twentieth-century Romantics, the intellectual general staff of Mussolini and Hitler? Are we not going to publish books that show how it really was with our uprisings of 1831 and 1863?4 The association on the pages of a popular daily newspaper of the Romantic tradition with Mussolini and Hitler was an almighty attempt at persuasion in the face of the next phase of Romantic asphyxiation that was threatening Polish society, according to Miłosz. How many readers of Dziennik Polski, however, knew the philosophical genealogy of German Romanticism and questioned the political consequences? Apart from this, the Romantic tradition was associated in Poland with the culture of victims, not perpetrators. Miłosz wanted to disturb and even shock with this juxtaposition, perhaps even cunningly refer to the universal hatred of the wartime criminals and exploit the potential of this affect for a radical revision of culture. He had well-thought-out intellectual arguments, but he was also well aware that Romantic paradigms were in excellent health and enabled society to defend itself against the truth of its own experiences. They therefore had to be made to look ugly. Miłosz probably had no idea that his feuilleton would appear in close proximity to the note about Otwinowski’s ‘Romantic drama’. It is also worth reminding ourselves that Miłosz had already written about the ‘memorable Easter days of 1943’ in his poem ‘Campo di Fiori’, which did not gratify Romantic needs for community and referred literally and

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

111

mercilessly to Polish indifference towards the extermination of Jews. The poet also knew, however, that ‘naked and defenceless, and chaotic reality’5 was bound to lose in competition with literature. Several years later Miłosz wrote about Polish Romanticism in a letter to Tadeusz Kroński in a similar uncompromising tone: ‘I loathe Romanticism, Romanticism is a plague, unhappy émigrés are Romantics two hundred per cent, it’s a sign of their total decline and decay. But poets in Poland are also Romantics, it’s sickening […]. I am not claiming that overcoming Romanticism is easy and can come at once. But it is possible to fill one’s life with it.’6 Miłosz’s loathing of Polish collective rituals was overwhelming. Miłosz sees post-war Polish culture as caught in the clutches of two Romanticisms: the former one – martyrological, nationalistic and fascistic – as well as a new revolutionary one, revived under the influence of Russia (‘rehashing Romanticism under this influence is one of the most disturbing developments’7). He writes about this to Kroński, yet it was under its ‘enormous influence’ that the poet survived the ‘turning point’ of 1943: ‘I understood what I had only vaguely intuited before then: that interwar Poland had ended irrevocably and there was no point in clinging to its remnants. In other words, I stopped being a poet of the interwar years, I began to become someone else.’8 In remembering the fate of Tadeusz Kroński and his wife Irena, Miłosz does not fail to point out that during the war, they lived in a state of heightened danger: ‘just like everyone else during the German occupation, but especially for reasons of race – Irena was Jewish, as was he on his father’s side’.9 Miłosz’s project, to ‘become someone else’, found its phantasmal expression in a screenplay about a Warsaw Robinson Crusoe – a man living for several months amid the ruins of Warsaw. Miłosz wrote it together with Jerzy Andrzejewski, impressed by the account of Władysław Szpilman, whom he met in Kraków after the war. Szpilman, after leaving the ghetto, had hidden on the Aryan side, and after the defeat of the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944 had remained in the deserted ruined city until the end of the war. The idea took shape in my head when I was in Kraków in the spring of 1945, influenced by a visit to Warsaw and seeing there a lunar landscape of ruins, and also by Andrzejewski’s and my own conversations with the pianist Szpilman, who hid in the ruins throughout the whole time of the uprising until the entry of the Soviet troops. Like Robinson Crusoe on his uninhabited island, collecting retrieved objects and worrying on a daily basis about wild animals and cannibals. Now, however, it was an uninhabited island created by civilization turning against itself. A lonely man in a landscape of ruins: that was the original idea for the film.10 Miłosz was seeking radicality: hence his friendship with the philosopher Kroński, hence his fascination with the fate of Szpilman. He confessed to

112

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Kroński that he ‘likes drastic things’.11 Szpilman’s story certainly falls into the category of ‘drastic things’. Miłosz’s assessment, however, of what was ‘drastic’ was objective, firmly grounded in reality, untranslatable into Romantic myths. Imposing a Robinsonade motif onto Szpilman’s experience should be included among his more radical ideas, allowing concentration on the difficult act of survival, of rescue thanks to human effort and not to metaphysical forces. It would be worth tracing sometime this thread of the Robinsonade, since it has its theatrical dimension, which we may find in at least two renowned Polish productions addressing the theme of the Holocaust: Józef Szajna’s Replika and Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class. The worldwide resonance of both productions confirms the pertinence of the diagnoses made by Miłosz immediately after the war. The film project was also concerned to use the authentic ruins of the city, in a similar way to how the ruins of Berlin were used in Roberto Rossellini’s 1948 film Germany, Year Zero (something that the authors of the Polish screenplay could not have known at the time). The film was therefore to be a document, a testimony and at the time a particular kind of theft of the testimony: the use of the Jewish fate to create a phantasm of radical change in one’s own identity. Miłosz concentrated on the materiality of the devastation and not on its symbolism. Therefore, as the ruins and rubble of Warsaw were gradually cleared away, the conception of the film lost for its originator its fundamental sense. He became increasingly irritated by the exploitation of topics linked to the war. Already then, he perceived its compensatory and masking mechanisms: ‘for the next twenty years people will write about the Occupation, because German figures are the only outlet for descriptions of cruelty’.12 Imagination inspired by the war could sate itself on images of cruelty, while one’s own lesser evil always took place harmlessly against the backdrop of absolute evil, represented by the Nazi crimes. The concept of ‘year zero’ was very close to Miłosz at that time. The idea of creating the film coincided with his condemnation of Romanticism, published in Dziennik Polski, for its spiritual affiliations with the recent Nazi crimes. Many years later, Jean-Luc Godard picked up the concept of ‘year zero’ in his Histoire(s) du cinéma. For him, however, year zero was not the end of the war, but the time of the Holocaust, in which European culture was blind to the crimes being committed and failed to see the death of millions of people systematically asphyxiated in the gas chambers. Let us not forget, however, that Miłosz dated his own turning point to 1943.

2. Between 17 January and 23 February 1946, fifty performances took place of Juliusz Osterwa’s production of the play Lilla Weneda (Lilla Veneda, 1839) by Juliusz Słowacki. This drama, which belongs to the canon of Polish

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

113

Romanticism, treats the theme of the eradication of one nation by another, takes place in prehistoric times, and is full of Romantic frenzy and historicophilosophical passion. The production was seen by 48,997 spectators. By 15 April, 100 performances had taken place, from which we may surmise that the total number of spectators was doubled. All the spectators of Osterwa’s production were given to experience, in the most material sense, a powerful clash between reality and theatre, felt as the contrast – bordering on hallucination – between art and the real world, between catastrophe and victory, between destruction and the pathos of the work of reconstruction. ‘Amid the ruins, the burnt-out streets of Warsaw – the rebuilt and first to be nationalized theatre, Szyfman’s old theatre, shines in blue and gold, glows with freshness and light.’13 ‘The beautiful, great edifice of the Teatr Polski looms above Warsaw’s rubble and ruins.’14 When the blood-red lights fall onto the stage, the whole theatre fills with the powerful voice of Roza Veneda with its convincing ‘We shall prevail’. And that word, even though I left the theatre threshold long ago, accompanies me still. And it still rings in my ears when I wade through Warsaw’s muddy streets, among the tumbledown houses, remembering the great victory of a year ago – the victory of the capital’s liberation.15 The confrontation of theatre with reality, of the genuine ruins of the city with theatrical harps, of memory of the real extermination of Warsaw with the dramatized lament of the chorus of Venedians (a prehistoric peaceloving people) over their extermination by cruel conquerors (the Lechites), the ‘shining’ theatre with the ‘tumbledown houses’, was no doubt a powerful experience that had significant impact on the reception of the performance. For sure, only faith in the contemporary relevance of Romantic myths could ensure that this theatre, as it cast its antiquated spells amid a sea of ruins, could arouse such strong emotions. After six years of horror and silence such as the history of this most tormented nation in the world [my emphases] has not seen before, after six years of monstrous disfigurement of the Polish word for ends hostile to it, at last from the boards of the most beautiful theatre in Poland rigged together from the ruins, that Polish word – that word silenced and homeless for so many years of dolour, unuttered pain, deprivation of work – falls on an auditorium speechless in tense expectation, the genuine, sublime word, resounding with the cry of tragic pathos as tragic as the pathos of the present moment…16 The greatest impression was made by the monumental choruses of conquered Venedians, a scenic guarantee of the animated spirit of communal feeling.

114

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Juliusz Osterwa is therefore owed much gratitude for shifting the scenes with the chorus as far as possible from the conventional model and clothing them in the greatest artistic beauty. These scenes were perhaps the best received and swept spectators away with their otherworldliness, achieved thanks to the concentration of scenic, decorative, light and musical effects. It is hard to imagine anything more perfect from the point of view of composition than those twelve majestic old men in costumes reminiscent of the Eastern borderlands, who, seated on their Druidic stones beneath a sky illuminated by marvellous colours, strike the strings of their golden harps and intone the song of their tragic nation. The verses are recited by the harpists in turn, only in exceptional moments collectively, thanks to which the spectator is spared monotony, while any pathos, in the wrong sense of the word, is stifled.17 Attempts made from today’s perspective to politicize the post-war controversy surrounding the premiere tend to be too one-sided, as a dispute between advocates of the new political order and its opponents.18 The conviction exists that the attack on Osterwa’s production came exclusively from leftist journals, while defence appeared only in the Catholic and nationalist press. There is undoubtedly some truth in this formulation, but also a lot of false generalizations. Leftist publicists did indeed unmask the political suggestiveness of the spectacle, associating its emotional tone with the mood prevailing in the political underground. But they also saw in it an apotheosis of the new post-war reality: the Venedians oppressed by the Lechite nobility were the Polish plebs, forefathers of the present-day workers and peasants. The reviewer for the Catholic Dziś i Jutro (Today and Tomorrow) in turn criticized excessive underplaying of the play’s religious symbolism, the fact that ‘over the dying pyre of the Venedians the figure of Bogurodzica (the Holy Mother of God) did not appear in any visual form’.19 Romantic myths, as we can see, could be interpreted any way people chose. The dividing line between them must therefore have run deeper, or simply run elsewhere. Behind the ideological rhetoric of the reviews, an elementary feeling of impropriety was felt by certain spectators. Let us follow this affective trace. Certain viewers were offended by the pathos, the excessively poetical quality, the relishing of atmospheres of horror and threat. Some associated the celebration of tribal myths with the Nuremberg race laws (1935), which had sparked the systematic and legally sanctioned persecution of Jews in the Third Reich.20 Were such feelings mere tools in a political campaign against Osterwa, or did they also contain arguments worthy of consideration, irrespective of the political lobbies they represented? Let us recall the antiRomantic arguments put forward by Miłosz. Mention of the Nuremberg laws is perhaps the only trace that indicates the crucial, historically precise reasons why Romantic myth departs from reality. Who are the Venedians, and who are the Lechites? The proposition suggested by the theatre – to

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

115

regard the Lechites as Germans and the Venedians as Poles – undermined the actual sense of the drama, serving only to appease the narcissism of the victims. Other meanings were also prompted. The Lechites are the oppressive political elites, the Venedians the exploited ordinary folk. The revolutionary rhetoric was thwarted, however, by the anachronistic artistic style of the spectacle. Eventually, even this interpretation was possible: the Venedians are the armed soldiers of the underground opposition, while the Lechites are the new persecutors of unquenchable Polishness, supported by Moscow. To many critics, Słowacki’s play seemed a tasteless wallowing in the moods of collective extermination. The reviewer for the literary weekly Kuźnica (Smithy) wrote: ‘I do not know of any other work in world literature where such an array of words connected with death, corpses, decomposition, is repeated so many times.’21 The naked, defenceless and chaotic reality, mentioned by Miłosz in his letter to Kroński, pleaded for myth, as we can see. In the immediate post-war cult of ruins, Miłosz discerned something perverse, bordering on the pornographic.22 He clearly treated his screenplay Robinson warszawski (A Warsaw Robinson) as an antidote to the reviving Romantic cult of ruins. He perceived in post-war Polish culture a perverse desire for acts of cruelty, extreme conflicts, but at the same time the disappearance of the sober gaze: ‘It is a very bad sign that Poles have ceased to be able to write about their own country.’23 And this is happening, according to the poet, in a situation where ‘every Polish topic is an international topic’.24

3. Announced at the beginning of 1945, Stefan Otwinowski’s ‘Romantic drama’ appeared a year later on the third anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Easter was published as the seventh volume in a series edited by the Provincial Jewish Historical Commission (Wojewódzka Żydowska Komisja Historyczna) in Kraków. Previously, there had appeared: Dokumenty Zbrodni i Męczeństwa (Documents of Crime and Martyrdom), an anthology of ‘authentic witness statements’; Pamiętnik Justyny (Justyna’s Diary) by Gusta Draenger, the memoir of a joint organizer of the Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa) in Kraków; Uniwersytet Zbirów (University of Criminals) by Michał M. Borwicz, ‘about the Janowska camp in Lwów’; Belżec by Rudolf Reder, ‘about the grave of millions of Jews by the one man rescued from the gas chamber at the Belżec death camp’; Michał M. Borwicz’s Literatura w obozie (Literature in the Camp), ‘an essay on underground life and literary work among the prisoners at the Janowska death camp in Lwów’; and Es brent (It’s Burning) by Mordechaj Gebirtig, ‘works written during the Occupation by the well-known Jewish folk singer murdered by the Germans’. All these volumes also contained photographs, maps, drawings and facsimiles of manuscripts.

116

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Easter was treated by the series editors as a document, which in itself did not yet contradict the notion of a Romantic drama. Stefan Otwinowski’s drama, which we place in the hands of readers, is not only an artistic work but also a document; written during the Occupation, it expresses thoughts and feelings which (due to the physical terror perpetrated by the invader) Polish humanists could not advertise at the time. With this drama we begin the publication of artistic works that are documents of this sort.25 Leon Schiller, when he staged Easter at the Polish Army Theatre (Teatr Wojska Polskiego) in Łódź in autumn 1946, followed precisely this line. He interpreted Otwinowski’s drama as a document reflecting its author’s emotions, wished to appeal to the empathy of viewers, to the ‘kindness of their hearts’, and to move his audience by presenting Polish and Jewish experience of the Occupation years ‘in a sentimental light, without showing the hellish machine of fascism’.26 In order to achieve this goal, he followed the intentions of the author himself, who had toned down many issues; above all, he tried not to render unduly sharply the antisemitic attitudes of Polish society, although they had to appear in his play out of necessity. ‘The ghastliness of reality is shown in the wings.’27 The spectacular coup de théâtre in Otwinowski’s play occurs suddenly, devoid of any psychological motivation: the involvement of one of the heroes, Siciński, a virulent antisemite, in saving the life of a Jewish girl. This apparent collapse in the law of probability, however, was not only the result of toning down the truth about Polish behaviour towards Jews at the time of the Holocaust. It had a very real basis in reality. It is enough to recall the famous appeal of Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, Catholic writer and co-founder of the Żegota organization that helped Jews during the war, who called for Christian help to Jews while claiming at the same time that Jews had not ceased to be enemies of Poles. Help was to be imparted for the sake of the purity of a Christian conscience, while antisemitism, considered to be an irrefutable right safeguarding the interests of the nation, gave this help an even greater lustre of moral sublimity. There was no question here of ordinary ‘human’ empathy, to which Leon Schiller, following the author, wished to appeal. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka’s Protest was analysed with unmatched insight by Jan Błoński,28 who reconstructed Kossak’s strategy thus: a condition for bringing effective help to Jews during the Occupation was the concession made to antisemitism, the unconditional recognition of its right. Only recognition of mutual enmity made possible active help in the wider social dimension. All surviving testimonies to Schiller’s production seem to indicate that its creators were unsuccessful in realizing the goal they had set themselves, that is to appeal to the ‘kindness of hearts’ – or, it was achieved only on a very limited scale. ‘On about the Jews again,’ people complained.29 Otwinowski’s play shared the fate, according to Błoński, of those few ‘literary works that

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

117

can be counted on the fingers of one hand, which portray the attitude of Polish society to Jews. […] It was a burning topic and writers were afraid that they would enter into conflict with the feelings and expectations of readers’.30 According to a survey conducted by the theatre among spectators, there were positive assessments of the production, but also critical and defensive ones (‘I am a Pole and I don’t agree with a lot of things in this play. They are unjust. We all make mistakes’), as well as those that were shockingly aggressive (‘It’s a pity Hitler thrashed you so little!’).31 According to Otwinowski, during one performance it came to ‘anti-Jewish demonstrations’: ‘about twenty people received the play by whistling and stamping their feet, while rotten eggs were thrown at the actors’.32 The breakdown of any empathetic bond in this case has such deep causes that Schiller’s production may be regarded as remarkably symptomatic. Especially if we accept the assumption that an attitude of common feeling, of entering into the fate of another human being, is one of the fundamental bonds uniting the stage with the audience, the figure on stage with the individual spectator. Paralysis in the communicative situation, in the flow of emotions, in empathetic attitudes, indicated the defeat of imaginative acts of identification between the Polish audience and the Jewish fate portrayed on stage. The refusal of empathy and the impossibility of appealing to it would not remain, however, without their consequences; they would become one of the reasons for the disintegration of the traditional symbolic structures of Polish culture, including Polish theatre. The condition for genuine empathy would be the future transformation in social identity, because it was precisely the aforesaid symbolic order that had to a large extent paralysed attitudes of sympathy and compassion towards Jews during the Holocaust. In its most widely disseminated and socially ingrained paradigms, it had proved to be parochial, only ostensibly universal, closed to the experience of others, focused on celebrating its own misfortunes. What had failed in the imaginary order, however, would be fulfilled by roundabout means in the symbolic order: it would disrupt, smash and rebuild it. Although it would take several decades for this to come about, a culminating point in this transformation in Polish theatre was nevertheless the premiere of Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class in 1975. The shock provoked by Kantor’s spectacle was the result of negotiations that had been going on under the skin of Polish culture for many years between its symbolic space and the ‘ordinary human reaction’, referred to by Miłosz when explaining the circumstances in which he wrote his poem ‘Campo di Fiori’.33 If we remember the state of paralysis to which such reaction was subject in everyday social practice, then ‘ordinariness’ may be regarded as more of a rhetorical stratagem. It is worth emphasizing that Schiller’s experience at that time was no exception. Aleksander Ford had begun work on his film Ulica Graniczna (Border Street) in 1946. From the very beginning, its theme as well as its conception had aroused anxiety. No doubt for this reason, the director

118

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

transferred production of the film to Czechoslovakia. The screenplay was revised many times. The intention of appealing to spectators’ empathy was also not alien to Ford, since he makes the children of a Warsaw backyard, whose lives are radically changed and finally separated by war, the heroes of his film. Thirty years later, Kantor in The Dead Class, similarly to Ford in Border Street, appeals to the figure of a child and childhood experience. The motif of the popular François waltz is likewise common to both works. In the film, it appears admittedly only once, as the motif played by the street organ accompanying the children on their excursion the day before outbreak of war. But in the screenplay, it was meant to return many times as a reference to an irretrievably lost and destroyed world. Stanisław Janicki called Border Street a spontaneous film, realized under pressure of the director’s personal emotions,34 and connected not only with the Holocaust: ‘At the time when the screenplay of Border Street was being written (1946), the first wave of post-war antisemitism was sweeping through Poland.’35 The film was completed in 1948 and in the same year was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival. The Polish premiere, however, was constantly being delayed. At the end of 1948 and beginning of 1949 the management of Film Polski, the state-run production and distribution company, turned to the writer Maria Dąbrowska, regarded as a moral authority, with a request to view and evaluate Border Street. Dąbrowska sensed immediately that her opinion was to be a litmus test that would reveal the future reaction of Polish society to Ford’s work. For this reason, she was thrown into a quandary. She recorded her ambivalent reactions to the film in her diary. On the one hand, she was very moved: ‘The whole Jewish tragedy is shown extremely well and makes a shocking impression, because the Jewish Marxists forgot about their Marxism and made it with ordinary human love.’36 On the other hand, the film made her indignant: ‘The whole Polish side is blatantly distorted, since it is done with hostility, barely restrained. Admittedly, they made concessions on behalf of Poland, but did not guard against fatal errors, which means that this film, especially as a state-sponsored enterprise, is a scandal, disguised antiPolish propaganda. How to extricate ourselves from this?’37 Dąbrowska also claimed that the film missed its own purpose: instead of combating antisemitism, it exacerbated it. Dąbrowska’s reaction may indeed be treated as a litmus test. First, it is worth noting that Dąbrowska did not doubt that the film was first and foremost a Jewish work, procured by Jewish Marxists. She does not have the slightest problem in distinguishing what is Polish from what is Jewish – and neither does she feel the least moral discomfort because of this (and yet she was invited to give her opinion as a moral authority). Evidently, the war had brought absolute clarity to everyone on this matter: the dividing line had been drawn powerfully and irrevocably. Dąbrowska, when admiring in Border Street the sensational performance of the actor playing little Dawidek, did not omit to mention that ‘this apparently Polish boy’ fell

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

119

splendidly into the ‘role of the little Jew’. The ‘Polish boy’ showed, according to Dąbrowska, ‘an absolutely Jewish type, even in his gestures’.38 We may question, obviously, her insight into the ‘real’ background of the young actor, as well as her somewhat ambiguous praise (based on the identification of ‘Jewishness’ primarily with external characteristics). Her remark about ‘the Jewish tragedy’ being portrayed in the film with ‘ordinary human love’ also invites commentary. First, Dąbrowska suggests that ‘ordinary human love’ was not a sentiment generally accessible to ‘Jewish Marxists’. Second, she does not ask herself what happened  to  ‘ordinary human love’ at the time of the Holocaust or whether one ought to make use of such sentimental clichés in the circumstances’.39 In this context, it is worth recalling Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive, also written in the 1940s. Sartre demonstrates with uncommon insight, how Jews were excluded in European culture from those ‘real human feelings’, so highly prized by Dąbrowska. The antisemite, according to Sartre,40 always required that a Jew should be deprived of his humanity and made exclusively a Jew, should be seen always in the social space and therefore always easily branded a pariah and excluded from the human community. The democrat did precisely the opposite: a Jew was admitted into the general human community at the cost of denying his Jewishness. This in turn caused the Jew’s humanity to become something of an abstract and overly universalized idea. Either way, in the mirror of society, the Jew was always reflected as a being having a double motivation: as a human being and as a Jew. In addition, this double motivation was felt by himself as tearing him apart internally, although it was a conflict introjected from the social space. Returning to Dąbrowska’s remarks in her diary about the anti-Polish character of Border Street, we should ask the simple question as to whether every account of the Jewish fate during the Holocaust is not basically ‘antiPolish’. Dąbrowska’s fear that the film would only exacerbate antisemitic attitudes should be confronted with the analyses of Sartre, who wrote about the silence that befell France immediately after the war on the topic of the Holocaust. Sartre was in no doubt as to the reasons: The whole of France is delighted and happy, dancing in the streets, conflicts in society have died down for the time being; the newspapers devote whole columns to prisoners of war and deportees. Will something be said at last about the tragedy of the Jews? Will we celebrate the return among us of those people who have been miraculously saved, or will we devote just one thought to those who perished in the gas chambers of Majdanek? Not a word. Nor a single line in the papers. Because we should not annoy the antisemites. France more than ever needs Unity.41 It would seem that Sartre, and not Dąbrowska, was right. Every account of the extermination of the Jews (not only that told ‘incorrectly’) inevitably

120

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

exacerbates antisemitism, because every such account undermines the myth of Unity and in so doing becomes an anti-Polish or anti-French account.

4. One can only add that this state of affairs was characteristic not only of the immediate post-war years, but lasted in Poland for decades. It became established as a form of social automatism, i.e. it took on the features of involuntary reaction. This point was recently and accurately formulated by Przemysław Czapliński.42 Every account of the Holocaust provokes in Poland a ‘repulsive reaction’, since it releases an instinctive fear that this account will inevitably, sooner or later, reveal Polish participation in the process of the Holocaust and the attitude of ‘too passive witnesses’. By the same token, a system of ‘deaf communication’ is set in motion. And even more: a witness (or victim) of the Holocaust is faced with the ‘assumed hostility, disgust, mistrust of the addressee, in whose language the testimony will be formulated’.43 Jerzy Jedlicki had drawn attention to this phenomenon already at the end of the 1970s.44 In Jedlicki’s opinion, accounts of the Holocaust in Poland found themselves in a social void, because the communicative situation had been interrupted precisely on the part of the addressee. Jan Błoński also wrote about it: ‘In almost everything written on this topic in Poland […] a hidden or repressed fear is evident that we, Poles, “might come out badly”, that we might be taken to be people lacking in heart and conscience.’45 A condition for Poles’ perception of themselves as sentient beings capable of compassion, therefore became the elimination or correction of accounts of Jewish life during the Holocaust. Neither Czapliński nor Jedlicki analyses the matter exclusively from the point of view of psychology, as a refusal of empathy caused, for example, by denied feelings of guilt. It is transferred by them into the symbolic space of culture and language – where the drama of deaf communication is played out. We should therefore start from the fact, asserted so many times over, that Polish became one of the most important languages of literature about the Holocaust. The reasons are obvious. The work of the Holocaust was carried out above all in the Polish lands: here, before the war, had lived the largest Jewish community in Europe; here, during the war, ghettos and death camps had arisen. For many victims, Polish was the only language in which they could express and record their experiences. Here too, there were the greatest number of witnesses to the Holocaust. Which means that in Polish culture – if, that is, its boundaries are to be defined by the boundaries of language – there exists a vast collection of texts (not only literary texts), the majority of which are poorly known to the users of this language, received with hostility, marginalized or totally removed from cultural memory and consciousness. This triggers a state of high tension and the ever more insistent question as to the reasons for such repudiation. Especially when, if we recall

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

121

the opinion of Henryk Grynberg, ‘Polish literature has achievements on the theme of the holocaust exceeding those of a “superpower”,’46 and also his conviction that the Holocaust is the greatest event with which Polish culture has ever had to deal. Imre Kertész uses his own example to analyse his use of a ‘foreign’ language in Hungarian culture. After the war, Kertész decided to return to Budapest and write in Hungarian. He presents his situation in a penetrating and merciless way. In writing about the Holocaust, he had to use a language that was ‘the consciousness of an indifferent society’.47 The very language itself, its clichés, its hackneyed and deeply ingrained formulae, forced Kertész’s account to the margins, made out of it the voice of a ‘victim’, the voice of ‘he who survived’, changed it therefore into a specific case, alien and extraordinary; because of this very fact it was easy to marginalize. The language forced the writer to confront the ritualized and euphemistic formulae which – imposed by a social majority of language users – were to serve the effacement of genuine experience and thrust it into the sphere of ‘universal, general human suffering’. Kertész had the impression that he had borrowed a language that was not intended for him, that he was given refuge there out of pity, temporally and in specific conditions: ‘I write my books in a borrowed language which, quite naturally, will expel me or tolerate my presence only on the peripheries of its consciousness.’48 In Dąbrowska’s diary record we can see this mechanism at work from the other side, from the perspective of the ‘rightful’ owners of the language: reading her words, one senses the irrefutable certainty of her own cultural affiliation, and also her strong conviction that she has the privilege of deciding what is Polish and what is Jewish – and where the dividing line runs between them. To the latter, therefore, she offers sympathy, yet at the same time fiercely defends the good name of the former. Dąbrowska gives us to understand entirely openly that she considers Ford’s film to be Jewish Marxist contraband, aimed against everything Polish. The only thing she is ready to concede to Ford’s film is sympathy for the ‘Jewish tragedy’ – namely, a tiny drop of empathy qualified by numerous reservations and by hostility. Dąbrowska’s comments are an example of the syndrome of sympathy tempered by enmity described above in relation to Zofia KossakSzczucka’s Protest. Except in Dąbrowska’s case, any remnant of empathy seems to disappear under pressure from her indignation at the film’s antiPolish emphasis. One gets the impression that in her diary, Dąbrowska speaks more fully and less guardedly than she would have dared to do in public. Under guise of private thoughts confided to herself, she in fact permits herself to address the language of an ‘indifferent society’, as Kertész called it, which feels it has the right to negotiate and censor any truth about the Holocaust that is inconvenient to it (in the name of this society, Dąbrowska had after all to express herself and protect it from an account that was unpleasant). Evidently, the ‘concessions made on behalf of Poland’ were unsatisfactory.

122

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Jerzy Jedlicki observed that language always protects cultural concretions, upholds cognitive and ethical patterns and turns away from any act of total destruction of the human personality as formed by culture. It is hard to resist the impression that Dąbrowska became in her own diary the involuntary victim of this language. After all, she was – as we know – perfectly aware of how the experience of the Holocaust breaks down language, violates it profoundly. As Władysław Panas suggests, Dąbrowska wrote the only grammatically incorrect sentence in the whole of her work precisely in a story devoted to the extermination of the Jews.49 The heroine of the story, who hides a Jewish female friend during the Occupation, is plagued by an absurd thought: ‘Why doesn’t Warsaw make an extermination for this river of extermination’ (‘Dlaczego Warszawa nie zrobi tej rzece zagłady od zagłady’). In this very odd sentence, Panas perceives the paradigmatic experience of Polish literature devoted to the Shoah: its semantic and communicative collapse. Jedlicki writes, however, that language defends itself against this type of collapse; ‘previously established and conventionalized systems of thought did not disintegrate even at the epicentre of the global earthquake. Nationalists remained nationalists, liberals remained liberals, Catholics Catholics, communists communists’.50 Each of these systems absorbed the experience of the Holocaust in its own way or denied it. There was no longer a common language. The only common thing is that people no longer create history but are crushed by it. But before this happens, ‘exclusive worlds’ will arise fenced off from one another by different rules of life and death. Worlds, in which even the language is different, just as the language of underground conspiracy and uprising was different from that of the forest partisans, as was the language of the ghetto, or the language of Pawiak prison or the Lagersprache.51 In this world without a common fate, the crossbar of empathy, according to Jedlicki, had been raised very high. This is another possible explanation as to why Leon Schiller’s empathetic project – despite being realized in the theatre – that is, within the framework of the most direct of all possible communicative situations – could not succeed; since, first of all, the common language of the community, its defensive shield, would have to fall apart. The borrowed language, to use Kertész’s metaphor, addresses the community of its users already as a totally different language: violated in its structures, crippled, defenceless and vindictive at the same time. Because the language that expresses the experience of the Holocaust, according to Kertész, should be ‘cruel and full of mourning’,52 bringing destruction to those who use it. In the Polish context, we should speak of the threat that the language of the Holocaust brought to Polish myths and heroic narratives, as the psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński analysed most interestingly.53

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

123

Polish literature became a witness, already during the war, to the nonuniformity of fates: above all those of Poles and Jews. Exposure of this difference has become perhaps one of the most difficult experiences for Polish culture. Unavoidably, it struck at Polish society, which felt itself to be, not without reason, not only a witness to someone else’s suffering but also a victim. The affective power of such striking, however, almost always succumbed to immediate processes of denial. Their source was fear of hearing accounts of one’s own evildoing, all the more so since they were not about sublime metaphysical evil, but – as Kazimierz Wyka described in 1945 – about low and shameful evil, associated with material gain, with feeding on the crimes that someone else had committed. ‘The guilt and crime lay with the Germans; for us were the keys and the cash’. He concludes: ‘it’s hard to imagine a more hideous example of morality’.54

5. In Polish culture after the Holocaust, an unprecedented clash came about between two orders – the symbolic and the real. An unparalleled effort was made (even at the cost of provoking derision) to revitalize symbolic canons, especially Romantic canons, in order to make them more flexible, receptive, capable of universalizing extreme experiences, such as those brought by the war. This was meant to conceal the fact that the symbolic community had disintegrated and prove that Romantic codes and myths were still capable of embracing even the most traumatic experiences. Hence what was actually most real, that is most deeply traumatic, had to forfeit its name, lose its exclusivity. Any overly concrete account of the Holocaust was a threat to this effort to reconstruct the symbolic order. In the struggle between the symbolic and the real, the weakest position fell to the imaginary order, without which, as we know, no act of empathy is possible, but which in turn, when deprived of support on the part of the symbolic order (that is, of that which is held in common, the social, the linguistic), leads to aggressive, competitive and destructive confrontations with images of the other. As proof, we need only remind ourselves of the hysterical reactions in Poland to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: all that was seen were Polish peasants and their indifference to the Holocaust. Lacan might therefore provide a credible explanation for the deaf communication that stymied Holocaust accounts in Polish culture. The exclusion of the imaginary order from discourse about the Holocaust was noted by Georges Didi-Huberman, when he emphasized that the ‘unimaginable’ first made possible the mass extermination of Jews, and then paralysed and dogmatized any debate about it. In his opinion, it is precisely the imaginary order that allows the terrifying image to be changed into testimony, to experience internal rupture and violate fossilized communal notions.55

124

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

In the years 1945–1946 many articles appeared in the Polish press devoted to Polish antisemitism. A significant number were provoked by Otwinowski’s drama and its two stage productions: in Łódź and Kraków.56 The following well-known authors and critics, among others, wrote about Polish antisemitism: Jerzy Andrzejewski, Kazimierz Brandys, Stanisław Dygat, Mieczysław Jastrun, Tadeusz Breza, Stanisław Ossowski, Stefan Otwinowski, Kazimierz Wyka. Some of the articles were republished in the volume Martwa fala (Dead Wave) in 1947. Forty years had to pass before the next stormy debate took place, following the publication in Tygodnik Powszechny of Jan Błoński’s article ‘Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto’ (‘Poor Poles look at the Ghetto’). Heat was added to the immediate post-war discussion, of course, by the recent pogroms against Jews who had been saved: in Rzeszów, Kraków and Kielce. Bitter words were spoken in these articles: beneath the surface of their sentences lurks horror at the attitude of Polish society towards the extermination of Jews. The theme was one and the same: ‘Polish antisemitism did not burn itself out in the ruins and conflagrations of the ghettos.’57 ‘Antisemitism was not destroyed in the Jewish hecatomb.’58 Such sentences repeat themselves like a common refrain in all the articles mentioned here. The authors were direct witnesses to the Holocaust (the majority were writers with sensitive ears and eyes); they must have seen and heard a great deal, since they produced such irrevocably unambiguous formulations. Like, for example, the following: ‘the Polish nation at all levels of society and across the intellectual spectrum from the highest to the lowest, continued after the war to be antisemitically inclined’.59 These are the words of Jerzy Andrzejewski, the author of one of the first literary witnesses to the Holocaust – the story Wielki Tydzień (Holy Week), written under direct impact of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. Equally uncompromising was Kazimierz Wyka: ‘the only country in Europe where antisemitism continues to exist and leads to political and moral crimes, is Poland. A country where Jews were fundamentally extirpated and where during the Occupation resistance to the Germans was the most vehement’.60 This was Wyka, who elsewhere expresses the conviction that ‘a central psycho-economic fact of the Occupation years will undoubtedly remain the disappearance from business and brokerage of millions of Jews’.61 The images of brutality, cruelty, or at best, indifference, must have been terrifying since they dictated words aimed mercilessly at the writer’s own society – without considering reasons or refining arguments, without sympathy even for that society’s sufferings. It is difficult not to sense that behind the formula ‘Polish antisemitism’ lie hidden concrete images that exceed it, namely the terrifying images mentioned by Didi-Huberman: events of physical, symbolic and linguistic violence where Polish reactions to the experience of the Holocaust have been remembered. Mieczysław Jastrun invoked scraps of dialogue overheard among Warsaw’s residents during the ghetto rising, such as the exhortations of some young female civil servants who ran out of their office to watch the burning

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

125

ghetto: ‘Come and look how cutlets are fried from Jews.’62 This type of account took on a phantasmal character: even if its truth can not be proved, it continues to attack collective memory. The most symptomatic story in this respect is that of the roundabout in Krasiński Square, immortalized by Czesław Miłosz in his poem. With an unparalleled feeling of responsibility for the symbolic space of Polish culture, Miłosz adds the image of the roundabout outside the walls of the fighting ghetto, thereby forcing Polish society to confront it. It comes as no surprise that some critics have tried to give the roundabout, which shames the Polish conscience, a phantasmal existence: its existence has either been vehemently denied or transformed into the poet’s empty mythic-making gesture. The symbolic aspect of the poetic image has been used as an argument against its reality. Much effort has been invested into proving that the roundabout on Krasiński Square was closed for the duration of the ghetto uprising. For example: ‘The roundabout revolving near to the burning ghetto has grown into a symbol of Polish antisemitism and indifference to the fate of the murdered Jews. Very effective from a literary point of view, but false.’63 Unfortunately, the historical investigations undertaken by Tomasz Szarota force us to accept the rotating roundabout and the Poles enjoying themselves on it on Easter Sunday 1943, as indisputable facts. Jerzy Andrzejewski immortalizes similar behaviours in his story mentioned above. Perhaps the most terrifying is the hunt by a band of screaming Polish children for a Jewish boy, frightened out of his hideout onto Puławska Street, into the blinding sun and crowd of passers-by. Such an image Aleksander Ford did not dare to include in Border Street. Above all, however, we should look at the record of Emanuel Ringelblum, portraying Polish–Jewish relations during the war, the reports of Jan Karski, or the diary of Zygmunt Klukowski, in order to inform ourselves about the actual attitude adopted by Polish society towards the extermination of Jews.64 The thing that most horrified authors writing directly about Polish antisemitism immediately after the war was the fact that the extermination of the Jews did not come as a moral shock to Polish society, had not inspired sympathy – at most feeble reactions of condemnation emanating from a feeling of imposed duty. Stanisław Dygat, in his review of Schiller’s production of Easter, recalled that events on the other side of the ghetto wall took place in the consciousness of Varsovians ‘somewhere far away, as if in far distant places like China, Mexico or Alaska’.65 Attempts were made to exclude this ‘far distant’ Jewish experience from the symbolic order of Polish culture. Tadeusz Breza, commenting on Otwinowski’s play, drew attention to a characteristic phenomenon.66 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was received by many Poles solely as a sign of the biological instinct of survival; they strove, therefore, to ignore any attempts to include this event within the space of a common history – which was something that the uprising leaders had so tried to emphasize, appealing to the battle cry ‘for our freedom and yours’ and draping both Polish and Jewish flags on ghetto

126

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

buildings. Breza writes that in the ears of many people, the phrase ‘Jewish uprising’ aroused the utmost astonishment: already on the level of language, it seemed incongruous and internally contradictory, sounding like a semantic dissonance or oxymoron, or simply nonsense. The struggle in the ghetto was seen more within the sphere of ‘naked life’ than within the framework of the symbolic tradition of Polish armed uprisings for the preservation of dignity and honour. For many Polish Jews, however, Polish culture and Polish history were the one legible symbolic order capable of protecting a feeling of their own worth. They could appeal to it now, however, only through negation. Władysław Szlengel, who was a witness in the Warsaw Ghetto to the departure of Janusz Korczak and his orphanage children from the Umschlagplatz, composed a poem under the impression of this event, which opens with a statement of the simple fact: ‘Today I have seen Janusz Korczak … ’ In this poem, Szlengel describes the experience of the Holocaust as ‘this shameful Jewish war’, but concludes it with the pathetic, though deliberately poorly formulated and arrhythmic assertion that ‘Janusz Korczak died, so that we might/Have our Westerplatte’.67 It transpires that the symbolic space of Polish history has become the next successive area of exclusion for Polish Jews: the metaphor of Westerplatte, a scrap of Polish coastline heroically defended in September 1939, speaks precisely of this. Therefore, Breza concludes his article with the dramatic challenge not to allow a situation where ‘each of these nations flows again exclusively within its own, fenced-off life channels’.68

6. Leon Schiller, in staging Otwinowski’s Easter at the Polish Army Theatre in Łódź, must have known into what territory of social indifference and hostility he was encroaching, all the more so since at the time of the rehearsals, discussion was taking place in the Polish press about the pogrom in Kielce. In Łódź, female workers forced to sign official documents condemning the murders in Kielce were on strike. All political groupings were involved in assessing the events: the authorities at various levels, the Church, underground political movements, émigré milieux. These were the circumstances in which Schiller conducted his rehearsals and – what was perhaps most unusual – attempted to appeal to the empathy of viewers, to their most basic reflexes of solidarity, tried to move people, provoke some kind of positive emotional reaction. Attitudes of empathy, as Dominick LaCapra asserts, are the basis of every process of working through traumatic experiences. Empathy, according to LaCapra, allows one to draw near to someone else’s experience without eliminating differences and separateness, and protects both from unwanted identification and from isolation. ‘Empathy is an affective component of understanding, but difficult to control.’ It enables the witness to maintain autonomy and does not aim at identification with the victim.69 When

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

127

considering the specifics of Polish experience, we should add that empathy also enables the witness not to enter into rivalry with the victim. LaCapra also observes that an empathetic attitude releases the subject from the bondage of abstract and universal moral obligations (like those driving Zofia KossakSzczucka and her famous appeal), transposes it always into the sphere of concrete human experience and is ultimately never separated from action in the social sphere; it always has practical consequences. Empathy, however, should not be politically programmed or subject to control. In this way, I think, the intentions of both Leon Schiller and Aleksander Ford should be interpreted. This was grasped with great insight by Edward Csató when he wrote that what concerned the author of Easter was the ‘establishment of an attitude among Poles towards Jews that would be appropriate, just and, as teachers of ethics would put it, “dutiful”; it is an axiological play, devoted to the ethical problem of how to formulate certain norms’.70 Leon Bukowiecki discussed Ford’s film in a similar light: The film – in addition to its other qualities – is deeply moving, but what value is art that does not grip us, does not provoke strong impressions? […] Ford rightly shows Jews as they were with their exotic costumes and customs, words and prayers, day-to-day living, as well as some of their sayings. Spectators were meant to say to themselves: ‘that is what Jews are like’, in order to take an interest in them, to think about what goes on inside Dawidek’s sweet little head underneath his black skull-cap.71 Stefan Otwinowski wrote his drama during the war. The initial stimulus was a visit he made in 1942 to a small shtetl from which the Jewish inhabitants had disappeared; the next was the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. The action is played out across three different time frames. The Prologue takes place immediately before the war in a small town, in an inn run by a certain Mrs Freud, where the main hero of the play – Stanisław Łaski – makes his appearance; first he becomes a witness to the antisemitic attitudes of the local citizens towards the proprietress of the inn, and later he befriends her children, Samuel and Ewa. Acts One and Two are set during Easter 1943 in the same town, where on the day before the predicted liquidation of the local ghetto, a revolt breaks out inspired by similar events in Warsaw. When Ewa Freud appears at the apartment of Doctor Przypkowski, begging for help, she arouses fear and consternation, thereby destroying the celebratory atmosphere in the Polish household. The third and final act is set in Stanisław Łaski’s flat, where Ewa is in hiding, at the moment when the Warsaw Uprising (1944, distinct from the Ghetto Uprising in 1943) erupts. Already from this cursory outline of the drama’s construction, it can be seen that Otwinowski is trying to carry out a series of highly visible operations in the symbolic space. To connect the Polish and the Jewish uprisings. To unite Samuel Freud and Stanisław Łaski in their shared passion for the history of the Polish Reformation and Polish Enlightenment (according to

128

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

the play’s author, the only, albeit fragile tradition able to bring about Polish– Jewish unity). Even more interesting are Otwinowski’s efforts to construct the symbolic landscape of the town in which the action takes place. The most important points of orientation are the Catholic church, the monument to Tadeusz Kościuszko and the statue of Saint Joseph. This is obviously the symbolic space of Polishness: its patriotic and religious traditions. The fourth symbolic place, to which Ewa Freud takes Stanisław Łaski during their first walk (against her mother’s wishes), is a well, associated with a cruel legend. During anti-Jewish riots a pious Jew returning home from the synagogue was drowned in this well by members of the local community. Otwinowski, no doubt deliberately, transferred this kind of drastic occurrence into a difficultto-define legendary past (in order, clearly, not to provoke antisemites and yet at the same time invoke, by way of allusion, equally monstrous events of the recent past). In this very well, Samuel Freud, one of the leaders of the rising in the local ghetto, perishes during Easter 1943 defending himself against Nazi soldiers. In this way, the well acquires new significance and is inscribed – purely because the author wishes it so – into a shared symbolic space. It is not hard to decipher this charade. The story of the well is an emotional trick used by the author to include the rising in the Warsaw Ghetto within the space of Polish history and, by inspiring admiration for the heroism of its participants and sympathy for their fate, to paralyse contemporary antisemitic reflexes.72 Therefore, thanks to the author’s own free choice, the Jewish woman, hiding on the Aryan side, pays homage in the final scene to the Warsaw Uprising, as she plays the piano. Machine gun fire outside the windows Stanisław (calmly) Again, something is happening. Warsaw. Ewa (sits down at the piano)73 Invoking the popular, and easily recognizable to the public, drama by Stanisław Wyspiański Warszawianka (The Varsovienne, 1898), whose action unfolds during the Polish national uprising of 1830–1831, Otwinowski strives to find a place for the Jewish uprising within the symbolic space of Polish culture. The utterance by Stanisław Łaski of the word ‘again’ has a double meaning: it refers both to the recent uprising in the ghetto and to the nineteenth-century Polish uprisings. In the final scene, Ewa does not play, however, The Varsovienne but – as we may infer from an interview given by Schiller – Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude (Etude Op. 10, no. 12). In taking such pains, Otwinowski was nevertheless aware that it was no longer possible to speak of a common fate (‘May it not seem to any of us that the fate of a Pole armed with the proper ID was the same as that of a Jew’)74 and that Polish society would defend itself furiously against accepting this truth. Otwinowski’s drama met with many critical reactions: he was accused of using clichéd schemes, of being overly ideological, of sentimentalism, artistic derivativeness and incompetence. Critics attacked the main thesis

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

129

130

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

FIGURES 6.1–6.3 Stefan Otwinowski, Wielkanoc (Easter), directed by Leon Schiller, Teatr Wojska Polskiego (Polish Army Theatre), Łódź 1946. Photograph Stanisław Stępniewski. Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego (Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute), Muzeum Teatralne (Theatre Museum, Warsaw).

of the play, namely that the Reformation, had it weakened the influence of Catholicism, could have liberated Polish society from the spectre of antisemitism. Otwinowski was rightly reproached, since it was precisely the land of Luther that had given rise to the most terrible exterminatory form of modern antisemitism. Edward Csató raised an interesting point about Easter, justifying its many weaknesses. Csató treated Otwinowski’s drama as an open-ended construction, unstructured intellectually and emotionally. Individual scenes of the play, which were not arranged into a coherent whole, Csató regarded as ‘an outpouring of the author’s feelings, an author who wished through their release to resolve within himself the problem of the Occupation, and within this problem the narrower question of an honest look at the martyrdom of the Jewish people’. He added: ‘Hence the number of hesitations in this play, interruptions to thought, expressionistic mangling of sentences, flights into symbolism, evidence of a problem still not ultimately resolved.’75 In other words, Otwinowski, in challenging the Polish public to adopt an emotional and empathetic attitude, was nevertheless aware that this was possible only through disintegration of the ‘symbolic concretions’ of Polish culture – that the exalted pathetic allusion to Wyspiański’s Warszawianka, however noble in its enunciation, would not solve the problem. The author himself

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

131

emphasized that his drama had appeared initially as a political brochure (and not as a fully fledged literary work) in the series of documents edited and published immediately after the war by Michał Borwicz. It was not so much the reality portrayed in the drama that had the character of a document, as the author’s emotional and moral reaction written into it towards the Holocaust. Undoubtedly, this emotional thread in the play must also have struck Schiller, who heard it – typically for him – in precise musical and rhythmic categories. Tadeusz Peiper was less forgiving: he exposed the play’s shallowness, excessive overdone speeches, static action. He acknowledged, however, that two moments in the play brought the author great distinction. Both might be called scenic representations of the anatomy of fear. The first portrays Ewa Freud’s intrusion on Easter night into Doctor Przypkowski’s secluded home. Peiper draws attention here to two points: the despairing pleas of Ewa for any kind of help whatsoever (‘We will accept any means’) and her repeated question (‘Where to? Where to?’) when it is suggested she should find herself a safe hiding place. Precisely here, according to Peiper, Otwinowski succeeded in expressing ‘perhaps the worst tragedy of the Jews’: ‘of the many shocking expressions of war, before the gales blew them away, one had been rescued of those that most deserve to remain, to survive’.76 The second moment drawn out by Peiper relates to the behaviour of Stanisław Łaski, a declared philosemite, who hides in a neighbouring room when Ewa makes her entry, afraid he won’t meet the challenge that fate has placed in his path. In the end, however, he overcomes his fear: he decides to take Ewa to Warsaw and hide her in his own flat. Otwinowski subjects this moment to detailed psychological analysis. There are several reasons to conquer fear: shame, idealism, hostility towards the nationalistic antisemitism represented by Siciński, as well as the desire for love to survive amid the horror of war. Peiper perceptively observes that ‘among these four impulses encouraging transformation, there was no sympathy at all for the Jews’.77 Furthermore, Peiper regards this as highly symptomatic. Tadeusz Peiper voiced not only his own perspicacity, but also an example of how the first artistic witnesses to the experience of the Holocaust might be interpreted – namely, not by following hermeneutic traditions that go from the detail to the whole, where the ‘whole’ is usually falsified in some way or other, but rather by seeking out traces of experience in individual images, questions, episodes; by deconstructing them rather than by bringing them together into a whole. In Border Street there are also many such tracescum-symptoms: the visit to the hairdresser of a Jewish officer before being called up, a Jewish tailor sewing on an armband with the Star of David, the bantering antisemitic laughter of the persecutors of a Jewish boy, a torn photograph, armbands thrown on the streets of the destroyed ghetto, the bowed heads of Jews being transferred to the ghetto. Similarly, in Easter: buying cigarettes in the Jewish inn, Ewa’s insistent knocking, the Easter table laid according to tradition in the doctor’s home, the monologue about fear, the white wall that Stanisław speaks of before he falls asleep.

132

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Stanisław (falling asleep) The white wall… Ewa (wakes up Stanisław) What are you talking about?… What do you mean, white wall? Stanisław I was falling asleep. Did I say: White wall? Evidently, it was necessary to say it. Ewa What for? Stanisław Evidently, it was necessary.78 It would seem that Leon Schiller tried to cover up some of Otwinowski’s more naïve moments, while he exposed others; generally speaking, however, he tried to accommodate the emotional impression of the spectacle, put it in order, give it form. He imposed on the performance the rhythms of a mourning ritual, painstakingly constructing every scenic image, taking care over the artistic detail and musical composition. His production aroused the admiration of reviewers. This is how the author of the play remembered the beginning of the performance: ‘Gloom, expectation. […]. Gently rising light surrounding one of the figures on stage. Then objects emerge from the gloom. There is silence, in which the mystery of reconstruction will take place. We will recreate a world that has died.’79 In another of his accounts, we find more details: ‘A solemn mood as in church. Silence. Krenz’s orchestra – a sublime mood, almost like in a mystery play. Darkness on stage during the overture gradually grows lighter – the contours of furniture, old Mrs Freud. Concentration.’80 Otwinowski’s memoir is invaluable: it allows us to include Schiller’s production in the trend in Polish theatre that will try, appealing to memory of the Holocaust, to assume the work of mourning (here we should remember also Kantor’s The Dead Class). Edward Csató also followed this line of interpretation. Although gunshots could be heard during the performance, a ball of fire glowed in the sky, and grey smoke weaved about the stage, its emotional tone was far removed from sounding the battle cry. ‘The spectator’s imagination,’ writes Csató, ‘already during the Prologue, which takes place still before the war in a Jewish inn in a shtetl, was enveloped by a feeling of deep heartfelt melancholy, prompted by that world, lost in the past, of insignificant kindly people, portrayed as if covered in dust by the action of time’.81 Actress Ewa Kunina, who made use on stage of her crystal clear, pure spoken Polish, enjoyed universal admiration for her role as Mrs Freud. According to Kazimierz Dejmek, a spectator of that performance, Kunina made out of her linguistic nobility and purity of enunciation a theme for the figure she was playing: she emphasized Mrs Freud’s feeling of attachment to Polish culture and her desire for assimilation. The actress herself was of Jewish origin. ‘She was extraordinarily moving. Unfortunately, her essence, her tone, was not taken up by the remaining actors, but for the spectators, at least for me, her conduct, style of acting, manner of expression, professional dedication, whatever she brought to the performance: atmosphere, colour, affected my reaction to the whole play, to the later events, to the further stage life of Easter.’82 Unity of language use, however, proved, as we know, to be fragile, easy to deny. In

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

133

Andrzejewski’s story, crystal clear Polish and affected attachment to Polish literature becomes the initial impulse prompting the reader’s doubts as to the ‘real’ origin of the master of the house, in which the action of Holy Week takes place. And indeed, in the flood of fear emanating from under his perfectly controlled mask of ‘Polishness’, Zamojski’s Semitic features emerge. The most terrifying thing when reading Andrzejewski’s story is the fact that the narrator is just as vigilant as the shmaltzovniks hanging around the burning ghetto. Trying to maintain a tone of melancholy, Schiller completely changed the character of the scene showing women praying in front of the statue of Saint Joseph. Otwinowski had called the women a group of pious bigots and subtly touched the strings of Polish religious antisemitism. Schiller changed them into Ancient Suppliants, who brought to the performance a mood of sorrow and meditation. He replaced the statue of Joseph with one of the Madonna and Child. He was clearly trying to speak to the Polish audience, to its religious sensibilities. By making use of musical and rhythmic devices, by stylizing the scenic imagery in a poetic way, he was attempting to draw the audience into a ritual of mourning. The formal aspects of the production met with approval. According to Stanisław Dygat, ‘Any possibility of chance is ruled out here: the shadow of an actor or object on a wall is as much an important element of the performance as a gesture or the rhythmicity of a word harmonizing with the rhythm of the musical backing.’83 It is perhaps no accident that Dygat drew attention to the perfectly studied play of shadows; it must have contributed wonderfully to the production’s melancholy poetics, to the attempt to stage a ritual of mourning. With similar precision, Schiller staged the scene showing the liquidation of the ghetto. Accompanied by ‘a series of booming automatic weapons’ and the tearful praying of the women, a scene of collective panic is composed: ‘Figures in the crowd running around, violent in their movements, fleeing in all directions, bumping into one another in fear and panic, are moved with unerring precision, harmonized with their surroundings, with the light, with the music, even with the rumble of gunfire.’84 ‘Fear of the Occupation’ was a theme strongly emphasized by some reviewers.85 Schiller shaped his spectacle according to the poetics of symbolism; he brought order to reality and intensified expressiveness. He did not locate the terror of people, who had been hunted down, within the sphere of naked life, but within the space of art. But maybe it was precisely Schiller’s attempt to inscribe ‘terrifying images’ into the orderly aesthetics of theatre that explained the spectacle’s cool reception.

7. Rachela Auerbach, in her review of the Łódź production of Easter, left an unrivalled document that speaks of contemporary theatre’s helplessness when faced with the experience of the Holocaust. Her text reveals both the sadness of disappointment and the gratitude she felt towards Schiller and

134

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

his company for their attempt: ‘Otwinowski’s Easter was written two years after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, perhaps even earlier – the first Polish play about the struggle in the ghetto. An attempt to convey the tragedy of the Jewish people through the prism of experiences connected with it of the Polish intelligentsia.’86 Auerbach speaks of the general hope among Polish Jews (a group to which she herself belonged) that Polish writers would be witnesses to the Holocaust, that a Polish poet would emerge who ‘had seen everything’. ‘Could any one of us, who had been in the thick of it, touch such things as a literary topic?!’ Auerbach does not demand from theatre the naturalistic truth of the image. She follows Stefania Zahorska, the author of a drama about the Warsaw Ghetto entitled Smocza 13 (Smocza Street, Number 13), in stating that ‘writers who write about murders committed by the Germans cannot, in the interests of expression, exaggerate or condense material taken from reality’, that they must ‘suppress, blot out, weaken it’. Theatre was to serve the transmission of feelings within a communicative situation subject to strong limitations. ‘Zahorska is surely right. In order to keep this material within the boundaries of art, one should not perhaps grade horror and suffering, not transgress the boundaries that reality has already overstepped, but retreat into a framework of experiences that are still accessible to normal artistic contemplation. In order, after showing the tragic fact, to reach a state of moral and emotional catharsis, one should not lead the spectator to a point where his or her hair stands on end from horror, or where pity for the suffering heroes in all its reality destroys all aesthetic distance.’ The model of tragedy would therefore seem to be the most appropriate dramatic form for moving spectators, provoking strong emotions and leading to their powerful discharging. In accordance with this understanding of tragedy, Otwinowski shifts facts that are too drastic off stage. ‘He does not show a single one of them directly. He gives almost exclusively echoes and reflections. The shadow of events, not the events themselves.’ Instead of moving people, however, the spectacle provoked paralysis: I have been wondering why such strange chill blows from the stage. Why Jewish spectators despite their admiration and to a certain extent gratitude to the author, who moves us in such a noble way and with such knowledge of an issue so crucial to us – despite all this, is unable to warm us. Why that warmth, which we sense in the author’s journalistic articles, did not come through in his stage picture. Why we do not sense those short-circuits with which the content could have been teeming. Edward Csató assessed Schiller’s production to be an explicit articulation of the ‘dutiful’ moral attitude of Poles towards Jews. Rachela Auerbach demanded instead the circulation of emotions, warmth, the emotional impact of the images shown on stage. For the sake of provoking such an experience in the auditorium, she was prepared to sacrifice the ‘nobility’

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

135

of Otwinowski’s play: ‘Perhaps it is too overgrown with Polish-Jewish complexes, which cannot be rejected at once en masse […]? Perhaps there is too much nobility in this drama, which there wasn’t in life. Perhaps Jews are painted too white, as are Poles.’ The conclusions Auerbach reaches at the end of her review contradict her initial assumptions. Without the appearance on stage of those things that were carefully removed, the performance is not capable of making any emotional impact. Yet in repeating the views of Stefania Zahorska, Auerbach endows them with a doubting nuance, audible in her use of such phrases as ‘surely’ and ‘perhaps’. It would seem that Rachela Auerbach, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, cooperated with Emanuel Ringelblum in compiling his archive of testimonies, belonged to the post-war government commission researching the crimes at Treblinka, worked with Leon Weliczker on the publication of his memoirs of his time in the Sonderkomando and gave evidence in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem after her departure from Poland, wanted the events of the Holocaust to be made maximally visible. In her diary written in 1942, we find the following confession: ‘I fear sometimes that these images of life, terribly interesting and terrible in themselves, which we see every day, will perhaps perish along with us, like images of panic on a sinking ship or among people being burned or buried alive.’87 In the same Zionist publication, Nasze Słowo, in which her review of Easter had appeared, Auerbach began shortly afterwards to publish articles about the Warsaw Ghetto, based largely on her diary notes. Her vividness of style, sensitivity to individual images and excellent visual memory are remarkable. The texts are full of concrete material details of life in the ghetto; they never create a dry, documentary-type record, but always provoke extreme emotions. Behind them lies astonishment at the image, its details and structure: ‘The deformation of reality with a definite purpose, the portrayal of details, the cumulation of certain effects and the exclusion of others – everything happens as if of its own accord, and once life has undertaken this task, it proves to be a master outstripping the most gifted individual genius.’88 Rachela Auerbach provides images observed every day in the ghetto with paradoxical commentaries; she abstains from moral judgements but uses instead aesthetic associations, linked to artistic experience. Their extent is wide-ranging: the paintings of Goya (‘We need a new Goya, to bring into relief with his pencil faces swollen from hunger’89); the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (‘Edgar Poe to a pale degree intuited these depths of horror and unimaginable psychological torture, into which one human being can plunge another human being, once in possession of the instruments of violence’90); the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle (‘all Conan Doyle’s ideas became everyday sights’91); film melodramas (‘Life, especially life so ripe for death as in our closed-off city, sometimes fabricates bizarre and glaring symbolic cuts, like melodramatic conceptions in a banal film’92). The result is the impression of being a participant in an ongoing spectacle, hence Auerbach writes about ‘self-imposed theatre, a self-shot film with soundtrack’.93

136

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

The model of theatricality proposed by Rachela Auerbach in the initial paragraphs of her review of Easter therefore stands in clear opposition to her experience, temperament and aesthetic needs. Her sensitivity as a writer is sensual, emotional; her diary teems with micro-scenes, events, episodes, the desire for immediate emotional effect. Perhaps the most important text published by Auerbach after the war is her Lament rzeczy martwych (The Lament of Dead Things). It is difficult not to admire the courage of its formulations: ‘In the portrayal of the extermination of the Jews, the extermination of things occupies a prominent position. The tragedy and ill-treatment of things equalled the tragedy and illtreatment of people, while at the same time it was a perfect reflection of and metaphor for that ill-treatment.’94 The fate of things, for Auerbach, is a moving spectacle: ‘This phenomenon was so diverse, so rich in its always tragically flaunted colours of decay, so profuse in its eloquent symbolism, and so directly affecting the soul of the onlooker that it deserves a separate monograph.’95 It is precisely Auerbach whom we have to thank for two sequences in Ford’s film Border Street, which take place in the Warsaw Ghetto and move us even today. One portrays a busy street crammed with people and objects before the mass deportations to Treblinka, and the other – the same street, now deserted, transformed into a rubbish heap of objects no longer needed by anyone. It was this image and the fate of these objects that enabled Auerbach to capture the difference between Polish and Jewish experience. In The Lament of Dead Things, Auerbach compares her impressions of her first walk around the deserted streets of the Jewish quarter in September 1942 with images of Warsaw from September 1939 and then again after the defeat of the Warsaw Uprising. She emphasizes the difference between the Polish-German battlefield and the landscape of Holocaust: ‘That view aroused enormous grief, protest, but in comparison with the earlier view of those other houses, as yet unburned and undestroyed, and all the more uncanny because of it in their desolation, like freaks – it did not contain such intense melancholy. Such sadness poisoning and darkening the soul to an agonizing degree.’96 These reflections lead the author to a radical conclusion: ‘It was the difference between Pruszków [a German camp for Polish survivors of the 1944 uprising] and Treblinka transported into the realm of affects …’ Precisely the fate of things becomes for Auerbach an argument for making the Holocaust visible, unavoidably encompassing by its affective impact also the Polish witnesses. Auerbach traces the effects of profanation, excessive visibility, the breaking of taboos (‘dragged from its hiding place on a rubbish tip, a pair of knickers stained with menstrual blood, which some girl had not managed to launder before her journey to Treblinka, lies before the eyes of men’97). She equates the fate of people with the fate of objects, takes up the theme of their mutual interchangeability in the material, symbolic and rhetorical order: ‘People went to their deaths, and their things went to the scrap heap. Or: people went to the scrap heap and

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

137

their things also went to the scrap heap, and of everything that was once called life, only a mountain of dung and carrion remained.’98 It is hardly surprising that Rachela Auerbach was so painfully disappointed in Leon Schiller’s production, that all she could do was express her humble gratitude for his gesture of remembrance. She did not expect empathy; from the theatre, she expected upheaval, shock, catharsis. Therefore, it is Auerbach who is the forgotten precursor of Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death.

8. There is no doubt that Leon Schiller’s empathetic project was premature and hit the wall of moral indifference. People feared too much the loss of the material goods they had gained and had difficulty in concealing their joy at the elimination of competition in various spheres of social and economic life. In addition, any challenge to make an honest examination of one’s conscience was treated as a sign of communist propaganda. Perhaps the deciding factor, however, was the exclusion of Jews from the symbolic community, sending them back into the domain of naked life, which was governed exclusively by the struggle for survival. An unmatched testimony to this experience and its psychological consequences is the story Holy Week by Jerzy Andrzejewski, which takes up a similar theme to Otwinowski’s Easter: the rescue of a Jewish girl by a Polish man. Both works, let us remember, were direct reactions to the rising in the Warsaw Ghetto (according to Andrzejewski, written ‘impatiently and in the heat of the moment’99), and both were published at more or less the same time, just after the war. Andrzejewski’s story requires careful psychoanalytical reading, bringing out details of the narration and contradictory emotional strategies. Despite its apparently succinct, matter-of-fact, focused narration, it is not hard to notice its internal cleavage, the chaotic incoherence of the impulses giving rise to it, all the more so because Andrzejewski rewrote it after the war in a crucial way, correcting the record taken down ‘impatiently and in the heat of the moment’. According to Artur Sandauer, in the postwar edition, Andrzejewski toned down the Polish hostility towards Jewish suffering and the aversion to the challenge it posed to Polish society, spontaneously recorded in the initial version of the story.100 The most interesting thread in the narrative is the analysis of the estrangement felt by the hero, Jan Malecki, towards the woman whom he proposes to shelter in his own home. Irena becomes an intruder, more the object of a moral experiment than a human being to whom help is being offered. As in Easter, many reasons can be found for why Malecki and his wife decide to hide Irena – sympathy, however, is not one of them. From the beginning, Malecki is tormented by a feeling of estrangement towards his former friend, and offers to shelter her despite himself, overcoming his internal resistance. He does not have the courage to refuse, which in turn provokes in

138

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

him a sense of guilt: ‘in view of the situation in which she [Irena] now found herself, he very much wanted to erase the distance between them but did not know how’.101 Malecki’s attitude to Irena’s suffering is entirely different from his attitude to the suffering of his Polish countrymen. The feelings he nurtures towards Irena and the tragedy of the Jews are ‘dark, complex and deeply disturbing’102; entangled in them is a ‘humiliating awareness of a hazy and indistinct sense of responsibility’.103 Andrzejewski includes enough examples of merciless aggression towards Jews seeking refuge on the Aryan side for us to fully understand the real basis of this ‘indistinct sense of responsibility’. Malecki realizes that what he feels in relation to Irena are anxiety and terror, rather than sympathy and love. Irena therefore becomes the estranged object of narrational observation. Malecki anxiously observes her Semitic features, which become increasingly more marked as a result of the misfortunes she experiences. He scrupulously notes every outburst of aggression: Irena oppresses everyone with her misfortune, accuses her surroundings of a forced sacrificial generosity self-imposed by a sense of duty. It is precisely here that a different narrative voice intervenes, no longer following the introspection of the main protagonist but vigilantly recording all the wartime sufferings of Poles, persistently underscoring them with a false objectivism. This voice is devoid of subjective tone; it belongs to a supernarrator, who speaks the language of an indifferent society and protects its communal interests. And as if in passing, it compares Irena’s attitude with the silent heroism of unfortunate Polish mothers and wives. Irena does not arouse sympathy either in the protagonists of the story or in readers. She irritates, provokes, inspires hostility. In Otwinowski’s Easter and Schiller’s production of it, in Ford’s Border Street and Andrzejewski’s Holy Week, mechanisms are at work that revise reality. It is sometimes hard to distinguish which mechanisms lull to sleep the vigilance of the Polish antisemite, which try to work out a ‘moral’ approach of Polish society towards the Holocaust, and finally which serve the project of reconstructing the symbolic universe of Polish culture. Sartre wrote that every Jew lives under pressure of a double conditioning. A similar phenomenon may be observed in these initial artistic reactions to the experience of the Holocaust that refer above all to the ‘burning’ (as Błoński put it) question of Polish–Jewish relations. Double conditioning in this case relies on every image of the Holocaust being negotiated with the symbolic space, within which a process not only of communication but also of empathy was meant to take place. In the works discussed here, this creates a significant rupture, which the authors, however, try to mask over. And so, in Act Two of Easter, for example, standard patterns and moral classifications used by the author disintegrate, as do the rules of conventional probability. An antisemite challenges people to assist Jews in hiding. In a cowardly way, a philosemite avoids a girl who is seeking refuge, while Ewa Freud, full of dignity and self-restraint, implores her former neighbours,

THIS SHAMEFUL JEWISH WAR

139

insistently and in humiliation, for any kind of help whatsoever. Here we may recall the famous formula of Henryk Grynberg, who said that every true image of the Holocaust is by definition ‘non-artistic’. Therefore, for years Grynberg himself wrote commentaries and addenda to his own Żydowska Wojna (The Jewish War, 1965) in which he describes the story of his rescue. He reveals places in the text where he originally adjusted reality in order to increase the artistic value. Every time, however, as Grynberg confessed, reality created a stronger ‘effect’ than any kind of artistic fabrication.104 Similar commentary could surely be applied to all the works discussed in this chapter. First, however, we need to be aware of their ‘double conditioning’. To bring out those places where the image does not undergo negotiation with the symbolic space of Polish culture, and where the unique Jewish experience has indeed been recorded. Only singularity and uniqueness can be the basis for an ethical reading, and in consequence, for empathy. Likewise, also for psychoanalytic therapy. Only the recreation of the unique character of the traumatic scene of which the patient has been the victim, opens up the perspective of cure. Psychoanalysis, as Paweł Dybel emphasizes, does not enable real, concrete suffering to be located within any universal symbolic system, but forces symptoms of deformation and disruption of the symbolic sphere to be examined under the impact of individual experience.105 In the film Border Street, there are two sequences that take place in a so-called shed, or rather tailor’s workshop run by its German owner in the ghetto. The scenes happen not long before the outbreak of the ghetto rising, and therefore after the great action of summer 1942, when the majority of inhabitants of the ghetto were sent from the Umschlagplatz to the gas chambers of Treblinka. The ghetto is now half empty; only those with officially sanctioned work could reside there legally. Children and old people were therefore deprived of any chance of survival. Hence Natan, one of the film’s heroes, tries to find employment for Jadzia. The sequence in the shed begins with a close-up of a small metal plate pinned to the little girl’s clothes, which is, in effect, her permit to live. The owner of the shed, dissatisfied with the workshop’s productivity, conducts a selection of the workers and removes those who are insufficiently productive. The first victim is an old man, described in the script as ‘swollen’ (i.e. showing symptoms of starvation). He is dragged outside and killed with a single shot. The second sequence, which occurs shortly afterwards, portrays the evacuation of the workers from the shed. For a fraction of a second, we see a woman packing a baby, whom she had previously been hiding, into a rucksack. Many memoirs record instances where people passed through selections with babies hidden in rucksacks, since by this time they were no longer allowed within the ghetto territory. These are two ‘scraps’ rescued in Ford’s film of the ‘shameful Jewish war’, the image of which was being carefully excluded from the sphere of Polish culture or scrupulously negotiated every time it was portrayed. To the Polish spectator, the scenes in the shed are largely

140

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

undecipherable, and require detailed footnotes; to many Jewish spectators, on the other hand, the images were only too concrete and understandable. Here is how one remembered them: ‘I went through a period when I went again and again to see Ford’s Border Street. I went about fifteen times. I would return from the cinema, throw myself onto the couch, and weep. I could not control myself … ’106 In a similar way, Peiper exposed crumbs of truth about the ‘Jewish war’ in Otwinowski’s Easter. Richard Rorty, reflecting on the phenomenon of human solidarity, takes as his point of departure an example of the extremely different behaviours of European societies in relation to the Holocaust. ‘If you were a Jew in the period when trains were going to Auschwitz, your chances of being hidden by your gentile neighbors were greater if you lived in Denmark or Italy than if you lived in Belgium.’107 He treats attempts to explain such things in terms of ‘human’ and ‘inhuman’ behaviour as pure linguistic usurpation, though he recognizes that ‘in times like that of Auschwitz, when history is in upheaval and traditional institutions and patterns of behaviour are collapsing, we want something that stands beyond history and institutions’.108 Therefore, he treats as a natural reaction, the attempt to appeal to ‘human solidarity’, ‘our recognition of one another’s common humanity’.109 According to Rorty, a condition for the existence of solidarity, however, is not to appeal to anything that has extra-historical meaning, anything that does not belong to ‘contingent historical circumstance’. Appealing to human feelings, seeing in a person in need of help ‘a human being like us’, always requires the support of more concrete circumstances (someone is a neighbour or, like us, the mother of small children). Rorty obviously realizes that even this type of concrete drawing near does not always have the desired effect. Despite this, he considers that any kind of extension of the feeling of community, embracing with the word ‘we’ those who have so far been excluded from ‘we’, is not achieved thanks to the idea of some ‘essential humanity’, but thanks to recognition that the differences that divide people, for whatever reason, cease to be crucial, even though they continue to be visible. It was precisely over the scale of the visibility of difference that a – more or less open – battle was fought in Polish theatre and Polish culture in relation to the first artistic testimonies to the Holocaust.

7 What is unthinkable in Poland

1. In 1964, at the Theatre of 13 Rows (Teatr 13 Rzędów) in Opole, Jerzy Grotowski directed a performance of his Studium o Hamlecie (Hamlet Study). Grotowski was already a well-known artist, and not only in Poland, but this spectacle passed almost without echo. It received few reviews and was performed twenty-one times, exclusively in Opole. Earlier, in 1962, Grotowski had staged Stanisław Wyspiański’s Acropolis and, in 1963, Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which he presented as the blasphemously fabricated life of a saint, in which all the heroes wore cassocks and habits (Catholicism was provocatively compared here to totalitarianism). Both spectacles brought Grotowski fame; he revealed in both a readiness to interfere in the symbolic space of Polish culture, which in post-war conditions was a highly risky undertaking due to society’s intense feeling that its symbolic resources were under threat (first because of the Occupation, and then because of the political order imposed afterwards). Appealing to historical trauma while embarking on a profane game with Polish Catholicism, Grotowski was entering the very epicentre of social fear. A year after the premiere of Hamlet Study, in 1965, he produced Książę Niezłomny (The Constant Prince) based on Calderón’s play loosely translated by Słowacki, a production that on the surface upheld the blasphemous impetus of Grotowski’s theatre, but in fact established a therapeutic metaphor which enabled that paralyzing collective fear to be contained. It indicated a fundamental change in strategy. In images of ‘constancy’ (constructed according to traditional religious iconography associated with the passion and death of Christ), Grotowski restored to the audience its right to feel a phantasmal need for total identification with the victim, without sin. Hamlet Study is the most enigmatic and provocative of Grotowski’s spectacles, for decades almost wiped from the history of Polish theatre and from the artist’s biography, marginalized, regarded in the best case as a ‘sketch’ for Apocalypsis cum figuris, the masterpiece that closed Grotowski’s career as a director.1

142

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

2. Grotowski’s initial point of reference was Stanisław Wyspiański’s Hamlet, ambiguous and heterogeneous in terms of genre, canonized in Polish theatrical tradition almost as soon as it was published in 1905, and recognized as the defining text of an artistic, ethical and political transformation in Polish theatre. The category ‘studium’ (study) had become attached to Wyspiański’s work – understood here, on the one hand, as an essay, thesis, in-depth analysis of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, and on the other as a sketch or trial run for a future work, a cycle of variations for a new drama or new staging. Grotowski treated work on the performance in precisely this manner: as a stimulus for his laboratory studies of the processes of actors’ creativity, as well as a cycle of exercises and improvisations, a work in the process of becoming, receptive to unexpected impulses that were the record of unconscious stimuli shaping every deep act of creation. ‘As much as possible, we tried to suspend censorship of ordinary images; to tear off in the acting process our worldly masks.’2 Grotowski also treated Wyspiański’s idea of inscribing Shakespeare’s drama into the context of Polish history and culture in an usually radical way – but more on this in a moment. Scenes from the drama were arranged in Grotowski’s production in a loose associative sequence, held together or broken up by Wyspiański’s commentaries. The organizational frame was provided by the scene with the gravediggers in the cemetery; the performance began and ended with this. A vision of the rituals of death and the opening of old graves therefore hung over the performance. Grotowski used the scenes of Hamlet meeting with Ophelia, his conversations with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and with Polonius, his visit to Gertrude’s bedroom, and also fragments of his encounter with the actors, the monologue ‘To be or not to be’, the scene of Ophelia’s madness. He strongly emphasized the bodily, physiological and sexual disgust present in many scenes of the drama – underscored by the actions of the actors. ‘The actor’s performance is a form of blackmail; it is not daily behaviour, but a physiology of exceptional states: sexual climax, agony, torture, rape. Inarticulate shouts and aberrant voices gush forth […]. Nudity and perspiration, the contorted faces and convulsed bodies remind us of a reality that is so close to us, so inherent in us.’3 Grotowski extracted from Shakespeare’s text moments of humiliation, violence, deceitful behaviour, and translated them into radical dramatic scenes. The director located his chosen scenes from Shakespeare’s drama in three spaces following one after the other: a tavern, a bathhouse and a battlefield. Each contained the potential to disturb everyday social conventions and to transgress norms and cultural taboos. Like Wyspiański, Grotowski wrote Shakespeare’s drama into Polish realia; he did not, however, locate the action in Wawel Castle, the seat of Polish kings, but sought instead places that degraded in the extreme the status of the characters and events.

WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE IN POLAND

143

Wyspiański’s ‘studium’ inspired Grotowski to adopt a regressive strategy towards this famous text of European culture: in his spectacle, the drama was broken down into its prime elements, and individual scenes reduced to their affective dimension. Regression is not denial, but rather a return to denied experiences, thanks to the weakening of defensive mechanisms and the intensification of libidinal energy. Intensified affective and perceptive experiences are accompanied by a state of passivity on the part of the experiencer. For example, during the dreamwork of sleep, the perceptive system is alerted on the basis of memory traces; on the other hand, the motor system is blocked. Perceptive impulses no longer mobilize action, as they do when an individual is awake, but are experienced in a state of total passivity and helplessness. The mechanism of regression leads to destructuralization, to disordering of images of the world and of the subject itself; it exposes how the system of perception functions, disrupts relations with social reality, and may lead also, as in the case of masochism, to a re-sexualization of moral norms, including – as a further consequence – the destruction of a person’s own social existence. Let us start from the fact that Wyspiański discovered in Shakespeare’s drama the presence of two conflicting dramaturgical orders presented palimpsestically, while relations between them could be described precisely in terms of mechanisms of regression. The more primitive of these orders (adopted by Shakespeare from his predecessors) is associated with the motif of revenge, night, the appearance of a ghost, the power of instincts, images of violence. The second, later one was built (already by Shakespeare himself) around the motif of introspection and self-knowledge, Hamlet’s art and intelligence. Wyspiański clearly presents them hierarchically, placing the drama of thought above the spectacle of instinctual urges. Grotowski appeals to mechanisms of regression, rejects Wyspiański’s hierarchy and even provocatively overturns it. In Wyspiański’s vision, as was noted perceptively by one contemporary critic,4 Hamlet is already long dead by the moment he dies, somehow cut off both from vital urges and from symbolic communal bonds. He feels disdain and repugnance towards human beings’ impulsive nature: in his relations with the world, he employs only the tools of his intelligence and artistry. And here too, Grotowski performs a significant intervention: he highlights the experience of repugnance and degrades the drama of thought. ‘The court here would be grotesque, excessive, brutal and repulsive in character, and laughable, terrifying in its stupidity, soulless, debauched and drunken, shallow and uncouth, filling the castle with empty tumult and tyranny.’5 Grotowski followed precisely this image of Elsinore, outlined so suggestively by Wyspiański, and translated it into bodily urges, concrete physiological drives. Onto the conflicted space described by Wyspiański, he imposed his own – shockingly aggressive – cliché. Hamlet in his production became a Jew, and all the remaining cast of Elsinore – coarse Polish peasants.

144

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE IN POLAND

145

FIGURES 7.1–7.4  Studium o Hamlecie (Hamlet Study), based on the text by Stanisław Wyspiański, directed by Jerzy Grotowski, Teatr Laboratorium 13 Rzędów (Laboratory Theatre of 13 Rows), Opole 1964. Photograph Ryszard Cieślak. Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego (Jerzy Grotowski Institute).

146

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

3. As Eugenio Barba – friend, assistant and disciple of Jerzy Grotowski – indicates, Hamlet Study, staged at the Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole, was ‘a slap in the face for everyone, friends and enemies alike’.6 Strong words. They may be evidence that we are dealing here with the artist’s radical gesture of self-exclusion from collective identity, with his preparedness to fall foul of everyone, with his desire to transgress all symbolic orders uniting the community – and hence with a form of social self-annihilation. We may suppose that the reason for the extreme reaction to the spectacle was Grotowski’s reference to an exceptionally obscene image of violence, whose target was the Jew, ‘a squeaky-voiced jumped-up “yid”’,7 and the fact that his persecutors were the Polish ‘populace’, peasants, ‘boors’, endowed with male vigour and brawn – and thus to an image that in Polish postwar reality, following the experience of the Holocaust, was absolutely censored (morally, politically, ideologically, linguistically) and devoid of the ethnographic ‘innocence’ (or ‘sinlessness’) of anti-Judaic popular prejudices. Let us note first of all that this is an image with a long lifespan, very archaic. We could say: with a powerful charge of libidinal investment. Grotowski was endowed with a magnificent ear for social atavisms – above all their bodily and vocal energy. I suggest that only repugnance could create such a type of sensitivity. At a certain moment in his artistic journey, Grotowski was prepared, with unprecedented severity, to unmask the experience of repugnance, to make repugnance the foundation of his alliance with the audience in the work of deconstructing traditional symbolic orders. The motif of repugnance, as a common platform for creating bonds with the audience, was completely overlooked, in my opinion, in the reception of Grotowski’s theatre. Let us cite, therefore, his comment from 1964, precisely from the Hamlet Study period, that an actor expects from the audience ‘a special sort of silence in which there is much fascination but also a lot of indignation, and even repugnance, which the spectator directs not at himself but at the theatre’.8 From the above quotation, however, it can be seen that Grotowski tries to demarcate boundaries to his strategy of repugnance; he wants to make them the basis for a cathartic transfer (the spectator should not direct the repugnance he feels at himself), which will eventually lead him to a complete reformulation of the subversive strategies of his own theatre in The Constant Prince. The experience of repugnance (or abjection) will be replaced by a display of beautiful suffering and become in the latter spectacle the basis for a mechanism described by Julia Kristeva: ‘it [the abject] curbs the other’s suffering for its own profit […]; it establishes narcissistic power’.9 This is how I understand Grotowski’s transition from Hamlet Study to The Constant Prince: from the image of the hunted and persecuted Jew to the bodily beauty of Christ’s passion. From narcissistic crisis to absolute affirmation

WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE IN POLAND

147

of narcissism as symbolic activity. And perhaps most importantly, I would interpret Grotowski’s change in strategy as a conscious therapeutic move with regard to the spectators. In Grotowski’s productions, popular religiosity spurred images of violence and humiliation; they were endowed with the impulsive energy of sadistic acts of persecution and the masochistic response of submission. Furthermore, Grotowski never seemed especially sensitive to the carnivalesque, absolutory optimism of popular culture and its regenerative myths. Quite the reverse: he obsessively emphasized the ingredient of violence inherent in it, the element of open aggression along with its sexual potential. The sadomasochistic phantasm was usually brought to an obscene extreme: rape, the discharging of sexual energy, orgasm on both sides (that of the victim as well as the persecutors). This indicates that Grotowski’s spectacles expressed not only repugnance towards communal instincts, but also an atavistic desire to fuse with the community, even at the price of extreme humiliation or selfdestruction. Present in the background was the obscene vision of the victim’s sexual clinging to his or her persecutors, a sensual dissolving into an archaic feeling of community. Here, I suspect, was the source of the repugnance that the audience could and, as Grotowski states, should feel. But there also arose a regressive feeling of security that depended on self-annihilation within this mythic community. In order to explain this communal need for regressive identification with myth and its totalizing nature, Grotowski had no hesitation in appealing to the fascistic rhetoric of myth and blood, when he spoke in 1964 (the year of the premiere of Hamlet Study) about national myths, ‘whose very presence we feel in our blood’.10 He was able, however, to carry out a similar analysis of his own activities, like Theodor Adorno did in relation to Richard Wagner. The author of The Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944) in his study written already before the war, claimed that the source of communal myths, reactivated in the Modernist period, was the experience of repugnance at oneself transferred to the figure of the Jew.11 In the stereotypical conceptions of the Polish common people, the Jew was someone unmanly, weak and cowardly. He was not a man, and because of this became an easy victim of social violence. Polish popular culture knows many incarnations of this phantasm, while the Polish village had become the scene of anti-Judaic excesses so well established they were guaranteed impunity, ‘innocence’ (or ‘sinlessness’), and the status of an endlessly renewed comic interlude within communal religious rituals. Alina Cała and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir have written about this, especially in connection with the folk custom of ‘hanging Judas’.12 In the eyes of the persecutors, ritualized acts of violence did not conceal anything reprehensible; they were in the nature of a custom and only their comic aspects were perceived. All ethnographical and anthropological research seems to indicate that the aspect of genuine violence underwent total denial, or simply repudiation.

148

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Cultural stereotypes and images associated with the figure of the Jew in Polish folk culture exposed their threatening vitality during the Holocaust and immediately after it (if only in the series of post-war pogroms). For example, legends about ritual murders, which had lain dormant for a long time, were revived and became an impulse for the pogroms, though this is only the most drastic example of a very complex phenomenon. ‘Reflexes encoded in culture, transferred to the new wartime conditions, became the cause of crimes, which a conscience reared in traditional aggressiveness was unable to evaluate.’13 Traditional models of cultural behaviour towards Jewish estrangement could incite real violence, as well as enable a significant proportion of Polish society to justify its own indifference or hostility towards the exterminated Jews. This also indicates that the Holocaust modified traditional notions only to a very limited degree; it gave them fresh vitality, however, and above all a new function – that of well-functioning defensive mechanisms. A key motif for Grotowski, exploited in Hamlet Study, relates to the stereotype of Jewish passivity, readiness to accept humiliation, lack of warlike spirit. The passive attitude, stereotypically identified with the figure of Hamlet (his inability to undertake an act of revenge), thus found itself associated with powerful collective notions about Jews passively going to their deaths and their alleged inability to fight back like soldiers. Grotowski’s peasant Elsinore undergoes military mobilization during the course of the spectacle, and in so doing realizes its social ideals of male initiation. And in this too, Grotowski strikes at the heart of anti-Judaic prejudices. Alina Cała explains that the attitude to military service radicalized the attitude of Polish peasants towards Jews: it always situated Jews on the side of such negative qualities as cowardice, lack of honour and military prowess.14 These stereotypes enabled, on the one hand, immunization against the shocking facts of the Holocaust (guilt was often attributed to the passive behaviour of the victims themselves) while, on the other, they resisted the inclusion of Jews in the fighting community. The Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto was often denied this name and by the same token, any heroic and symbolic connotations; the uprising was treated exclusively in categories of biological, instinctive self-defence located in the sphere of naked life. Meanwhile, the formation of the Anders Army in the territory of the Soviet Union in 1941–1942 was accompanied by a strong antisemitic atmosphere, which diminished the recruitment to it of Polish Jews.15 One of the popular arguments was precisely the stereotype of the Jew as a coward, useless soldier, potential deserter and even traitor to the communal interests that the creation of the army was meant to serve. Memory of these episodes was still keen in Polish society at the time when Grotowski produced Hamlet Study, but any social debate concerning them was totally frozen. There is not the slightest doubt – or so it would seem – that Grotowski referred in his spectacle to the phantasmal motifs of Polish folk culture. After

WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE IN POLAND

149

all, he did this consistently from Forefathers’ Eve through to Apocalypsis cum figuris. A more interesting question is whether he also trusted the mechanisms of denial and repudiation inscribed in folk culture and now revived so violently – mechanisms that could create for him a feeling of security and impunity when he tackled forbidden topics.

4. As he worked on Hamlet Study, Grotowski must have been aware that he was encroaching on a minefield, also politically. Summoning up the ghost of Polish antisemitism, with all its unbridled libidinal vitality, was in 1964 an act either of extraordinary courage or of desperate bravado. His activities may have been protected, however, first by the powerful and well-established mechanisms of denial and tabooization inherent in Polish society, and second by the political and ideological practices of those days (acutely observed by Grotowski), which appealed precisely to those same mechanisms of tabooization. The antisemitic attitudes of Polish society were exploited in the political game with great intensity, but simultaneously no one was allowed to speak about them openly. Thus, they located themselves in the domain of an unspoken social ‘id’, while functioning no less – or perhaps even more – effectively in the domain of denial. After the war, Polish antisemitism was deprived of a language. The more it kept silent, and the more people kept silent about it, the more it became a powerful reservoir of social energy, awaiting political investment. Without going into too much detail, we should remember that there were two warring factions within the Communist Party, whose conflict shaped Polish political life in the years 1956 to 1968, known in popular parlance as the ‘Jews’ and the ‘Boors’. The first of these, associated with a cosmopolitan mindset, were perceived as newcomers from the East who had spent the war years beyond the reach of Nazi occupation; concerted efforts were made to impute Jewish origin to them, and ascribe to them destructive intentions regarding Polish national traditions. The second, who had spent the war under Nazi occupation, often had links to the peasant partisans, and legitimized themselves with their ‘correct’ social and national origins; they openly appealed to nationalistic ideology, frankly that of the pre-war National Democracy.16 Communal atavisms became the most menacing political capital of those years, but also that which brought the greatest profit. How ambiguous, then, is the fact that Jerzy Grotowski also decided to appeal to them and stage with their assistance his sadomasochistic phantasm? The political key seems clear enough. It suffices to consider seriously what forces might be represented in Grotowski’s production by the peasant Elsinore infatuated with national symbols and songs, and who his HamletJew might be, as he loses the right to his royal title and any real power. ‘In

150

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Hamlet Study, the conflicts in contemporary Polish society were inscribed almost directly, as was study of the phenomenon of totalitarian power’, writes Elżbieta Morawiec many years later,17 seeing in Grotowski’s spectacle a prefiguration of the events of March 1968, when Poland’s remaining Jews were expelled. Therefore, she attempted to play down the image of the brutal antisemitic mob casting responsibility for its crimes onto the system of power. ‘The king, gravedigger and disposer of bodies, ruler of souls, was the “first cause” of the repressive community, taking upon itself the role of “executioner” in relation to the individual.’18 Grotowski, however, in my opinion, sought another way of absolving the ‘community’. Grotowski’s production was accompanied, as usual, by the so-called viewing instructions written by Ludwik Flaszen,19 literary director of the Theatre of 13 Rows. In this case, the ‘instructions’ had a genuine political sense: they indicated control of the system of perception. Let us quote a fragment from Flaszen’s text: ‘Hamlet as a Jew? The court of Elsinore as a Polish Mob? Jewish issues and anti-Semitism are not the production’s key ideas. These are only special, drastically sharpened forms of social superstition, inimical stereotypes of the stranger that are deeply rooted in the collective imagination.’20 Although it openly and drastically referred to the ‘Jewish question’, the spectacle should be received and interpreted, according to Flaszen, as totally beyond it – as if this were not in itself a painful and unresolved problem for Polish society. We may therefore infer that Flaszen also validated in his own way the mechanism of denial and repudiation, by which the ‘Jewish question’ was surrounded in post-war Poland. He gave it the semblance, however, of a rational interpretative procedure. That which is concrete, specific, sensory, is to be interpreted as universal, exemplary, abstract. The conclusion is self-evident: Grotowski, in his own way, implanted in theatre the forms of suppressed social communication created by the post-war political reality. And what is more, he put this to radical artistic use – he cultivated the state of social energy accumulated under high pressure. Without the traumatized community deprived of voice, his theatre would not have been able to formulate its own assumptions regarding its confrontational strategy towards the audience: provocation and shock, the generation on stage of an aggressive libidinal surplus. Let us pose this question: why should what is most glaring and visible in the performance be treated only metaphorically, or even vanish completely from the spectators’ field of vision? This would appear to be a fundamental question in that the impossibility of establishing metaphor in a psychotic social space seems to be part of the diagnosis proposed by Grotowski to Polish society. The model of reception proposed by Flaszen was in fact doomed in advance to failure. First, because of the nature of the social emotions to which he referred – dark, twisted, many-layered, saturated with ressentiment and denied feelings of guilt. It was therefore difficult to subordinate them to

WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE IN POLAND

151

intellectual models. Second, because Grotowski’s strategies as a director did not depend on that kind of rational and orderly reaction. Quite the opposite: they needed shock, the violent release of emotions, the mobilization of contradictory attitudes in the spectators. It is therefore hard to acknowledge as a suitable motto for the spectacle, as Flaszen suggested to the spectators, the famous formula from Wyspiański’s Hamlet: ‘Hamlet is what we should think about in Poland.’21 Grotowski undermines this platitude. Wyspiański’s words ought rather to be travestied in this case as follows: ‘Hamlet is what in Poland is unthinkable.’

5. The spectacle has left no orderly testimony to its reception: barely a few snippets of emotional reaction and a lot of insinuations. The production itself was therefore subjected to powerful denial. For example, the reasons why it was removed from the repertoire after scarcely three months remain unclear. Barba claims that it was for political reasons and the decision was taken against the will of the theatre.22 Other communications suggest that the artists themselves withdrew from further performances of Hamlet Study. A year later the spectacle no longer appeared in the list of Grotowski’s most important works published in the programme for The Constant Prince, the next production by the Laboratory Theatre. In 1980, in the first Polish monograph devoted to Grotowski’s work, in the chapter on Hamlet Study, the author Zbigniew Osiński does not use the word ‘Jew’, even though he speaks of the ‘nightmare of people hounded to death’ and the ‘extreme explicitness of the details’.23 The performance received few reviews: the ‘Jewish question’ appeared in the margins or not at all, although it may have been precisely this that paralysed the spectacle’s reception and provoked fear within the company (not only had a strong social taboo been broken, the bounds of political risk had also been transgressed). ‘Hamlet in Opole Jewified!!!’ wrote Józef Kelera pointedly, supplying three exclamation marks and a somewhat enigmatic, though telling, commentary: ‘This is not a “gimmick” devoid of meaning, although the meaning should not be transposed literally: there is both sense in it, and expression – drastic explicitness, rapaciousness.’24 We should ask, however, what those three exclamation marks actually signify, on what depends the ‘explicitness, rapaciousness’ of Grotowski’s idea, and what we are supposed to understand by the word ‘literally’. Why should what is ‘explicit’ or ‘drastic’ not be ‘literal’? Is the critic suggesting that whatever is ‘explicit’ or ‘drastic’ is totally deprived of language, so that it finds itself ‘beyond words’, displaced beyond any kind of symbolic order? Was this a deliberate strategy to generate shock by exploiting the everyday practice of keeping quiet in the social space? Kelera in any case distinctly appeals to the reader’s intuitions and recognition of the dark collective emotions to which

152

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

the spectacle referred. His analyses are similarly paralysed by the libidinal surplus of Grotowski’s production. Only Zbigniew Raszewski (a theatre historian rather than a critic) dared to describe clearly what he had seen in the spectacle. I don’t believe, however, that Grotowski would have wished for such clarity of vision. What did Raszewski see? ‘Let’s take a good look at Hamlet. In the Opole staging he is a passionate, but shrewd Jew. His fellow actors have assumed the guise of participants in the Warsaw Uprising. Hamlet attempts to explain to them that their impulses border on madness. He jumps up to each soldier in turn with the Talmud in his hand, and then each soldier in turn spits in his face. The soldiers, who even sing insurrectionary songs, irresistibly bring to mind formations such as the Battalion Zośka.’25 The image that Raszewski saw had no right to find itself in the symbolic space of Polish culture; it could function only according to the laws of murky excess, the obscene secret of the ‘mob’. It was an image of no cultural value, was not subject to any exchange or negotiation, and fell beyond the frame of social communication causing it to freeze. But it was also an image urgently guarded, fortified by social fear. It had no symbolic value but the power instead to paralyse. It could also not count on support from any political milieu – it was too shocking and scandalous. This was no doubt why Barba described it as a slap in the face for both Grotowski’s enemies and friends. One of those friends who experienced the performance as a slap in the face was precisely Zbigniew Raszewski. In a letter to Jerzy Got, he expressed directly his emotions connected with the performance: Hamlet is a Jew. The thing naturally takes place in Poland. I was enraged by a particular scene in which boys from the Home Army spit in Hamlet’s face (see the earlier information). Not that and not so. He, who at the creation of the world endowed them with the ability to think, dozed off when it came to their turn. Despite this, they will make themselves liked, because they want something and know how to work.26 Raszewski must have been aware that by reporting so succinctly in Pamiętnik Teatralny the meaning of the staged image, he was catapulting Grotowski’s spectacle into the very heart of an almighty collective trauma and political row – since the dividing line of political conflict among the political elite ran in those days between the ‘patriots’ and the ‘Jews’. Nationalistic reflexes were referred to openly; antisemitic attitudes only obscurely. Not without reason did Ludwik Flaszen try to convince spectators that what was most shocking in the performance was not, in fact, its real theme. The image described by Raszewski of the Jew, into whose face the Warsaw insurrectionists spat, prompted objection within himself and the need to resist it: ‘Who does not remember the photograph in which the laughing “Zośka” soldiers embrace Jews from the Gęsiówka camp, which they had just liberated?’27 By invoking this episode of liberation during the

WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE IN POLAND

153

Warsaw Uprising of the small concentration camp created on Himmler’s orders on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto,28 Raszewski succumbed to the prevailing tendency to balance the books of Polish attitudes towards the extermination of Jews – a tendency that required every invoked foul deed to be counteracted by testimonies to Polish nobility and readiness to make sacrifices. Raszewski made use of this strategy of ‘an image for an image’; in addition, the image he himself recalled had the character of an historical document, and therefore, in his view, greater worth and power of persuasion. But we should remember that Grotowski’s spectacle struck precisely at this kind of book-balancing. It exposed areas of Polish society’s narcissistic selfdefensiveness, appealing rather to an economy of collective libido than to an overly precise balancing of moral reasons and historical circumstances. The space of symbolic negotiations was completely paralysed in this case. Grotowski – in contrast to Raszewski – was well aware of it. The strategy of ‘an image for an image’ did not work, did not mobilize social activeness and collective energy. It left Raszewski at best in the stereotypical, and in those days politically ambiguous, role of defender of national dignity. The image put forward by Raszewski was basically repressive in nature: it did not broaden or enrich the perspective, but rather drew a curtain over the image seen in Grotowski’s spectacle. Behind it lurked also the shadow of Polish ressentiment, based on the conviction that Jews did not appreciate the heroism of Poles who had hurried to their rescue (in the case of the liberation of Gęsiówka, it was described by some rescued Jews as sheer chance, and not as a deliberately planned military action). Grotowski must have known that beneath the images invoked in Hamlet Study, only one image in fact lay concealed: an image continually terrifying, haunting and tormenting Polish society, the true Gorgon of Polish post-war reality. No matter how many times it raised its head, it released a wave of fury and violent repudiation. This was the image of the Polish ‘mob’ (‘pospólstwo’), to stick with the language proposed by Grotowski, translating into action its narcissistic libidinal potential in relation to the extermination of Jews. The image of an indifferent, aggressive and ominously jubilant community, reviving the atmosphere of the pogroms, and drawing from it both material and psychological profit. For example, the scene where Hamlet meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern contains a series of drastic, explicit details: Hamlet dragged out of his dark corner; his being set upon by a dog to the accompaniment of collective guffaws; the theft of his last morsels of bread. In this scene, the Jewifying of Hamlet is especially audible.29 We constantly ask ourselves the same question: how strongly were images of this sort inscribed in everyday experience of the Holocaust? How many people saw them? How many people participated in them? We find them, for example, in the wartime diaries of Zygmunt Klukowski, who recorded with terror the behaviour of the Polish populace in response to the extermination of Jews by the Germans:

154

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

The column was guarded by Germans on horseback. Lamenting and weeping Jewish women followed behind the marching Jews. Many Poles stood by and watched. Some of their faces showed no sympathy at all; some of the people even laughed and joked. […] The way some Poles behave is completely out of line. During the massacre some even laughed. Some went sneaking into Jewish houses from the back, searching for what could be stolen. […] In town some of the Jewish houses were sealed by the gendarmes, but some were left completely open, so robberies took place. It is a shame to say it but some Polish people took part in the crime. Some people even helped the gendarmes look for hidden Jews.30 Such images may be found also in the Occupation diaries of Emanuel Ringelblum, as he recorded the wave of pogroms in which Poles participated in Warsaw in 1940. The culmination came around Easter, the period traditionally associated with forms of ritualized anti-Judaism (for example, the above-mentioned ‘hanging of Judas’). It is perhaps worth adding that to the Polish collective imagination, mass death in the gas chambers did not become the most terrifying and traumatic image associated with the Holocaust – mass death was even appropriated politically in a very specific way (important was the number stretching into millions, not the identity of the victims) and incorporated into the national symbolism of martyrdom with which society’s image of Auschwitz was constructed in Poland between 1948 and 1968. This symbolic theft of traumatic experience was possible because for Poles, it was in fact someone else’s trauma. As one of the Polish interlocutors of Claude Lanzmann put it in the film Shoah when asked about his personal attitude to the Holocaust: ‘If you get injured, it doesn’t hurt me.’ But Grotowski wanted it to hurt; that is why he invoked the image of peasant Poland, civilizationally backward and mentally primitive, nourished by ressentiments. He was not interested in portraying realistic truth, but in phantasmal effectiveness. He spoke openly about this at the time: the performance should search ‘for the things which can hurt us the most deeply’.31 Grotowski was not mistaken: no other image exposed collective fear so powerfully and mobilized national narcissism to such a degree every time it raised its head. Almost exactly this same image was revealed twenty years later by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah. Shown only in fragments on Polish television in 1986, the film provoked a furore, a sense of wrong and a call for historical reliability in the evaluation of the past; such terms were flung at it in the Polish press as ‘shame’, ‘slander’, ‘infamy’, ‘insult’. Had Grotowski’s spectacle been staged at the National Theatre (Teatr Narodowy) in 1964, it would certainly have prompted a similar scandal. In Lanzmann’s film, Poland appears as a sad, low-lying, rural and small-town country full of peasant carts, cows, chickens, churches and wayside crosses. The inhabitants

WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE IN POLAND

155

are almost exclusively peasants, cunning and distrustful, but also proud in their own way of their secret about the enormous crime committed there. They tell about it with unconcealed excitement, recall and re-enact the past with childish zeal, sometimes laughing. They willingly crowd around the camera like curious children, their faces freeze in ambiguous smiles, they speak not of ‘Jews’ (Żydzi) but of ‘kikes’ (Żydki). The effect is terrifying: we see in Lanzmann’s film the remnants of an archaic society, confronted by an experience that totally exceeds its moral and emotional horizons. And what is perhaps most shocking is the still active libidinal energy of the collective secret. Lanzmann is told, following a moment of hesitation, about obscene Polish laughter at the Holocaust by Abraham Bomba, a hairdresser rescued from Treblinka, transported there from Częstochowa: ‘Something strange happened, / it is not pleasant, but I will tell it / – we were in that truck like animals, / only our eyes were visible – / they were laughing, laughing, / they were pleased: they were getting rid of the Jews.’32 Polish laughter accompanying scenes of Jews’ public humiliation on the streets of occupied Kraków was also recorded by Marian Jabłoński: ‘a crowd always gathered’ (Jabłoński’s statement, recorded on video, is included in the permanent exhibition in the Schindler Factory in Kraków, Kraków under Nazi Occupation 1939–1945). A similar thing was going on in Grotowski’s theatre: laughter was an act of aggression and an instrument of violence. In Hamlet Study it resounds many times, combined with vulgar and brutal gestures. The ambivalent carnival laughter – destructive yet reviving a sense of community – did not exist here. A condition for the durability of carnivalesque models of culture, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, is that nothing conclusive has yet taken place in human history. Grotowski could not have signed up to such an optimistic conviction. The convergence between his spectacle and Lanzmann’s film is truly striking. Grotowski likewise refers to an image of Poles as a nation of peasants. He allowed himself that same narrowing of the field of vision, as a result of which the film was so violently attacked in Poland. Ludwik Flaszen explains Grotowski’s intentions as follows: it was about revealing, in extreme situations, the archaic spiritual components of the nation ‘formed by collective experience of the past’.33 What Grotowski had presented as a series of phantasmal projections, Lanzmann captured – even if it was not his main intention – in the form of a document. A few photographs have been preserved of Grotowski’s production; two portray the scene described by Raszewski. In the first, we see the unit of semi-naked insurrectionists bending forward aggressively, ready to attack, with their eyes fixed firmly straight ahead of them. They also bring to mind a cavalry unit during a mounted charge. At their feet lies Hamlet in his striped trousers, black Jewish gaberdine and skullcap: it seems that at any moment he will be trampled to death. The second photograph shows a scene of utter confusion: all the actors are lying on the ground, Hamlet among them. They

156

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

appear to be dead. According to Flaszen’s commentary, ‘On the battlefield, Hamlet expresses his yearning for solidarity and community, finally, in this extreme situation, fraternised with these.’34 This would imply that Hamlet the Jew, spat upon, trampled underfoot, dishonoured and crushed by the unit of Polish insurrectionists, is included within the circle of community in this final act of humiliation and death. Precisely now the ‘Kyrie eleison’ rings out – finally closing the circle of symbolic violence. We can state at once that this image is historically valueless: it was precisely their manner of dying that ultimately divided the Polish fate from the Jewish, and paralysed mutual relations. Death in this case did not unite but separated irrevocably. Raszewski tried to substitute the image invoked by Grotowski of Polish soldiers humiliating a Jew, an image that was inassimilable in the Polish symbolic space, for another one which upheld narcissistic denial: Polish soldiers rescuing Jews. Raszewski defends the open space of symbolic negotiation. Grotowski had ceased to believe in it and therefore sought a solution in a masochistic phantasm, where the physiology of death is equated with the physiology of sex. In Hamlet Study, Grotowski made use of images with powerful historical baggage as instruments with which to violate his audience, offering, in exchange for emotional submission, the perspective of absolution. It is worth explaining this mechanism for achieving ‘innocence’ (or ‘sinlessness’) through shock. In one of his less canonic texts, delivered as a lecture in Skara (Sweden) in January 1967, the director explains to young drama students how to deal with situations that exceed everyday dimensions, events that are unimaginable. The topic of his reflections is matricide (as though they were rehearsing the role of Orestes). Grotowski explains that attempts to imagine this situation or one’s own participation in it would be futile. He proposes invoking other events, familiar from direct experience. For example, killing a cat and the accompanying thrill: ‘returning to the memory of having killed a cat when you have to kill your mother, is not banal’.35 Step by step Grotowski moves away from the initial situation of matricide and approaches something called ‘memory moments of intense physical climax’.36 We may presume that he is talking about sexual pleasure, exposed on stage in entirely physical bodily reactions, and about the shocking juxtaposition of the initial task with the ultimate effect. Grotowski is not concerned with the memory itself as a real intervention in the libidinal economy, with provoking a particular kind of climax within it. ‘The shock of sincerity will be too strong,’ he explains.37 ‘When you achieve this you will be pure, you will be purged, you will be without sin. If the memory is one of sin, afterwards you will be free of this sin. It is a kind of redemption.’38 Was Hamlet Study about an analogous redemption from collective sin? Did Grotowski, in this extreme and drastically explicit production, wish to refer to a dream of a community achieving ‘sinlessness’ in a state of libidinal arousal?

WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE IN POLAND

157

6. It is not at all clear what Grotowski had in mind when he said that theatre should search ‘for the things which can hurt us the most deeply’. His aim was not, or so it would seem, an historical settling of accounts or formulating accusations against Polish society. In 1964 arose ‘The Theatre’s New Testament’, an interview conducted with Grotowski by Eugenio Barba. It appeared exclusively abroad.39 Fragments were included meanwhile in the famous programmatic text entitled ‘Aktor ogołocony’ (‘The Actor Stripped Bare’), published a year later in the Polish journal Teatr.40 The very juxtaposition of these two publications already says a lot. ‘The Theatre’s New Testament’ seems in many places to refer to Hamlet Study; ‘The Actor Stripped Bare’, on the other hand, is above all a commentary on Grotowski’s work with Ryszard Cieślak and his role in The Constant Prince, for which rehearsals had begun shortly after the premiere of Hamlet Study. Nineteen sixty-four was also the year when the theatre moved from Opole to Wrocław. It was in September 1964 that Grotowski wrote in a letter to Barba the words that testified to a deep transformation: ‘everything appears to me under a new light’.41 ‘The Theatre’s New Testament’ in many respects is an exceptional text; the valuable, perhaps too sincere even, testimony of an artist’s quests and doubts. Grotowski speaks directly about the inspiration of psychoanalysis, of the ‘psycho-analytic language of sounds and gestures’ appropriate to the actor’s art and the ‘psycho-analytic language of words’ created by great poets. Psychoanalysis is recommended here as a method for examining the motivations informing one’s own actions from the point of view of compensatory mechanisms. For example: ‘A man who has unfulfilled political tendencies, for instance, often becomes a producer and enjoys the feeling of power such a position gives him.’42 The process of an actor’s analysis of himself is compared in turn to psychoanalytic theory. Grotowski also speaks of psychotherapy for the spectators. He is aware, for example, that a necessary condition for a successful psychotherapeutic process is the weakening of the claims of the ‘superego’ and the establishment of an active position of passivity on the part of the actor/patient. Grotowski presents the attitude of the actor to the director from the perspective of mechanisms of transference: ‘the actor must direct against him certain unconscious mechanical reactions’.43 Among the experts who should cooperate with theatre, undertaking experimental study of actors’ creativity, the psychoanalyst is of prime importance. Grotowski also uses such concepts as ‘superego’, ‘compensation’, ‘narcissism’, ‘masochism’ and ‘sadism’. That Freud’s psychoanalysis was a crucial source of inspiration is also confirmed by Ludwik Flaszen’s text, in which the performance of Hamlet Study is called a creature devoid of ‘super-self’.44 All references to psychoanalysis, however, disappear without trace in ‘The Actor Stripped Bare’. The actor’s experience is metaphorized in this reworked text by Grotowski exclusively within two discourses: the religious and the erotic-romantic.

158

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Was this only an act of caution on Grotowski’s part? The use of the language and tools of psychoanalysis could indeed in those days have been politically and culturally stigmatizing. The Second World War and the initial post-war years resulted in a total break in psychoanalytic strands in Polish culture and science, as Paweł Dybel has shown.45 Polish psychoanalysts, mostly from Jewish milieux, either left the country before the war, or perished in the ghettos and death camps. ‘The Communist authorities, in whose eyes psychoanalysis was a bourgeois theory in the service of imperialism hostile to Marxism-Leninism, were to have their task made easier after the war.’46 It is worth recalling that between 1945 and 1967, no works by Sigmund Freud were published in Poland. In the interwar period too, the milieu of psychoanalysts, as Dybel explains, was already in more or less open conflict with traditional forms of Polish culture. The Catholic Church openly opposed psychoanalysis, often intervening with hospital consultants who allowed patients to undergo psychoanalytic treatment. Attempts to interpret Romantic threads in Polish culture from a psychoanalytic perspective provoked violent protests from conservative university circles and imputations of ‘humiliating’ and ‘defiling’ the national culture. Gustaw Bychowski’s book on Słowacki, for example, was received in this way.47 (According to Zbigniew Osiński, the pre-war edition of this book was obligatory reading for Grotowski’s actors). I believe, however, that the erasure of Freudian psychoanalytic inspiration had a deeper motivation (Jungian inspirations in Grotowski’s work belong to another order; they come from fascination with gnosis, and so are more strongly linked to religious discourse). It enabled the obscurity surrounding the essence of Grotowski’s quest to be upheld, especially as Grotowski in his next production, The Constant Prince, decided to fight to regain a right to the communal cultural space that he had so violently exposed and repudiated in Hamlet Study. Maintaining the discourse of psychoanalysis would have made such a move impossible for several reasons. First, it felt very foreign in those days to Polish culture: it continued to be associated with what was alien and, quite simply, ‘Jewish’. Second, it would have exposed rather too openly the masochistic phantasm without which Grotowski’s theatre could not exist, but whose nature the artist did not wish, or so it would seem, to fully unveil – in The Constant Prince he concealed it behind religious metaphor. Psychoanalysis provided overly precise tools for trying to comprehend that phantasm, as well as interpreting the traumatic layers of Polish society’s condition after the war. But Grotowski was concerned that, confronted by a spectacle of humiliation and distress, the spectator should remain dumb, and in this way defenceless against its affective power. The most critical assessments of Grotowski’s theatrical work took precisely the masochistic phantasm as their point of departure. Helmut Kajzar wrote that although Grotowski’s work was patronized by psychoanalysis,

WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE IN POLAND

159

what was expected from the spectator was a religious position, participation in liturgy, which leads to acceptance in silent humility of the violence of theatre, negating principles of symbolic negotiation.48 Jan Kott, in turn, asked why physical torment and humiliation is the only human experience in Grotowski’s theatre; experiences connected in addition with some kind of ‘refulgent’ and all-embracing pleasure.49

7. According to Sigmund Freud, theatre is born on the basis of moral masochism.50 Pleasure drawn from the spectacle would thus depend on watching scenes of human defencelessness against acts of violence (originally and above all divine violence). The spectator’s pleasure is therefore characterized by masochistic gratification. But the whole thing depends on the real source of pleasure remaining hidden. Otherwise, instead of pleasure, the spectator might feel repugnance at such a visual and direct image of his (or her) own denied incentives. Freud finds an example of moral masochism in the figure of Hamlet, above all in his passive attitude towards Claudius, his powerlessness to realize a plan of revenge. Shakespeare’s play refers to what is denied – it is the first psychopathological drama in modern European culture. It leads the spectator to the cognitive boundary of his own denied sources of pleasure, even at the price of provoking in him (or her) attitudes of negation and revulsion. Grotowski was aiming precisely in this direction. He did not protect the spectator from the experience of repugnance – since every kind of intensified affectiveness was desired here. Working with his actors on Hamlet, Grotowski referred to images, access to which in collective experience was doubly, if not triply protected: by the defensive mechanisms of national narcissism and the mechanisms of fear, as well as a sense of guilt. Breaking down defensive mechanisms was meant only to awaken the energy of shock; it did not lead to cognition of the social reality, which in everyday practice protected their functioning. Stephen Greenblatt presents three different models of exchange, upon which strategies of representation depended in the Shakespearean theatre: appropriation (or seizure of things which seem devoid of value, indifferent or vulnerable and defenceless against this kind of violence), purchase (understood literally as something requiring payment) and symbolic acquisition (involving forms of mediation and the effects of mediation). This last could take three forms: acquisition through simulation, metaphorical acquisition and acquisition through synecdoche or metonymy.51 By adopting the status of ‘poverty’, Grotowski significantly limited these practices of exchange. He left, in my opinion, only two of these models: appropriation and acquisition through metonymy. This radicalized in an extreme manner the ties between theatre and the social space. Appropriation violated the

160

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

symbolic order; while acquisition through metonymy directed attention towards something that could not be presented directly but which existed in the field of genuine social existence. On the one hand, this confirms the status of ‘poverty’ adopted in Grotowski’s ‘poor’ theatre; on the other, it gives it a very radical, even aggressive character. Instead of a theatre in which social and sexual energy freely circulate (as in Stephen Greenblatt’s vision of the Shakespearean theatre), we find ourselves in a theatre where violence is performed, about which the spectators are meant to keep quiet, yet in their ability to experience shock, gain pleasure and absolution.

8 A crushed audience

1. ‘The actors, crammed into a wardrobe, suffocated there’ – this was how Zbigniew Warpechowski remembered Kantor’s staging of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s play W małym dworku (Country House, 1921) in 1961.1 With the distance of time, the spectacle had become reduced to one image, a single effect. To a traumatic event.2 In the colloquial speech of this interview, it left an impressive trace, more impressive than any critical reaction to the spectacle. It is enough to erase the theatrical word ‘actors’ and replace it with ‘people’, shift the image from the sphere of art to the sphere of reality, for us to feel its menace. Among the reviewers of the performance, only Ludwik Flaszen accurately grasped the basic tension in Kantor’s work, when he wrote that ‘the thing is […] lined with scandal’.3 He therefore felt the presence of suppressed experience, denied, transposed, although he identified it above all with sexuality, and not with death and extermination. Kantor himself admitted that his staging of Country House was a reminder, many years afterwards, of the abandoned idea of reality discovered in the wartime production of The Return of Odysseus. And although he had in mind only an artistic idea, the radical emergence of the idea of reality, after a significant period of oblivion, must also have referred to other areas of experience, if only the historical. Kantor often spoke of war as he did of art, comparing it to poetry: ‘It was a reality incredibly condensed and dangerous, a step from death.’4 Kantor was fascinated by uninterpretable situations that escape the needs of meaning, are elusive as a totality and do not allow themselves to be included in any ordered narrative structures or transparent rules of representation – which is not difficult to comprehend, if only because the horizon of reality in his work is ultimately defined by art alone and its negative, empty epiphanies (Kantor owed his understanding of reality and

162

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

its traumatic foundation to psychoanalysis5 and to his personal experience of history). Where, however, the impossibility of interpreting meaning began to be exhausted or collapse, and some event with rather obvious connections to life or historical experience loomed on the horizon (and without this event, Kantor’s art would have simply been impossible), a categorical and even hysterical prohibition on understanding immediately appeared (let us indulge for a moment in a play of words, allowing us to perceive a potential cause and effect relationship between history and hysteria). Since such events shine almost continually through Kantor’s work, this prohibition has to be consistently and relentlessly renewed (in order to see that this is indeed the case, it suffices to read Kantor’s self-commentaries, especially from before The Dead Class).6 Only during the period of the Theatre of Death, does this prohibition gradually cease to be binding, just as Kantor’s theatre ceases to be governed by the hard law of reality, which traumatizes and condemns to unnameability every memory or image providing the merciless impulse for art. Kantor’s prohibition was generally treated as the privilege of an artist establishing the rules of understanding: therefore, it could not be questioned, attacked or even debated. Kantor knew perfectly well that the avant-garde modernistic model of art allowed him not to explain the prohibition he had introduced (which, in the context of his artistic activities, seemed obvious). Also, the historical, political and cultural circumstances in which Kantor created his art (particularly in the years 1964 to 1971, from Informel Art to Impossible Theatre) made his prohibition a gesture that was almost invisible (especially in Poland: both because of society’s readiness for forgetfulness and because of powerful mechanisms of censorship and self-censorship). Kantor purified the situation and experimented with participation in the unnameable. He created artistic events with enormous potential resonance, referring to the historical realia of the Holocaust while at the same time surrounding them with the mighty wall of his prohibition. He created within the realm of art extreme situations of denied identity, severed bonds and broken discourse, for which the only extra-artistic model seems to be ‘an event without a witness’7 – experience, which, in the moment of survival, leaves it radically uninterpretable. The limit to Impossible Theatre (I slightly expand the range of the conception here) came when strategies of ‘the impossible’ proved to be isolated gestures of violence and humiliation transposed from reality into the sphere of artistic activity; Kantor – with shocking self-awareness  – calls them ‘wretched interventions’ around the infernum and concisely catalogues their trademarks: ‘kneading,/impressing (a trace),/branding (a stigma),/crushing,/compressing,/dirtying,/smearing,/tugging,/tearing,/ burning’.8 Their artistic matrix seems to be no more than a trace of historical Hell, the imprint of the inexpressible – in this way Kantor carried out a radical reinterpretation of the Orpheus myth, placing it within the paradigm of avant-garde art as well as uncalculated and incalculable history.9 This is

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

163

a crucial, difficult and disturbing moment in Kantor’s work, unveiled by himself with premeditation. And transferred at the same time into the sphere of consciously arranged absence: visible to the extent that it is impossible to name. What most troubles and disturbs us here is the compulsion to repeat the real gesture of destruction, violence and humiliation as well as exclude it yet again from the sphere of moral consciousness.10 It is enough to contemplate from this point of view the cycle of artistic happenings realized by Kantor in Nuremberg in 1968.11 All depend on humiliating procedures carried out on an incapacitated man. Let us recall one of them: the meeting with the rhinoceros-man, Kantor’s archetype of the excluded human being, the incarnation of the homo sacer. In a public place, a café, before the eyes of other guests and gapers gathered outside the windows, Kantor commits systematic acts of violence against his interlocutor, including cutting and tearing his clothes. He does it coldly, methodically; his victim does not react or defend himself; the gazes of the random spectators seem sleepily indifferent, as if insensitive to the cruelty of the observed act. The impression is shocking – provided that we abandon, at least for a moment, the perspective that it’s an artistic event. And all the more powerful in that Kantor had already managed to liberate his art from habits of mimetic thinking and seeing, which means that he was not trying to represent or remind us of anything. Precisely for this reason, the sense of the happening emerges so suddenly yet at the same time must remain incomprehensible. Kantor was no doubt anticipating such a moment in the reception of his work, since in an interview with Wiesław Borowski he said that ‘understanding in art and understanding of art cause shock and surprise’.12 In this case, the ‘shock and scandal’ resulted from the awakening of historical memory and its simultaneous denial. We could, obviously, attribute this particular activity of Kantor exclusively to the context of the ‘emballages’ that fascinated him at the time and abide by the purity of artistic discourse (all the German happenings from this cycle were inspired by the recognizable iconography of painting, that is they appear to be safely grounded within their autonomous status as artistic acts). Kantor could not have been unaware, however, of what kind of social landscape he was acting in, and what images – from not so long ago – of brutality he was invoking. But his activity was transposed totally into the realm of artistic gesture and encompassed by his prohibition on interpreting their most primitive and most obtrusive meaning (or index of meanings). We may put it this way: Kantor violates our memory, paralyses memory’s most obvious field of associations and, in so doing, renders impossible interpretation, in the artist’s gesture, of the radical acts of violence transferred from the sphere of reality. The effects of the traumatic trace are staged by Kantor as the artist’s autonomous gesture full of explosive vitality – sublime, risky and comic. Therefore, the impossibility of interpretation is perhaps linked to the state of heightened visibility and reality. In addition, this same

164

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

state of memory paralysis is revealed in its ‘natural’ state, as it were, in everyday social experience. By this very fact, we become collaborators in an uncompromising and bold manipulation, which perhaps predetermines the great emotional power of Kantor’s art. The most powerful sign of Kantor’s prohibition became the Annihilation (literally: Aneantizating) Machine, which featured in his production of Witkiewicz’s Wariat i Zakonnica (The Madman and the Nun) in 1963, but which also appeared as an independent art object (for example, in the ‘antiexhibition’ at the Krzysztofory Gallery).13 It consisted of a pile of folding chairs tied together by a simple moving mechanism, which could give out a terrifying, deafening rattle. The object’s philosophical and existentialist name clashed with the primitive, aggressive mechanism and its ‘poor’ appearance – which not only proved Kantor’s aesthetic esprit, but also brought to mind the ideological functions of euphemism that customarily conceal the reality of violence, and in extreme cases, the Holocaust. In one of the films of Andrzej Sapija, the Annihilation Machine can be seen set up in an empty street: the pile of folded wooden chairs emits a dull clatter; the context of the authentic city space turns it into a shocking monument to absence and memory transposed beyond the boundaries of human speech. The Annihilation Machine was a paradoxical and model traumatizing object in Kantor’s theatre. In The Madman and the Nun, it occupied a central place, drowned out the actors, grew in size and significance, degraded all other forms of stage action and provoked extreme emotional states (from panic to bored indifference). According to Kantor, however, it signified nothing, and served only to frustrate the theatrical action, the seeds of illusion and embryonic stage characters. And yet its intensified visibility and audibility constantly produced some tiny droplet of sense at the very edges of sensory experience – it was something intolerable at least (something nevertheless!). Its action was subject to the primordial, automatic reflexes of anthropomorphization and the habitual need for moral judgement. It functioned in a way that Kantor himself described as ‘brutal’, ‘blunt’, ‘thoughtless’ and ‘relentless’.14 The radical nature and semantic homogeneity of such epithets, used in relation to an object empty of meaning and intended to produce emptiness of meaning, is staggering! The Annihilation Machine was therefore not only the actualization of Kantor’s prohibition, but also in a sense its victim (it became itself an uninterpretable object), a zealously guarded secret ostentatiously exposed to public view – in the hope that precisely in this way, its shockingly direct communication could be best shrouded in silence. In order to explain the mechanisms of self-denial and self-erasure mobilized by Kantor, it is worth referring to Witkiewicz’s play. Despite its simplified views, Kantor not only used the drama’s text as a totally autonomous reality existing independently of theatrical staging, he also read it with insight, reaching for the very heart of its meaning, entering exposed structures of discursiveness (which he sometimes ground to a pulp)

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

165

and splendidly capturing the author’s original gestures that had shaped the textual material and its source tensions. Already in the opening scene of The Madman and the Nun, the therapeutic direction of the dramatic action is apparent: reaching the ‘dark spot in his [the hero’s] soul, the forgotten place, the “psychic wound”, as they say’.15 The goal, however, is not achieved, the psychoanalytic discourse misses its target: Alexander Walpurg, the main hero of the drama, does not become an obedient model patient; with derisive verve, he incorporates psychoanalytic concepts into reality, stages the instinctive drives of aggression and desire, and in so doing exposes the therapeutic procedures of psychoanalysis. Parodying psychoanalytic strategies, Witkiewicz creates a drama in which the principle of trauma, however, enjoys undisputed triumph. The parody strikes at its own self and, through the mechanism of double negation, confirms what it had made fun of a moment ago. Witkiewicz well understood the dualistic – self-masking and self-unmasking – discourse of the unconscious. His version of parody comes close to the idea of phantasm,16 which does not express itself directly but through distortions and the principle of contiguity (phantasm, like parody, exists alongside or in-between, that is it always remembers about absence, recalls some absence). Kantor proceeds in similar fashion: at the centre of the staged reality, he places an object that frustrates, drowns out and renders impossible the emergence of any kind of coherent discourse. One could argue that the performance of The Madman and the Nun was more a radical linguistic event than a theatrical spectacle. The stage was a small platform; in surviving photographs, the actors almost fuse into one organism with the centrally placed Annihilation Machine, the upper part of which protrudes like a fragment of a shipwreck, while the figures in their ragged clothes look like castaways. The drama was not played out here in the image, which remained locked inside the same situation of mortally threatened existence, but in language exposed to a radical act of destruction, loss of communicativeness, collapse of its basic functions – since the Annihilation Machine was located at the very centre of human speech. Its presence in the spectacle drove a situation that became glaringly paradoxical: intensified visibility and semantic absence. In other words, one is tempted to say, it owed its modality to the unconscious, which reveals itself in symptoms and not in signs, transposes the meanings of conscious discourses and creates in them lacunae. The Annihilation Machine directed the attention of the spectators to a place of diffusion and ultimate disappearance of meaning. It may, therefore, be compared to Freud’s ‘navel of the dream’ or Lacan’s ‘thing’: it created the all-powerful and invisible reality of trauma. The more invisible, the more powerful. Kantor understood perfectly the relation between jokes and the unconscious, as well as the comedy of trauma; he moved therefore in the sphere of experiences threatening social anathema, because they were received as indecent and inappropriate, ‘scandalous’ and ‘shocking’, to use

166

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

his own descriptions (he was protected only by the effectiveness of his own prohibition). The Annihilation Machine in all its horror, lurking behind its euphemistic name as well as in the very mechanism of its functioning, had its comic aspect. The horror became the source of comedy, which – as we know – manifests itself where we encounter automatism and the overuse of repetition. Comedy also flows from the humiliation and objectification of human beings, desensitizes the viewer to violence and strips him/her of sympathy. And it becomes all the more powerful, the stronger the bond with experiences ousted from consciousness. Precisely such conceptions of comedy (‘situated outside accepted convention, caustic, clownish, flagrant’17) similar to the ideas of Bergson and Freud, were closest to Kantor. This type of comic quality, as Kantor further explains, is ‘a filter for human affairs, it purifies them, shells them and brings them into relief, does not allow them to be effaced, silted up’.18 Comedy is therefore an ‘uncompromising system’ whose price is defencelessness and the sacrifice of dignity. Kantor made use of this type of comedy in his happening entitled Tratwa ‘Meduzy’ (The Raft of the ‘Medusa’) in 1967. His reconstruction of Théodore Géricault’s painting, portraying people dying on a floating raft after the frigate Méduse ran aground, has the feel of ostentatious parody (similar tensions to those portrayed in the picture could already be seen in the image of the people swirling around the Annihilation Machine in The Madman and the Nun19). First, Kantor succeeded in packing onto a small stretch of beach at Łazy on the Baltic Coast a crowd of people, who were each provided with a reproduction of the famous painting and urged to reproduce it with the aid of their own bodies and beach furniture (rubber mattresses, towels, transistor radios, lifesaving rings). The reconstruction took place in an uncontrolled manner, in a fun atmosphere, in a tight squeeze, chaotically,20 terrorized by instructions from the supervisors who had emerged from the crowd of beachgoers. Kantor had organized a beach party for an extreme situation; allowed scenes of agony, despair, hunger and terror, to be parodied, and to be toyed with in language (the action was taperecorded) as well as in action. The assumption was it should be a ‘soulless copy’,21 disable emotional closeness to the distant and forgotten real event, the catastrophe of a ship that had once provoked shock in the Romantic artist’s soul: ‘His soul ruffled and disturbed by pangs of conscience, Géricault embarked on the work of his life.’22 Possessed by the traumatic image, the artist forced the rescued witnesses to take part in particular reconstructions of the events, and also instructed human figures and a model of the raft to be made from wax, in order to stage in his studio the situation of annihilation. Kantor must have been fascinated by the impossibility of artistic control over traumatic experience. Therefore, in his happening, he tried to draw close to what was real, to what cannot be recorded in any symbolic language of the artwork, since here the principle of aphanisis (self-obliteration, or the disappearance of the subject), as described by Lacan, is at work.23 The trace left by the action was to be the tape-recording of the hubbub of human

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

167

voices describing the most drastic scenes in Géricault’s picture, and speaking indeed only of the impossibility of understanding the event in which they themselves were taking part – because its meaning and affect belong here to completely separate orders. Only with distance (spatial, mental, artistic) can the noisy crowd, crammed together and acting chaotically, terrorized by the instructions issued to them, create the impression of a real situation of annihilation. With the help of living people, genuine objects and real spontaneity, liberated by the situation of collective amusement, Kantor deconstructed the banalized – because it was tamed by a masterpiece of fine art – image of catastrophe: he attacked it through parody, erased it and at the same time opened up a new space for experiencing annihilation at the very heart of the banal, beach-holiday reality. Kantor knew that this experience escapes conventionalized artistic forms; that it cannot possibly, because of its very nature, be controlled by consciousness. Hence in descriptions of his artistic practices, he appealed to psychoanalytic discourse, to its insidious and mistrustful procedures. Precisely while working on The Raft of the ‘Medusa’, he formulated the principle underlying the happening’s creation and effect: The happening for me is a kind of ‘controlling of the object’, an attempt to capture it in flagranti. Great precision is required in tracking down its properties, mistakes, crimes, trials and tribulations, hidden and masked details. Necessary intuition in discovering the correct trace, and at the same time unbelievable perseverance in the laborious assembling of insignificant trifles, circumstantial evidence, information.24 Control of the object via the happening explicitly brings to mind the search for traces of a ‘primal scene’ in psychoanalytic therapy.25 Kantor was fascinated by the traumatic object, which constantly leads to its absence and persistently manifests its inability to ‘be assimilated with life’.26 This inability was best revealed by the action entitled Multipart, performed within the framework of the Impossible. First, a series of white pictures with broken umbrellas stuck onto them was exhibited at the Foksal Gallery. Later, the pictures made their way to private owners along with instructions allowing the owners to treat the acquired artwork in a spontaneous, impulsive and uncontrolled way; the work thus lost its inviolability and dignity. The temporary owners were permitted to write or draw on the picture, damage or injure it and, as it turned out, also bury it in the earth, inter it (those owners who behaved in this way interpreted best the inexpressible message of the work and the metonymy for the Holocaust present in it). After a year, the pictures were exhibited again in the Foksal Gallery. The words written on them, the actions and drawings, most likely never became objects of Kantor’s particular attention, apart from perhaps the general effect of the dispersed, chaotic and mutilated discourse, the futility of which in comparison with the ultimate situation always fascinated

168

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

him. The ultimate epiphany of the unconscious and the fundamental impossibility of its expression would remain a white picture with its stuckon traces of death, destruction and absence. The first stage of Multipart, revealing the self-obliterating mechanism of the unconscious, aroused as a result of trauma, was in fact the real final stage: the white pictures expressed just as much the idea of a clean blank page, as the traumatic experience of self-obliteration and unreflective repetition. Temporal inversion in this case was the basis of Kantor’s conceptual activity. The white pictures proclaimed the prohibition on understanding, exposed the perfect mechanism of selfobliteration and expressed the futility and unimportance of any other kind of communication.

2. Richard Eyre in his review of Witkiewicz’s Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen) performed by the Cricot 2 Theatre during the Edinburgh Festival in 1972, wrote that the spectacle was like a ‘journey through a war-torn foreign country’. He interpreted in a radical way some of the production’s images and situations, especially in this statement: ‘Towards the end the entire company, the whole catalogue of society, […] is crammed inside a corral, jumbled, piled like meat.’27 Let us add that the Polish premiere of this spectacle took place five years earlier in 1967, and no Polish reviewer had dared to interpret its reality in such a drastic and literal fashion. Kantor’s insistence that the happening’s structure and material should not be referred to any external circumstances (even though they presented themselves to the spectators with unparalleled urgency) weighed heavily on the production’s reception. But the mighty vortex of collective denial was also at work here. Kantor proceeded with great bravado, trusting to its efficacity. He conducted an open game with forgetfulness, creating in the theatre a brutal event, while at the same time erasing its historical and traumatic prototype from the spectator’s conscious horizon. I should like to interpret Kantor’s theatrical work in the context of the problematics of testimony, which on the surface may appear totally inadequate in the face of Kantor’s artistic strategies and no doubt incompatible with his intentions. The artist carefully protected – especially during the period of happenings and Impossible Theatre – his avant-garde position and did not allow his plays to be associated with any pragmatic social practices with an historical, political or psychological dimension; and the category of testimony ought certainly to be counted among these. ‘In the beginning was the testimony,’ writes Lawrence L. Langer,28 recognizing the situation of giving testimony about a traumatic event to be paradigmatic for literary, theatre and surely any art after the Holocaust. Let us begin, however, with the biographical question: was Tadeusz Kantor a direct witness to the Holocaust? We know very little about this.

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

169

FIGURE 8.1  Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive.

Did he see, for example, the crowds crossing the bridge over the Vistula from Kazimierz to Podgórze in March 1941 with all their worldly goods, when the Kraków ghetto was created? On the other hand, it is a known fact that in November 1942, Kantor along with his mother, sister, brother-in-law and niece, moved to Węgierska Street, which until recently had been part of the ghetto. After the first mass deportations, the boundaries of the ghetto were changed, and some of the abandoned streets were settled by inhabitants from other quarters of the city. Further liquidation continued until spring 1943: transportations to the death camps, street executions. This means that for several months Kantor found himself in direct proximity to these events. It is also worth adding that on Węgierska Street there had previously been a prayer house and a boarding school for Jewish children. There are also conjectures that Kantor could have spent time in his family town of Wielopole Skrzyńskie, immediately after or even during the liquidation of the Jewish population – such a theory appears in the chronology of Kantor’s biography during the Occupation compiled by Józef Chrobak.29 We can also learn from here that Kantor was employed as a draughtsman by the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit, under whose aegis the racial section, among others, operated. Kantor started work there two months after anthropometric examinations had been carried out on residents of the Tarnow ghetto before its liquidation. He also worked in the set-design

170

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

shop of the Staatstheater, located in the Izaak Synagogue, which was left deserted following the deportations from Kraków’s Kazimierz district. This is obviously only a handful of facts and circumstances. Although biography does not illuminate a great deal, and at most provides arguments for tentative hypotheses, we may however be flabbergasted by the extremity and penetration with which Kantor enacts in The Water Hen a situation which I would call, following Dori Laub, ‘an event without a witness’. While working on his fourth production using dramatic texts by Witkiewicz (following The Cuttlefish, Country House and The Madman and the Nun), Kantor reflected intensively on the mutual situation vis-à-vis each other of the audience and the stage, of spectators and actors. In this case, however, it was not about seeking spatial solutions, but rather about the structure of the event, which radicalizes the position of spectators and actors, places them in extreme proximity and estrangement simultaneously, permits various forms of familiarization without allowing the two worlds to unite, and precipitates both spectators and actors outside the frame of their erstwhile experience. From Kantor’s unpublished notebooks, different variants of this situation emerge. One theme is, however, common to both: the actor and his/her activity must be alien and inaccessible to the spectator – not able to be assimilated. The audience ‘listens in’ to the reality on stage and becomes involved in an unclear situation, because something is going on there which, as Kantor writes, ‘should not have witnesses’. The artist indicates that his idea of the changed situation of spectator and actor was not invented especially for this production: ‘that idea dwelt in me’. We might ask what exactly it was: a previously discovered aesthetic rule, or rather a traumatic matrix? It is no accident then that relations with the audience became the object of particular attention in many reviews, beginning from simple observations concerning the location of the spectators and the placing of them in situations of gross discomfort. The reviewer for the Italian Corriere della Sera wrote of the ‘senseless arrangement’ of the viewers,30 who blocked from one another the field of vision, and of their lives made unbearable by being dragged into absurd interactions, or by demands to perform senseless actions (such as standing up or sitting down, inclining their head to the right or left) – as if their attention was being deliberately distracted, or real circumstances were being simulated in which the witness was deprived of the privileges of the spectator, that is of someone situated safely in relation to the actors and endowed with tools for understanding the presented action. ‘The majority of spectators proved obedient out of fear or politeness,’ the reviewer observed, not without irritation. Another Italian critic commented on the manner in which the actors turned to the audience: the aggressive intentions accompanying this disturbed the rhythms of the dialogue on stage.31 Aggression was often linked to the attempt to impose on a chosen spectator the role of confidant of intimate secrets, to drag him/her into the undesirable situation of cooperating in someone else’s humiliation. This is

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

171

perhaps why one British reviewer had the impression that the performance was marked by ‘the vivid incongruity of actions viewed through a keyhole or a half-curtained window’.32 This mechanism for engaging the spectators is described in most depth by Hanna Ptaszkowska. She grasps one essential detail: the actor, in the moment when he/she tries to establish contact with a spectator (enquiring about their seat, ticket or how they feel), experiences amnesia, ‘forgets’ about what is happening on stage. And so, as an actor, he/she ‘falls out’ of the frame of the stage reality just as the spectator in turn ‘falls into’ it. What is more important, however, and gives much food for thought, is that Ptaszkowska does not recognize this experience of the spectator as light-hearted entertainment: ‘It was the most engaging and psychologically draining situation in which I have ever taken part.’33 It is therefore worth identifying a few elements in this ‘draining’ experience: the discontinuity of the spectator’s status, the forced involvement of the spectator in the role of witness or confidant, the excessive closeness of two totally estranged realities, as well as the episodes of amnesia played out by actors in moments of detachment from the stage action when they cross over to the spectator’s side. On the occasion of the premiere of The Water Hen, Kantor drew up a manifesto of the theatre happening, which disassociates itself from traditional methods of staging dramatic texts, undermines the claims of illusion and the dominance of fictional events over the concrete materiality of the stage and throws out of gear mechanisms of representation in order to achieve the effect of total loss of meaning. In The Sunday Times review this mechanism of the loss of referentiality is explicitly described: ‘The lady in the dirty water in the cracked old bath is a lady in dirty water in a cracked old bath. The lady counting teaspoons is a lady counting teaspoons. There is no connection between them.’34 Events are concrete, yet refer to nothing, mean nothing. And what is perhaps even more interesting: the panic, fear or apathy of the actor does not provoke any empathetic reactions on the part of the spectator, because there is no framework that would integrate them, set them in order, confer meaning and an emotional horizon shared by all. The spectacle consisted of a series of concrete prosaic activities performed by the actors (such as counting teaspoons, shaving, carrying suitcases, pouring water into a bath), taken, however, to a level of obsessive repetition and hysterical gratification, sometimes involving absurd ‘slips of the tongue’ or a mistaken substitution of object (socks smeared with dripping). Any connection between the individual activities arose only due to the situation of being crammed together, the density of people, and not as a result of causal, emotional, psychological or plot-related ties. The rhythm of the performance sprang from the extreme abuse of the actor’s energy, erupting and quickly exhausted. The result was the destruction of space, violation of the spectator’s sense of security (they could be splashed with water, soiled with dripping, wounded by a fork, jostled by the actors) as well as the loss of ability to order their impressions sequentially: too many things were happening at once; the

172

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

events followed on from one another breaking all rules of probability, subject to unexpected twists and brutal interventions. Disturbance of proxemic security (things happen too close) overlapped with unfailing mechanisms of mental isolation (the observed events are alien and incomprehensible). Throughout all these actions, however, the actors were enunciating the text of Witkiewicz’s drama. They succumbed to the comic compulsion to speak – the scenes followed on from each other according to the order established by their author; the actors contained their acting activity within the confines of a phantasmal script that seriously violated practical verisimilitude as well as any so-called ‘imaginability’. This phantasmal scenario might have been entitled: family history at the time of the Holocaust. One reviewer, trying to grasp the relationship between the dramatic text and the actors’ performances, claimed that Witkiewicz’s play ‘merely murmurs beneath the action like a protesting subconscious’.35 And so, what is shouted out here so loudly would belong in fact to the order of hidden speech (if we judge it from an everyday and commonsensical perspective). Sometimes the actions on stage came close to the events portrayed in the drama; often they even attained exaggerated literalness; other times, the two orders parted company and proceeded along their own separate tracks. It was difficult in the midst of such chaos to follow the plot of the drama. The text, naturally, therefore referred above all to the situation in which the audience and actors found themselves – and thanks to this, it also functioned in an extraordinarily concrete way. Let us recall that Witkiewicz’s characters are constantly preoccupied with commenting on the situation in which they find themselves. In addition, these situations are always drastic, extreme, ultimate. The heroes are always conscious that their experiences fall outside the frames of ordinary, everyday existence, are no longer subject to routine reactions. This is already mentioned in the opening scene by Edgar, who is about to kill his female lover, totally in cold blood, with the aim of experiencing a transformation in his personality. Every following scene of the drama is situated beyond the boundaries of the ‘imaginable’, mobilizes the characters’ reserves of monstrosity, ridicules conventional moral reflexes and depreciates death and physical suffering, which have completely taken over the sphere of lost everyday existence. The characters usually react to death with laughter. ‘You killed her? So you were the one who shot her? How funny! Ha, ha … As though you were out hunting’: thus Edgar’s crime is soberly acknowledged by Tadzio, his underage and perhaps adoptive son,36 who is already accustomed to all kinds of atrocities (or rather is formed by them). Since the drama’s plot is degraded by Kantor, the commentary on such so-called ‘unimaginable events’ comes to the fore – especially as the actors shout out their questions with obsessive insistency and clownish ostentation, directed usually at the audience. Kantor positioned his actors behind crooked and irregularly placed barriers of the kind used by enforcement agencies to separate onlookers from extraordinary and emotive events. Actors and objects created something like a moving camp, a collective constantly on the move in panic, living in a

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

173

temporary, transitory state. The characters were equipped with suitcases, crates, rucksacks and other valuable – from some points of view – objects. The spectacle began in a situation of collective panic, expectation of some disturbing event. The actors asked one another the time, for example, or demanded an answer from the spectators to the question: ‘Has it started yet?’ The question related of course to the spectacle itself, but the anxious and panicky tone seemed either comically exaggerated or incomprehensibly sinister. Someone was counting their suitcases, someone else teaspoons. Steam was gushing from a bath. From their former homes, there remained the remnants of desperately guarded, movable possessions, as well as remnants of everyday rituals: someone was shaving, someone was changing their clothes, someone was telephoning. In the final scene, Kantor brought the staged reality to absolute destruction. The waiters, who until then had been serving both audience and actors, became the perpetrators. People and objects were squeezed by them into a tighter and tighter space. The barriers also increased in number. Soldiers appeared around about, moving like automatons and aiming without respite into the pile of people. ‘Nightmarish merging of human bodies with objects’, Kantor wrote in his copy of the script.37 It is hard not to think of scenes from the Kraków ghetto.

FIGURE 8.2  Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive.

174

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

The actors create a ‘nightmarish battlefield’: they lie down on the floor, lie stiffly alongside one another, sometimes on top of each other, ‘with eyes staring into space’. The spectators are conducted into this space of orchestrated extermination, forced to leave their seats and walk between the lying bodies, carefully placing their feet in the designated spots. The actors sometimes rise up and utter ‘cries of pain and fear’, after which they fall back down inert. ‘The spectators execute / weird leaps, / turn over the lying bodies, / jump, terrorized / and entangled / in this absurd game.’38 Led into the interior of the image, they do not understand its meaning. For whose eyes, therefore, was this spectacle created? And whose vision makes them incomprehensible? A traumatizing gaze, belonging to no one, seems to penetrate the space, excluding the spectators from the position both of participants and of observers, locating them in the field of the impossible. We need at last to pose the question directly: why did Kantor portray, in his own commentary, situations that refer to the Holocaust as autonomous events belonging to the realm of art and happenings? Why did Kantor ascribe the traumatic effect of densifying and inflaming reality to the autonomy of the artistic gesture? Was the isolating of a memory trace – irrespective of to whom it might belong – a deliberate act, or an unconscious one? The Water Hen is an unprecedented example of the mechanism of isolation, recognized by Sigmund Freud in his essay Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) as one of three motor techniques, alongside repression and undoing, of the psyche’s defence against pathological memory formations. Isolation depends on suppressing associative connections and on isolating the sphere of affects; it should be recognized as a ‘direct symptomatic manifestation of its own’.39 Reading Kantor’s marked-up score resembles a proliferating rhizome of symptoms. He underlines all kinds of obsessive and perverse actions by the actors, as well as places where the action disintegrates, states of excitement and states of fear, excess or insufficiency of psychic energy. He uses language that prevents the events from being identified on the historical plane (and even forbids this), but that brings to the surface the affective level; multiplies and hyperbolizes adjectives describing emotional states and their pathological registers. Among the characters in the spectacle were two Hasids wearing black gaberdines and skullcaps as well as a Tsadik with an enormous trumpet. Each one of their entries was associated with great tumult, shouting, wailing. According to Kantor, they created a ‘tussling, confused group shaken by epilepsy’.40 Their interventions always had the nature of a sudden outburst, of something unexpected and at the same time unfounded. The list of scenes in The Water Hen prepared by Kantor enables the obsessive and almost predictable rhythm of these interventions to be captured. Among other things, Kantor’s Hasids performed a ritual dance with candles and the cry ‘Mazel tov’ during the wedding of Edgar and Lady. From the Tsadik’s

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

175

trumpet, as Kantor explains in his script, came ‘piercing’ and ‘tragic’ sounds. Today, it is difficult to determine what proportion of the audience would have recognized the song Es brent! (Undzer shtetl brent) by Mordechaj Gebirtig, who was murdered in the Kraków ghetto in 1942. The song was written in 1936 as a reaction to the pogrom that took place in Przytyk, near Radom, and to the growing antisemitism of those days. During the Occupation, it became a song of the ghettos, and Aleksander Ford used it as a musical leitmotif in Border Street. Fragmented and mixed in with the melody of a popular Polish tango, phrases of this song appeared in Kantor’s production many times – always associated with a situation of intensifying chaos and uproar. In none of the Polish or foreign reviews of the performance was this musical motif recognized; Kantor also did not explain it in his script. Furthermore, the Jewish strand in the performance was universally passed over in silence. For various reasons, no doubt. One of the Italian reviewers was alone in expressing his disquiet: it seemed to him inappropriate to introduce on stage ‘Jews well-defined as Jews, and in one of the countries of Central Europe’.41 It is worth explaining that these figures had their prototypes in Witkiewicz’s play. Witkiewicz included three Jewish businessmen: Typowicz, Ewader and Widmower. Admittedly, they do not wear Jewish gaberdines, as in Kantor’s production, but they are portrayed by Witkiewicz as typical representatives of the ‘Semitic race’. In the final scene of his drama, precisely these three Jewish capitalists play cards, thereby rubber-stamping issues raised earlier, such as: ‘The Semites are the race of the future’,42 ‘The spiritual rebirth of the Jews is the key to the future happiness of mankind’,43 ‘The Semites will always find a way’.44 This final issue, it should be noted, appears in the drama concurrently with the alarming news of the cataclysm happening outside: ‘There are heaps of corpses out there on the street’.45 Kantor exchanged one cliché (the Jewish capitalist) for another (the gaberdine-wearing Jew) and consolidated it within a changed context (Holocaust, and not Witkiewicz’s revolution); thus he gave a different meaning to the final scene of the drama: ‘They remain alive/they start to play cards/their final round’.46 Between the theatrical image, Witkiewicz’s text and historical reality, a constellation of powerful tensions arises that mutually undermine each other’s meanings, and what is most important: the historical association, although it shapes the scenic reality, is suspended in the process of the performance’s reception. It is important to remember that the premiere of The Water Hen took place in 1967, shortly before an antisemitic campaign was unleashed in Poland, and the spectacle was performed throughout its duration. The tactical silence of reviewers is therefore hardly surprising, especially as one might have got the impression Kantor was dangerously exploiting antisemitic clichés, while exposing them at the same time. However, this was not the only reason why images of the Holocaust shaping Kantor’s production remained uninterpreted.

176

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

FIGURE 8.3  Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive.

3. Dori Laub posits the radical thesis that the Holocaust was an event that produced no witnesses. At any rate, at the time when it was taking place, it made occupying the position of witness impossible. This was linked to ‘the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure’47 of the event itself. Neither could the outside observer remain totally unaffected, that is capable of perceiving and assimilating the totality of events, nor all the more anyone who found themselves inside the very event (that is, he/she was a victim or a perpetrator). For this reason, remembered events lost any kind of resemblance to reality, especially if they had been shrouded in silence and kept secret for many years. The events of the Holocaust therefore took place in a situation of collective delusion from which no one could break out. In order to approximate the nature of this delusion, Laub refers to Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes and the mechanism shown in it of the rift in consciousness. ‘An event without a witness’ becomes a formula for describing both the behaviour of people at the very centre of the traumatic events who take the delusion for the reality (the crematorium was called a bakery, and the pile of human bodies a magazine of damaged mannequins) – and the post-war silence on the topic of the Holocaust that lasted for decades.

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

177

It was in precisely this area that Kantor operated. His production of The Water Hen was not only a penetrating analysis of an event without a witness, but also, more importantly, its replaying. As is well known, transference (or the re-enactment of the suppressed or denied experience within a new situation, either in reality or in sleeping dreams), on the one hand, hinders the possibility of reminder, because it appears as something incomprehensible and excluded from the current context; and on the other hand, thanks to this transference, the denied conflict becomes visible. It is similar with Kantor’s spectacle. On the one hand, images of the Holocaust are recalled; on the other, the perspective of their correct interpretation and historical location is rendered inaccessible to the spectators. Kantor did not so much create a spectacle about the mechanisms that disrupt consciousness and memory, as base upon them the direct effects of theatre. The spectators were therefore placed in a similar situation to the applauding crowd in Andersen’s tale. The process of perception mobilized by Kantor was affected by a far advanced paralysis in referential functions. Robert Eaglestone, analysing testimonies rescued from the Holocaust, identifies a characteristic mechanism: I know, but I do not see.48 Kantor performed an equally characteristic inversion: I see, but I do not know. The theme of loss of memory and loss of experience is already powerfully inscribed in Witkiewicz’s text. Edgar, the main hero of the drama, calls himself many times a mannequin, a marionette, someone who has no access to his own experiences. He therefore attempts to carry out something atrocious or submit to someone else’s violence. Perhaps this is the result of his having ‘experienced too much for one day’. In the space of a few minutes he becomes a murderer, his female lover dies, he finds his long-lost son (who had been living in a home for boys) and learns of the terrible death in agony of his closest friend. The figure of Tadzio, the underage witness to the unimaginable events, was played in Kantor’s production by Maria Stangret, dressed in a costume imitating the body of a naked boy. Throughout almost the entire performance, she sat motionless on a raised chair that towered above the stage (rather like that of a tennis umpire), while her high-pitched voice dominated over the tumult. Her speeches were accompanied by a recording of a child crying immediately after waking. The effect was nightmarish. The ‘huge naked child’ was, at one and the same time, witness, judge and victim. Dori Laub, who survived the Holocaust as a child, begins his text about ‘the event without a witness’ by invoking his own experiences. This is how he tries to encapsulate them: But these are the memories of an adult. Curiously enough, the events are remembered and seem to have been experienced in a way that was far beyond the normal capacity for recall in a young child of my age. It is as though this experience of witnessing is of an event that happened on another level, and was not part of the mainstream of the conscious

178

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

life of a little boy. Rather, these memories are like discrete islands of precocious thinking and feel almost like the remembrances of another child, removed, yet connected to me in a complex way.49 Here, we may recall the analysis of Bruno Bettelheim, who undertook research during his time in Dachau and Buchenwald on the behaviour of people in extreme situations.50 Bettelheim noticed that concentration camp prisoners gradually stopped identifying with their adult personas: their behaviour and way of experiencing feelings underwent regression, infantilization. For this reason, those acts of brutality and humiliation that reminded them of situations remembered from childhood, were especially painful. Often, these were in fact relatively trivial and non-threatening. On the other hand, situations that were genuinely extreme did not register in the field of consciousness, and what is even more amazing, did not appear in dreams. At the root of this loss of ability to fully experience, according to Bettelheim, was the rift or dislocation characteristic of traumatic situations. Emotional reaction was separated from the event: the prisoner became the distant and indifferent observer of his/her own suffering; had the impression it was happening to somebody else. Did Kantor’s work betray symptoms of phantasmal identification with the Jewish fate? While working on The Water Hen, Kantor articulated in one

FIGURE 8.4  Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive.

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

179

of his manifestos the idea of the artist as eternal wanderer – no doubt one of the traces of such phantasmal identification. Together with this notion there also appears an intense re-enactment of situations of humiliation as well as the idea of art as a journey: affirmation of nomadic attitudes, readiness to undertake risks, disdain for stability. In his later text ‘Od ambalażu do idei podróży’ (‘From Emballage to the Idea of Journey’), Kantor called the heroes of The Water Hen a troupe of ‘eternal wanderers’;51 evidently with time, Kantor grew more and more inclined to sentimentalize his own work. The terror, to which the ‘eternal wanderers’ were subjected in the performance, underwent stronger and stronger effacement. If any kind of ‘journey’ had taken place in it, then it was characterized by action under duress, under the pressure of brutal violence. In this instance, it would be more accurate to regard the word ‘journey’ as an extreme euphemism (one of those by which attempts were always made to tame the experience of the Holocaust). The heroes of Kantor’s spectacle were ‘the jews’ – written with a lowercase ‘j’ and enclosed in inverted commas, as in the book by Jean-François Lyotard,52 who wished to avoid their being mistaken for real Jews. But the fate of real Jews is dependent, as Lyotard explains on his opening page, on what ‘the jews’ actually signify. Jews are the real object substituting for ‘primary repression’ – what is originally denied (indicated by the word ‘jews’). They therefore point to a fundamental rupture, something always shifting, which cannot find a permanent place but about which European civilization strives at any cost to forget, attempting to free itself from the experience of lack (‘the jews’ belong to the Other, reveal a lack in the symbolic order, its defect, incompleteness). Meanwhile, Lyotard claims, we must not forget about the Forgotten, must not experience wholeness and unity. We should protect ourselves against the temptation of symbolic fullness, since for real Jews, what proved in the end to be most real was the way in which Europe, aiming towards such fullness, tried to get rid of them: ‘Christians demand their conversion; monarchs expel them; republics assimilate them, the Nazis exterminate them’. The extermination of Jews, however, did not eliminate ‘the jews’, on the contrary: it provoked and intensified their phantasmal existence. Crucial for Lyotard is the concept of ‘primary repression’, which is not captured by consciousness as a moment of initial scission into what is conscious and what is unconscious. The result is an accumulation of psychic energy and the free flow of forces in the sphere of the unconscious. Naturally, therefore, the primary repression is not representable and by definition must be forgotten (because it has never been remembered).53 Primary repression stands as a matrix for traumatic experience: since in this case too, consciousness is incapable of grasping the experience, binding it, making it the object of representation. In other words, it cannot be witness to the event. Traumatic experience, according to Lyotard, implies a double blow. When it strikes the first time, it is not registered in any way; it forces itself into the system of the unconscious and excites it, without finding an

180

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

object (Kantor writes of a ‘red-hot, scorching bullet’, which becomes an object devoid of any representational function). As Lyotard explains, the first blow does not trigger performance, ‘is not set to work in the machine of the mind’. It is a feeling which has neither witness nor subject: no one experiences it. Similarly, in Kantor’s production, no one (not the spectators, nor the actors, nor Witkiewicz’s characters) experienced the feelings of panic-stricken fear driving the motor activity of the spectacle. The second blow comes considerably later: an excess of uninvested energy becomes concentrated and accumulates, and eventually strikes with an affect that has no reference to the actual context – for example, in the form of sudden fear. In this case, in turn, the subject does not know why it is experiencing something. The first blow may be called shock without affect, the second – affect without shock. Let us risk a hypothesis: Kantor refers to primary repression, or denial, but makes use of images of secondary repression, that is images of the Holocaust removed from collective memory, or rather flashes of them, which shape the excess of the staged activities. He involves spectators and actors in the draining situation of an uneven investment of energy, without allowing the context that might justify it to be explained. He endows what has been forgotten with scandalous vitality. In Lyotard’s words, Kantor does not lay claim to memory, but to recognition of what ‘never ceases to be

FIGURE 8.5  Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1967. Cricoteka Archive.

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

181

forgotten’54 – therefore, he allows the spectators ‘not to remember’, that is not to recognize the images he uses. Second, although he moves in the sphere of trauma’s second blow, he stages the impetus of the first. In this way, he succeeds in not binding together representational scenarios of destruction and affect – he creates instead an avant-garde situation of closed circulation and ‘draining experience’. Lyotard writes of the poor and limping representation that bears the traces of the first blow, and which cannot be expressed admittedly in terms of meaning, or revealed as experience in the affective sphere, but may leave its trace, injuring the work in terms of its material content. In a similar spirit, Adorno invokes Igor Stravinsky’s work Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier’s Tale), written at the end of the First World War. Adorno underlines how the composer wrote it for a ‘sparse, shock-maimed chamber ensemble’ (it was impossible in wartime conditions to assemble a full symphony orchestra), calls it a music of ‘voids’ and regards it as a ‘pointer for intellectual production after the present war’,55 postulating the status of poverty and incompleteness. According to Adorno, the war lacks an ‘epic’ element and so ‘it will leave behind no permanent and unconsciously preserved image in the memory’, while life as a result ‘has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals’.56

4. I would like to recall several of Kantor’s performances and happenings, in which the dramatic process and conception of space relied on a situation of crushing menace and terror. I shall mention only the most important: Powrót Odysa (The Return of Odysseus, 1944), Nadobnisie i koczkodany (Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes (also known as Lovelies and Dowdies, for example for the Edinburgh Festival performance), 1973), Trątwa ‘Meduzy’ (The Raft of the ‘Medusa’) – that is, one of the scenes from the panoramic sea happening from 1967, and the lesser known happening Pralnia (The Laundry) from 1971. The Laundry is one of the least discussed of Kantor’s happenings. ‘The crushed crowd in The Laundry took part in a series of individual activities united by a common meaning: it participated in the intensifying monotony and obsessive atmosphere of taming objects and joining in activities geared towards throwing those objects more and more urgently into relief.’57 In the authentic hotel laundry, the participants of this happening are attacked by the sound of air being pumped into tyres, the roar of gushing hot water, and the hissing of spray deodorants. Full of clouds of steam, the crowded space grows increasingly more suffocating and confined. In Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, meanwhile, Kantor made out of the prosaic act of handing over outer garments to a cloakroom, a raucous event full of violence and turmoil. The sharpening of the vocabulary used by Kantor in his own commentaries on the spectacle is worth noting: such

182

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

words as ‘hell’, ‘terror’, ‘shame’, ‘duress’, ‘brutality’, ‘passivity’, ‘violation’. In his unpublished notes to Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, Kantor assumed the tone of a cruel and sadistic lawmaker: ‘the audience must be deprived of all comforts – crushed’.58 It is well known that the idea of ‘liminality’ lay at the heart of the sociology of Victor Turner, who adopted the term from Arnold van Gennep, examined and modified it ceaselessly, but also expanded it (applying it not only to rituals of initiation) and constantly redefined it (introducing, for example, the category of ‘liminoid phenomena’, which, in his opinion, were more appropriate for examining complex modern societies). Liminality – in its widest sense – became for Turner the crux of all processuality; the condition for transformation; a synonym for human beings’ creative and unharnessed powers; the place where innovative metaphors shaping the progress of social life were manifested; a turning point in the social drama; and a moment of self-knowledge for individuals and societies. At times he was prepared to see all art and intellectual activity within its confines, since he identified all imaginative operations, as opposed to mechanical operations, with liminality. Turner constantly expanded and deepened the concept of liminality, but he would not overstep a certain boundary – on which, more in a moment. In rituals of transition, or rites of passage, as Turner reminds us many times, the liminal phase is an intermediate phase between the loss of former status and the gaining of a new one. In the social drama, on the other hand, it appears most strongly in the third phase: the regaining of equilibrium. After the phase of violating the social order and the phase of crisis, there comes a time for rituals, both secular and religious, the task of which is to reinterpret the past responsible for the crisis as well as restore a ‘feeling of sense and order’. Liminality understood in this way becomes a condition for reflexivity, another crucial category for Turner: ‘Major liminal situations are occasions when society takes cognizance of itself.’59 Reflexivity, understood as self-knowledge or self-awareness, enables the crisis to be overcome. In some of his texts, Turner seems to even identify these two categories – liminality and reflexivity – with one another. Despite repeatedly underlining the ambivalent nature of liminality and the manifestation in it of menacing and destructive elements, Turner himself emphasized above all its positive, favourable aspect. He refused to accept that the breakdown of a social system, the thrusting of a collective into a forced liminal situation, could result only in ‘anomie, angst, and the fragmentation of a society into a mass of anxious and disorientated individuals’.60 He tended to shift the question of violence into the shade, which does not mean that he did not perceive it. In defining liminal situations, he indicated the presence of violence in general terms: ‘in many societies the liminal initiands are often considered to be dark, invisible, like a planet in eclipse or the moon between phases; they are stripped of names and clothing, smeared with the common earth, rendered

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

183

indistinguishable from animals’.61 He also perceived that liminality depends on human beings’ humiliated corporeality, on the biological aspect, but at the same time hurried to provide a reassuring conclusion: ‘One is born into nature to be reborn from it.’62 Referring to an essay on Dostoevsky by one of his students, he indicated the possibility for liminal situations to indeed exist without communitas – ‘the lack of community […] creates both an unenviable liminality and the feeling of despair’63 – but added immediately that here, the concept of liminality had been expanded to an extent that he himself had never taken into account. If, at this point, we encounter the boundaries of liminality in Turner’s anthropology, then we surely also come up against the limits to his conception of the social drama. Kantor’s imagination was haunted precisely by ‘an unenviable liminality and the feeling of despair’, devoid of the ritualistic optimism that Victor Turner, in his reflections on social dramas, never seems to renounce. Let us recall once more Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes. This is without doubt a performance in which liminality appears to be the fundamental idea organizing the staged reality. Let us begin with the space, with the fact that the audience is detained in a cloakroom – in a zone between ordinary everyday life and theatre proper. Here Kantor arranges – with the aid of two noisy cloakroom attendants (one is a cross-dresser, the other a butcher) – the liminal ritual of the ‘stripping of signs and insignia of preliminal status’,64 that is the obligatory removal of overcoats and jackets (during performances in Italy, even shirts were pulled off). Here we encounter the scandalous juxtaposition of two different experiences: a phantasmal, almost pornographic breakdown of personal identity, and a vision of collective extermination penetrating the tumultuous scene. Some of the spectators are ‘caught’ as they enter the cloakroom and made to play a role as one of the Choir of Forty Mandelbaums, which involves hanging a numbered plate around their necks and being directed to a separate sector. The remainder of the audience is likewise not admitted to the ‘proper’ auditorium and remains held outside the dividing door, on which hangs a large notice in several languages: ‘Theatre Entrance’. This concealed place, inaccessible to the spectators, turns out during the course of the action to be not a theatre auditorium, but a bathhouse – a pornographic secret, a place of planned orgy. In this provisional space between one entrance and another, strange human monsters appear. Turner saw a symbol of the liminal creature in the combination of the human and the animal, whereas Kantor creates his own ‘liminal monster’65 out of the combination of humans and objects: he does not grant liminal beings the power of nature and instinct (as Turner does), but rather confines them, mechanizes and degrades them. The object, or bio-object, becomes, as one of the French reviewers observed, something like a ‘mortal wound, impossible to cicatrize’,66 although at the same time it provokes a certain type of panic-stricken vitality bordering on fear of

184

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

objectification. ‘The actor found himself in a state of determination, in states of panic or ecstasy, but on the other hand he was degraded and made fun of by Kantor, was defending his own dignity. The pressure of demands was so strong that the instinct of self-preservation constantly came into play’.67

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

185

186

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

FIGURES 8.6–8.11  Frames from the film Lovelies and Dowdies, directed by Ken McMullen, 1974. The film contains a record of the production of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Nadobnisie i koczkodany (Lovelies and Dowdies; also translated as Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes), directed by Tadeusz Kantor, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków 1973; Edinburgh Festival Cricoteka Archive.

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

187

The man on the door, constantly opening and shutting it, became indeed an allegory for the liminal creature, but because of the impossibility of crossing the threshold, he was at the same time its radical negation; through the fact of his endless, futile, repeated actions he carried the liminal situation to the point of absurdity and exhaustion. In this production, Kantor carried on an extreme and extraordinarily risky game with the topography of the Holocaust, with a traumatic space in which such words as ‘bathhouse’ and ‘cloakroom’ concealed the criminal and terrifying procedure of collective slaughter. Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz, in his monograph on Kantor, called the space beyond the door a ‘metaphorical gas chamber’,68 although he does not develop this thread in any way. However, this is the only testimony to the spectacle known to me, where the thing is named for what it is (the same term ought equally to be applied to the ‘laundry’ in the happening described above). The brutally obvious association, for some reason, was passed over in silence both by Kantor and by the reviewers. Certainly, Kantor was exploiting here the neurotic mechanism familiar to psychoanalysis of denial through revelation, expressed in terms of negation: what I carry into effect or say, cannot be what I am really thinking or the real cause of my suffering. The artist brings about a situation in which his game cannot be named and uncovered by the spectators. By letting loose laughter and agitation among the audience, he rendered a metaphorical interpretation of the theatrical space impossible. However, the very reality of the invoked space of the Holocaust seems to paralyse metaphor and the ability to think symbolically. Kantor makes of the Holocaust a space of absolute forgetfulness, which because of this he can then treat with total impunity – besides, scandalous excess seems to be for him the only possibility for coping with traumatic reality (a similar strategy was adopted many years later by Artur Żmijewski in his film Berek, translated as Game of Tag, 1999). Parody understood in this way becomes a form of ‘caricatured’ sacred mystery,69 because its object always remains beyond reach: ‘[..] the artist, feeling unable to push his egoism to the point of wanting to represent the unnarratable, assumes parody as the very form of mystery’.70 Kantor, it seems to me, felt for many years the topic of the Holocaust to be taboo. At meetings in the Krzysztofory Gallery following the premiere of The Dead Class, he attacked ‘plagiarists’, who made ‘private obsessions’ out of ‘the greatest shrines’ such as the Auschwitz concentration camp.71 Watching the documentary film by Włodzimierz Gawroński and Krzysztof Miklaszewski entitled Szatnia (Cloakroom) devoted to Kantor’s Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, one could be persuaded that the selection carried out among the thronging spectators was received by the audience as merely half comic, half embarrassing: ‘Kantor […] based himself precisely on shameful experiences: embarrassment, attempts at defence. This was the case with the Mandelbaums: he displayed that whole discomfort, disorientation, before the eyes of the rest of the audience. He did not demand from the spectators that they play the Mandelbaums. He amused himself with this Ecce Homo finger pointing at the spectator.’72 The spectators

188

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

with number plates around their necks were subjected first of all to a public drilling (or rather sadistic maltreatment) led by the cloakroom attendants and the Chief of the Mandelbaums. For example, they rehearsed the gesture of a Jewish lament according to dictated matter-of-fact instructions: ‘Arms up, with a “tendency” to clutch the head. Let’s practise it: arms up, circular movement of the torso.’73 According to some reports, Kantor himself took part in this training: ‘The audience is not able do what he wants but is forced just as much by the actors as by Kantor to stand up, sit down, scream, gesticulate.’74 Later this group of spectators is led out behind the scenes, where they don Jewish gaberdines, hats and beards. Their return prompted peals of laughter from the spectators. From then on, the group of Mandelbaums created a captive ‘lamenting choir under the baton of a boorish choirmaster’75: ‘members of the audience dressed as Mandelbaums (Orthodox Jews in gaberdine and beards) wail dutifully on the sidelines’.76 In the film Cloakroom, the fragment about the rehearsal is prolonged, during which Kantor describes to the actors the scene where the Mandelbaums will be ejected individually – like ragged old hags – through the separating door that leads allegedly inside the theatre, that is, into the ‘metaphorical gas chamber’. The horrifying meaning of this image would seem to be sufficiently unambiguous and obvious. Kantor presents it

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

189

190

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

191

FIGURES 8.12–8.18  Frames from the film Szatnia Tadeusza Kantora, czyli Nadobnisie i koczkodany w Teatrze Cricot 2 (Tadeusz Kantor’s Cloakroom, or Lovelies and Dowdies (Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes) in the Cricot 2 Theatre), screenplay and production by Krzysztof Miklaszewski and Włodzimierz Gawroński, OTV, Kraków, 1973.

192

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

instead to his actors as a great comic climax relying on the intensifying effect of mechanical repetition, anticipating resounding applause and tremendous laughter from the audience: ‘There will be total frenzy!’ The spectator, caught up in a situation where his/her sense of security is attacked and traditional status undermined, loses the ability to interpret the theatrical events symbolically. ‘People react to this play staged by Tadeusz Kantor with peals of laughter,’ noted Artur Sandauer in his review, indicating at the same time that Kantor’s work ‘starts at the limit of possibility, on the furthermost boundaries of humanity’.77 Kantor, operating with a powerful, effective and comic metonymy (the audience end up in the cloakroom instead of the theatre), hijacking and hyberbolizing its real functions (the theatrical cloakroom), paralyses the functioning of metaphor. He does it sufficiently successfully for that uninterpretable, figurative meaning to turn out to be, in Lacanian speak, the traumatic ‘thing’. Ultimately then, the whole spectacle is played out between two realities: the physical and the traumatic. The former, however, would seem to totally engage all the spectators’ powers of perception. The existence of the latter, especially in relation to the unbridled nature of the comedic element, we do not even dare suspect. According to Victor Turner, metaphor emerging in a liminal space steers the progress of the social drama, leading to its understanding and resolution. This kind of metaphor indicates the boundaries within which a given experience is perceived. The ‘unenviable liminality’ – with which Turner did not wish to deal – prompted in Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes the nightmarish vitality of actors writhing about on the brink of humiliating objectification. It created a situation impossible to interpret and understand, and thereby paralysed the functioning of the reflexivity anticipated by Turner. Kantor spoke and wrote about it many times (‘the actors carry out many actions, which the spectator cannot decipher’78), as did his reviewers. The mechanism was expressed most dramatically by the German critic Marlis Haase: ‘The spectator is separated from the staged action by a barrier of incomprehensibility (which is one of Kantor’s conscious aims) and, reduced to the position of a defenceless victim, is in no state to react.’79 Victor Turner observed that one cannot discuss a given system from the inside; that it is not possible to indicate its boundaries with the aid of its own ideas. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to seek external ideas. Therefore, in order to speak of the end of a social drama (which is tempting, if only because Turner appears to author a totally universal formula embracing all collective experience), we should surely reject the category of liminality and replace it, for example, with the idea of obscenity. Obscenity indicates a hidden sphere of violence, perceived as law allowing sadistic desire to be gratified thanks to an imposed obligation. A cruel, sadistic law, like the murky basis of all law, becomes the source of a fatal surplus of enjoyment. The category of obscenity – which is especially important to my thinking – therefore excludes any positive aspects of carnivalesque transgression, although in many respects it may appear to resemble it.

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

193

Slavoj Žižek, inventor of the term ‘obscene supplement’, has analysed its functioning using the example, among others, of Nazi Germany, where the Holocaust was rendered possible thanks to the murky participation of the whole of society; the community rejected those who did not want to accept this dark side.80 The principle of ‘surplus enjoyment’ had to be constantly concealed, in order for this law to operate effectively, binding everyone together by means of a ‘dirty secret’ never uttered aloud. Kantor arranges precisely this kind of situation in his production. But this time the secret bound together an unpredictable community of spectators, whose attitude to the Holocaust must remain unknown yet strung, I suspect, between unawareness, forgetfulness and indifference. Kantor exposed this state of affairs, but he also, for some reason, perpetuated it. One could put it this way: in Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, Kantor operates with the substitute taboo of unbridled sadomasochistic sexuality, which finds its real object of enjoyment in death. In his notes to the spectacle, Kantor wrote about the masturbation performed unceremoniously by the heroes of the erotic triangle: Sophia, Pandeus and Tarquinius. Masturbation that led to states of torpor and loss of vitality: ‘every moment one of the three gets unhealthily aroused, exasperated, abnormally – after which they suddenly forget, as if in a state of numbness.’81 The situation of sexual shamelessness is performed as a masquerade of parodic pornographic phantasms and, I should add at once, as the semblance of liminality, since the single point of reference here is death, devoid of the symbolic supplement of the motif of rebirth. Kantor must have been aware that in Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, Witkiewicz carried out a radical and painful compromise of rites of passage. The limit to self-knowledge, both in Witkiewicz’s drama and in Kantor’s production, is death stripped of any human ceremonial: ‘brutish’ animal death. A remnant of the funeral ritual, its ruthless compromising, was the attempt by one of the actors to bury a skeleton (‘he transfers the earth with a spade from one end of the room to the other and then buries the skeleton taken from his suitcase’).82 During the performances in Teheran, Kantor explained to critics that the skeleton here is not a symbol of death, but only ‘something’ that can be buried and dug up. The cloakroom in Kantor’s production resembled, not by accident, a butcher’s shambles where the meat of slaughtered animals was hung up. Throughout the spectacle it was present in the landscape, somewhere in a distant corner, like a traumatic object: clothes were hung on the hooks. This cloakroom-shambles is just as primitive as the contraptions used for mass extermination, but devoid of the masks that those assumed. I do not believe that the terrifying question could have escaped Kantor – the question that looms at the end of Witkiewicz’s drama and which, from the perspective of the director’s historical experiences, must have sounded even more pointed. The green pills, which enable people to die fully aware of their bestiality, are recognized by one of the characters, Sir Thomas, as the highest expression

194

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

of human civilization: ‘We’re just a step away from being able to bring the dead back to life in order to kill them off still more cruelly.’83 Instead of the myth of life reborn in death, to which Victor Turner seemed always to remain loyal, there emerges the Lacanian idea of second death as the ultimate annihilation of the human symbolic order. For Kantor, the sphere for practising the idea of the second death was uncompromising avant-garde artistic creation, based on procedures of undermining, unmasking and destroying the symbolic dimension to art, procedures that the artist described – significantly – in terms of a feeling of guilt. Kantor saw himself as a destroyer of ‘sublimated operations and practices, called artistic’.84 This terrifying power of the modern artist he acquired and became aware of ‘in the middle of a genocide unprecedented in history’. In radical artistic gestures, he perceived a sinister reflection of real acts of violence – therefore he felt his own art to be ‘blasphemy, profanation, apostasy, transgression’,85 and his own situation as an artist to be a tragic trap. Therefore, in the wartime production The Return of Odysseus, he performed hidden acts of identification with Odysseus the criminal, whom many spectators remembered as a Wehrmacht soldier. As a ruthless and sadistic legislator of art that undermined symbolic transmission, he bound his creative activity – precisely on the basis of obscenity – to experience of the Holocaust. ‘This is my final manifesto: art as terror!’ he announced during work on Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes. It was he himself, present personally during the spectacle, who fomented and organized the sadistic show, if only by inciting the pair of comic and sinister cloakroom attendants to increasingly extreme acts of violence; this climate of sadistic torment was shared also by the audience, who enjoyed with unconcealed pleasure, for example, the embarrassment of their kith and kin designated to play the role of the Mandelbaums. The latter, however, concluded their performance with a scene in which Sophia is annihilated, torn to shreds. The above-mentioned Marlis Haase could not conceal her terror: ‘They came here as ordinary citizens, each left as one of forty Mandelbaums, forced to kick the semi-naked princess – which, to put it mildly, is not an everyday experience.’86 And this is how John Barber of the Daily Telegraph summed up his impressions: ‘It has the fascination of watching a street accident in a foreign country. Clearly something disastrous has happened and something urgent and incomprehensible is afoot.’87 Flagrantly and tragically, Kantor exposed, and equally effectively concealed, the scandalous, obscene connection with the Holocaust – as in the above-mentioned mechanism of neurotic negation. The mechanism of negation, as Freud explains, indeed enables the resistance of denial to be overcome, but it does not enable the denied experience to be assimilated. Similarly, at the beginning of the 1970s, Kantor was trying to formulate his own and the collective attitude towards the Holocaust – it therefore comes as no surprise that the social drama as understood by Victor Turner succumbed here to blockade and paralysis. There is not the slightest allusion in any of the reviews known to me to the ‘theme’ of the spectacle, which is

A CRUSHED AUDIENCE

195

also not surprising, since Kantor removed all ‘theme’ from his work, while he invested metatheatrical situations based on mechanisms of comedy and primitive violence with the energy of this denial. On this point a long and complicated commentary ought to be appended, in order to avoid any misunderstanding of Kantor’s intentions. We should recall at least the rich series of reflections on the Holocaust inspired by Jacques Derrida and his postulate to deconstruct all discourses of European culture suspected en bloc of ‘participation’, since Nazism ‘had grown like a mushroom in the silence of a European forest’.88 This strand of risky deconstruction – and this is worth remembering – was initiated in Polish culture precisely by Tadeusz Kantor. In his productions he pulverized traditional mechanisms of representation, exposing their ‘obscene’ substratum that paralyses memory. Robert Eaglestone thus understood Derrida’s connection to the Holocaust: ‘Derrida’s work is not a way of viewing the Holocaust […], it grows itself from these cinders.’89 We could say the same, in my view, of Kantor. One thing is certain: in Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, he radically opposed the kind of theatre that is woven into the rhythms of life and celebrates mysteries of transformation.

9 Archive of the missing image

1. When in October 1977, Andrzej Wajda began rehearsals at the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw for Rozmowy z katem (Conversations with an Executioner) based on the book by Kazimierz Moczarski, he was immersed in many parallel projects. He was making a new film about contemporary Poland Bez znieczulenia (Without Anaesthesia aka Rough Treatment); planning a gigantic theatrical project about an artistic bourgeois family in Kraków at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries entitled Z biegiem lat, z biegiem dni … (As Years Go By, As Days Go By) to be played over three nights at the Stary Teatr (Kraków); thinking about filming Jerzy Grotowski’s already legendary production Apocalypsis cum figuris as well as a documentary about the naïve art collected by Ludwik Zimerer Zaproszenie do wnętrza (Invitation Indoors); and preparing a new production of Stanisława Przybyszewska’s play Sprawa Dantona (The Danton Affair). The script for the film Powołanie (Vocation), about second-year seminarians at a Silesian seminary forced to work in a mine, was also ready. During the rehearsals for Conversations with an Executioner, filming was taking place in open-air locations and historic interiors in Warsaw for the television version of Stanisław Wyspiański’s play Noc listopadowa (November Night). In Wajda’s notes from the time, we find yet more sketches, projects, ephemeral ideas.1 All this happened following the premiere of Człowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble), a film about Stalinist Poland, which perhaps more than anything made Wajda aware of the political significance of his art, sparked great emotion among audiences, established new boundaries for artistic expression in the culture of the People’s Republic and, being politically risky, quickly vanished from the repertoire of Polish cinemas, despite the vast box-office queues. What should we call this whirlwind of topics? How to grasp such a hectic rhythm of work? Basically, Wajda created an unusual and unprecedented

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

197

project for investigating the social space through art. It might be best described through the metaphor of a net or network (in a double sense: of both catching and mingling). In those days, Wajda felt himself to be the voice of the collective, a participant in a great awakening of societal emotions and historical memory: his attitude to society changed, the element of provocation disappeared, while the need to tighten the communal bonds that had always accompanied his work intensified. Wajda no longer attacked collective myths as fiercely as he had in the 1960s, seeking instead understanding with his audience through the exposure of common experiences tabooized or censored by the culture and propaganda of the Polish People’s Republic (such as attitudes to Stalinism). He emphasized the theme of political independence, steadfast attitudes, motifs of continuity of memory. He realized his own artistic projects but also documented the works of other artists – especially those received by the public in terms of shock and catharsis. This was the case with Kantor’s The Dead Class and Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum figuris. If I reconstruct correctly Wajda’s fascination with these productions, then it was connected with the intensity of the sustained affect as an event happening on the border between social and individual experience, as a tectonic shock exposing layers of the collective’s contemporary as well as archaic history. I would place greatest emphasis on the most recent layers: Wajda strongly sensed the historicity of Grotowski’s and Kantor’s works, their powerful libidinal impulse associated with visions of a community in a state of radical crisis, and violently puncturing the outward pretence of post-war stabilization. Wajda’s productions from the first half of the 1970s had a similar libidinal impact: Dostoevsky’s Possessed and Wyspiański’s November Night. Kazimierz Moczarski’s book, which was a record of the author’s conversations with the Nazi criminal Jürgen Stroop in their shared prison cell in Mokotów immediately after the war, was likewise a great event. It provoked a powerful reaction in society and disappeared instantaneously from bookshops, accompanied by its legend as a work whose publication had been threatened for political reasons. And so, in the same cell of a Stalinist prison, a criminal responsible for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto came face to face with one of the leaders of the Home Army, of the Polish armed underground. Already for these reasons, the book was potentially of interest to Wajda. Zbigniew Kubikowski, who in 1972–1974 as editor-in-chief of the monthly literary journal Odra had published the Conversations almost in their entirety, as well as an interview with the author conducted by Mieczysław Orski, later paid the price by forfeiting his position.2 The book appeared in the summer of 1977, and rehearsals were already underway by early autumn. Zygmunt Hübner, director of the Teatr Powszechny – originator of the production Conversations with an Executioner, author of their adaptation for the stage and future re-creator of Moczarski’s role in Wajda’s spectacle – reacted swiftly. Wajda, although busy with many other film and theatre projects, resolved immediately to direct the performance.

198

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Wajda realized that the spectacle might have problems with official censorship. He therefore decided not to sign a contract with the theatre until the very last moment, in order not to have his hands tied. At any moment he could withdraw – both in case he was dissatisfied with the effects of his work, and if political and censorship pressures forced him to make concessions that were too great. He guaranteed himself conditions of complete artistic freedom – we should remember this in this case. For if we encounter traces of ideological compromise, then they should be ascribed to a source other than state censorship. Wajda notes on 4 October 1977: ‘I began rehearsals. The direction of the theatrical adaptation emerged. What we have has no shape. I took on Allan Starski for the scenography, discussed with him. But I will not sign the contract and nor accept any obligations, in order to have a free hand when censorship difficulties appear or if the whole thing isn’t good enough.’3 Wajda operated spontaneously, but astutely. He knew fairly soon what aesthetic qualities the set required, having invited the film designer Allan Starski, with whom he had made Man of Marble, to cooperate with him. More doubts were raised, as can be surmised from the above note, by the adaptation of the text and the interpretative direction of the whole. Already on publication, it was known that ‘Moczarski’s book will be subject to various readings’.4 Critics asked what exactly the Conversations with an Executioner were about: were they a document recording Jürgen Stroop’s activities, the man who in 1943 led the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, or the next cruel tale about crematoria, worthy to stand alongside the prose of Tadeusz Borowski and Bogdan Wojdowski, or was it a study of the sociopsychology of a war criminal? Or perhaps it was a tale of Stalinist Poland, in which leaders of the Home Army were equated with Nazi criminals? What, then, does the enigmatic sentence in Wajda’s notebook mean: ‘What we have has no shape’? Does it refer to Moczarski’s book, Hübner’s adaptation or the initial, still hazy ideas of the director himself? We may deduce from Wajda’s notebooks that he decided initially to concentrate on making a story about the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and its brutal suppression, about the liquidation which ended with the spectacular blowing up of the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street. Especially as these were themes that had already appeared in Wajda’s films: in his debut film Pokolenie (Generation, 1955) based on Bohdan Czeszko’s novel (1948) as well as in Samson (1961) based on Kazimierz Brandys’s. In Generation, the camera did not traverse the walls of the ghetto, preserving as a result the ‘Polish’ perspective of observers or bystanders of the Holocaust (contrary to the novel, in which there appears a fragmentary, interrupted strand relating to events in the ghetto). In Samson, all events – both life in the ghetto and on the ‘Aryan’ side – we see through the eyes of Jakub Gold, a Polish Jew, victim of Nazi extermination policies and antisemitism in Polish society. This time, Wajda had the opportunity, thanks to Moczarski’s book, to present these same events from the perspective of the perpetrator – a man who has passed into history as the ‘executioner of the Warsaw Ghetto’. In

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

199

Wajda’s work, he thereby completed Hilberg’s triangle of participants in the Holocaust.5 It is already clear from this example that Wajda did not create self-contained ‘masterpieces’; instead he was a master at creating connections, sequels, references, revisions, supplements. Thus every one of Wajda’s projects was born as a component of a whole network of projects. The spectacle Conversations with an Executioner arose within a similar dense network. Wajda was an artist who examined the libidinal dimension to social communication: the flow of energy, affects, emotions. He was able to recognize his own failures, although at the same time he was rather too trusting of his audience – he measured his own ‘successes’ only according to the scale of their emotional resonance. Therefore, despite Wajda’s selfassessment, I would place Samson, for example, among his most outstanding works, and the negative reception of the film among the social symptoms that the artist was unable to properly interpret. We will return to this train of thought. In 1977, Wajda had every right to suppose that a spectacle about the Warsaw Ghetto would encounter problems with censorship. Ten years previously, in 1967, he had started discussions about producing a film version of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week. The preparatory work had been done quickly, but the screenplay, written by the author himself, was subject to ever more far-reaching interventions as a result of political events (the SixDay War, the condemnation of Israeli policies by the USSR, the antisemitic campaign at home, the forced emigration of Polish citizens of Jewish origin), until permission to produce the film was finally withdrawn.6 In 1977, the topic of the uprising in the ghetto returned to social consciousness thanks to two prominent books: Moczarski’s Conversations with an Executioner and Hanna Krall’s Shielding the Flame. The opportunity therefore presented itself to Wajda to return to a theme that was always important to him and remained unresolved. For the first time, however, Wajda undertook it in the theatre. After 1968, any Jewish topic was likely to arouse social emotions, both because of the imposed top-down silence and the unclean conscience of Polish society, due not only to suppressed memory of the Holocaust, but also to the antisemitic campaign. Precisely in this context, we should remember that after 1968 Wajda took great care over the visibility of Jewish motifs and characters in his films, thereby exposing himself to accusations of paying homage to antisemitic stereotypes. Jewish figures appear, we recall, in Krajobraz po bitwie (Landscape after the Battle, 1970), Wesele (The Wedding, 1973), Brzezina (The Birch Wood, 1970) and Ziemia obiecana (The Promised Land, 1974). Wajda always tried to capture what was specific in their dress, behaviour, speech and experience (the political, phantasmal and affective significance of Wajda’s depiction of Jews has still not been adequately analysed from the point of view of cultural studies). In the West, this was perceived as paying tribute to antisemitic stereotypes,7 but in the Polish context it haunted collective memory with visions of a society that was not ethnically, culturally and religiously homogenous. It

200

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

was a protest against the lie manufactured in post-war Poland by various ideologies. As Roman Zimand wrote, the ‘arch-Polish’ and ‘truly Catholic’ dream of a nationally and confessionally homogenous state ‘found its realization’ in communist Poland.8 The antisemitic campaign of 1967–1968 as well as the final post-war wave of emigration of Polish Jews resulted in sinister consequences for the historical education of younger generations. National and patriotic phraseology was expanded in the next programme of study prepared in the mid-1970s with the idea of a planned ten-year period of secondary schooling. The topic of the Warsaw Uprising [which took place a year after the uprising in the ghetto] was significantly broadened, without including any content relating to the extermination of Jews. Among the concepts which pupils were expected to know, there were indeed such terms as ghetto, extermination, crimes against humanity, but it is not clear at all to what extent they were intended to refer to the fate of the Jewish population.9 During rehearsals, however, Wajda grew convinced that something was not working in this staged account of the end of the Warsaw Ghetto. On 6 November 1977 he notes: ‘In reading the whole of Conversations with an Executioner, one does not distinctly feel the dramatic tragedy of the ghetto. There are too many insertions of other topics […] the matter of the ghetto gets lost’.10 He was therefore considering a general revamping of the adaptation, in order for the ghetto itself to dominate the whole performance, and the removal of the self-contained ‘too finished form’ of Stroop’s several accounts interspersed throughout the narrative. Other threads were to be reduced, ‘torn to pieces’, and included as digressions from the greater topic of the ghetto. Wajda’s efforts, however, came to nothing. The reworking of the adaptation did not get very far. Eventually, the first account of the ghetto appeared at the end of the first part of the performance (although Jewish themes had been introduced earlier in scenes portraying Stroop’s antisemitism). The three remaining accounts determined the dramaturgy of the second part. What is most important, however, is that the ghetto appears in the background of the reviews, in the margins, bolstered by respectful platitudes, which convey well the degree to which Jewish themes were ‘frozen’ even in milieux distinguished by a high level, for those days, of political independence. Hence assertions often appeared, disturbing also for the authors of those words, about the indifference that accompanied the watching and hearing of the spectacle. Roman Zimand again provides an explanation: ‘I think that we do not have a language in which we could speak normally about Jewish–Polish affairs.’11 Marta Fik compared the expectations of Wajda’s production with its realization: ‘Something must have heavily disappointed, since the performance did not succeed with all spectators in breaking down a certain distance or even indifference, even though precisely distance and

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

201

indifference would appear to be – out of purely human consideration – the least appropriate both in relation to the subject matter and the situation shown in the Conversations.’12 As an aside to her remarks on the spectacle, Fik acknowledges however that Moczarski’s book does not expose ‘any particularly insightful truths’, but is effective because of its narrative flow, its way of presenting the main protagonist, and its compilation of facts ‘often seemingly unimportant, yet composing a terrifying whole’.13 She therefore emphasizes the effect of the ‘creation’ rather than its harsh speech as a document. Roman Szydłowski expressed his doubts differently: I’ve no idea how this account from the time of horror will be received by young people, who know it only from books, films and television serials, sometimes from the tales of parents and relatives. But for me and for people who survived the years of war and occupation in this country, it was a profound experience. I was in Warsaw on that Easter night when the ghetto burned.14 Szydłowski does not write, however, about his own Jewish background, does not give a name to emotions from those times, does not invoke any images of, or the perspective from which he saw, the burning ghetto; nor does he mention what image of the war he remembers from the TV serials. Szydłowski was not the only spectator of Wajda’s production who was in Warsaw ‘on that Easter night’. Another critic who left testimony to his reactions to the theatrical rendering of Conversations with an Executioner, one of the most valuable, was Jerzy Andrzejewski, writing in the magazine Literatura: Many directors are accused of subjecting authors’ texts to their own staging conceptions without due regard. It seems that in this case the great artist Wajda placed too much trust in the author’s text. I am not questioning the authenticity of Moczarski’s account […]. I have no doubt that Stroop’s character is genuinely portrayed and that the liquidator of the Warsaw Ghetto was indeed like that: one-dimensional. But this account, already an historical account, is still not a work of art. A theatrical performance, on the other hand, should be a work of art. Thanks to its greater public openness of the word, theatre attacks the spectator with sharper ruthlessness than a book attacks a reader. I listened to the whole performance with great attention but did not get the impression the words carried power, such as would be capable of elevating the stage characters into higher dimensions, above and beyond a prose account.15 Thus we have another testimony to the inadequate power of the words, and to the too weak reaction of the spectators to events so momentous and important for Poland’s most recent history.

202

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Perhaps it is Andrzejewski, author of one of the first literary responses to the uprising in the ghetto (his story Holy Week), who asks the most important questions of Wajda’s production. Above all, he broke with the idolatrous cult of the document, which had surrounded Conversations with an Executioner immediately after publication. He defended the separate logic of artistic activity and its affective power. But in the end he recognized that Wajda’s spectacle had to be defended: After all it is a great moral and social achievement on the part of all: Moczarski, Andrzej Wajda and the three actors. And so, at the close of 1977, the Polish stage resurrects Holy Week 1943, the tragedy of our Jewish compatriots, as well as the heroic struggle of the insurgents belonging to the Jewish Combat Organization, the famous ŻOB [Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa]. For witnesses of those days – it is a reminder, for younger generations – a worthy portrayal encouraging reflection.16 Andrzejewski, as we can see, had no doubt as to the theme of Wajda’s production. His defence emerged from recognition of the crucial commemorative and educational functions of the performance rather than the artistic and emotional. But its social importance he understood above all in the context of social forgetfulness. Wajda, when he took on directing Conversations with an Executioner, expected a strong emotional reaction, which, however, the topic of the ghetto uprising for some reason was not able to arouse to a satisfactory degree. This is not to say that the spectacle did not arouse emotions – they were connected, however, with a different domain of historical experience. Let us return again to Andrzejewski’s review, exceptional if only because he ascribes the failure of the performance to Moczarski’s book: With all due respect to the biography of the author who died a few years ago, the account of his prison conversations with SS General Jürgen Stroop, commander of the German troops fighting the insurgents in the Warsaw Ghetto, did not make much of an impression on me, told me nothing I did not already know about the mechanisms determining the actions and reasoning of Nazi criminals.17 Andrzejewski writes that the one shocking scene of the performance was the prologue, where Zygmunt Hübner appears in the proscenium as Moczarski at an author’s promotion evening holding a bunch of white and red carnations, and answers audience questions about the circumstances in which Conversations with an Executioner arose. Meanwhile, the following passage, explaining the powerful effect of this scene, was removed by the censor from the published version of the review: ‘The fact that Stroop, awaiting his death sentence already for a second year, was interviewed by a

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

203

distinguished activist of the underground Home Army [AK] also condemned to death (rehabilitated in 1956), was not sufficiently emphasized in the book. It was done however by Wajda in his theatrical production.’18 In this respect, Andrzejewski’s opinion coincided with the opinions of others. Almost all critics mentioned the prologue. Including Jan Kłossowicz: ‘The most dramatic situation that could be imagined is related during the prologue, where Hübner plays Moczarski talking about himself. Then there are the opening moments of the action in the cell, when Moczarski realizes with whom he has to share his prison life.’19 Many years later, Wajda claimed that adding the prologue was meant above all to inform the spectators of the circumstances in which the Conversations arose and acquaint them with elements of Moczarski’s biography. In actual fact, however, the prologue altered the dramaturgy completely, shifting the spectators’ attention to the figure of Moczarski himself and opening the field for vivid reactions from the public. Reviewers mention shivers of emotion, the great silence in the auditorium, the reception of the actor reincarnating the figure of the recently deceased author, his hands trembling during this scene. Wajda remembered Hübner receiving ‘many curtain calls’.20 Marta Fik, not inclined to emotional confessions, wrote that ‘the tragedy of Moczarski continues to shock’.21 ‘The main protagonist in Conversations with an Executioner is Stroop, but its tragic hero is Moczarski.’22 Fik thus records the transference of the affect in Wajda’s production very precisely: it was not the tragedy of the ghetto, but the tragedy of Moczarski, a high-ranking AK officer placed in the same cell as a Nazi criminal, that prompted real emotion among the audience. Wajda initially tried to construct the cell in the likeness of Kantor’s memory machine, which at the time had fascinated him in The Dead Class. ‘One shouldn’t search for too many activities in the cell. Nor increase them. Quite the opposite. Let it be something like a repeated film take; the same things, the same actions, the same automaticity, only accompanied by a different dialogue, a different new story. […] everything is accompanied by the same indifferent activities.’23 Ultimately, however, that image of the cell would dominate the whole performance, become its main ‘theme’. Wajda, by inviting Allan Starski to cooperate, counted on the filmlike, hyperrealistic effect of the imagery of the set, the astonishing – for theatre – excess of realism. Krzysztof Kąkolewski described this effect with his reporter’s eye: The cell was suspended above the stage, a wall taken out of a large building, where there were other prisoners, above the drama’s participants, underneath them, on either side, on all sides. The three men [Stroop, Moczarski and another Polish prisoner] stride up and down at the same time, passing one another with violent steps in the absurdly small space. Each one walks as if in a different direction. The Cezanne-like light, which Moczarski described, enters through the window, the changing light indicating the time of day or year, which brings so many memories

204

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

back to Stroop and which Stroop exploits, standing against the backdrop of the window in order to be almost invisible, but allowing himself to see very clearly when Moczarski enters.24 We should also remember the sound effects, not mentioned in this description: ‘Three of them and the omnipresent, recorded sounds of the prison corridor. Scraping doors, clink of keys, muffled echoes of voices and footsteps.’25 And also the particular ‘ghostlike’ character of the image: The cell was separated from the audience by a screen of black gauze. A funeral pall. Thanks to this screen, yet another effect was achieved. The spectators had the impression they were looking at a coarse-grained, enlarged old photograph; the actors lost their facial features. Zygmunt Hübner grows similar, physically even, to Kazimierz Moczarski. Stanisław Zaczyk changes beyond all recognition, identifying more and more with Stroop.26 From the point of view of the audience’s emotions, the stage images assumed the form of a theatrical reportage about Poland’s recent history. During work on the spectacle, Wajda therefore gradually discovered where its real theme lay. At the same time, we should understand the word ‘theme’ to actually mean ‘affect’ – that is, something that affects the audience, moves it, paralyses it, outstrips reflection and meaning. And, as always, he invariably exchanged it for an image. Everyone who wrote about the production introduced the word ‘shock’ or ‘shocking’ in all their grammatical forms, using them either to describe genuine emotions experienced during the performance or, in the negative mood, as disappointed anticipation, the lack of expected ‘shock’. Shock affected what was seen rather than what was heard. Demanded were emotions associated with the past, not knowledge about the past; catharsis, not a history lesson. The issue had wider contexts, however: the most important model of Polish theatrical culture in the 1970s was connected precisely with absent history and its affective influence. Emotions triggered by theatre were seen as proof of the vitality of the community’s secret life. This was the model above all of Kantor’s The Dead Class, as Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz has systematically analysed. After 1968, the most ‘absent’ history in Poland was that of Polish Jews. Much more ‘absent’ than that of the Warsaw Uprising or the Home Army. Pleśniarowicz explains the dramaturgical principle behind Kantor’s work: ‘The sequence of all these aggressive acts, or as Kantor calls them: murders, is one of the indirect forms of the presence of the subplot of the dead race, the subplot of the Holocaust. The rhythm of simultaneously making History present and keeping it secret finds its culmination in the Jewish subplot.’27 Wajda, who filmed The Dead Class, broke this rhythm for the sake of making present: he transferred several scenes of the play to Kazimierz in Kraków, thereby exposing the Jewish

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

205

theme in Kantor’s production. He might therefore have anticipated that in Conversations with an Executioner, the Jewish theme would also ‘work’. The principle underlying Kantor’s spectacle, however, was denial and absence: these guaranteed the triggering of communal shock. ‘It’s odd this collective enthusiasm with which we received – and go on receiving – The Dead Class. We who are so divided in our opinions, aversions, suppressed ressentiments, artistic tastes, understanding of theatre, its orientation, its tasks – in relation to this spectacle, we are all suddenly of one mind.’28 During the rehearsals, Wajda became more and more interested in the situation of Moczarski and Stroop living together in the cell, and less in the ‘issues’ raised by Stroop. Most of all he followed the motif of Moczarski’s book, which had prompted strong emotions in society: ‘At last the real theme of Conversations with an Executioner has emerged, namely: Moczarski watched and listened to Stroop with the aim of understanding the mentality and way of thinking of their torturers: [Anatol] Fejgin, [Józef] Różański,

206

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

FIGURES 9.1–9.3  Kazimierz Moczarski, Rozmowy z katem (Conversations with an Executioner), directed by Andrzej Wajda, Teatr Powszechny, Warsaw 1977. Photograph Renata Pajchel. Archiwum Teatru Powszechnego w Warszawie (Archive of the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw).

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

207

and others. Because he [Stroop] was imprisoned shortly after the liberation, he did not know such people and could not comprehend them.’29 A risky note in every sense: naming in one sentence a Nazi criminal alongside high functionaries of the Polish secret services (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa or UB), whose Jewish origin was universally known to Polish society thanks to the antisemitic campaign of 1968. Wajda possessed excellent intuition of the collective emotions running under the skin. Therefore, the initial reaction of the censor aroused his (symptomatic) disquiet: ‘Today the censor with responsibility for theatre came to the rehearsal. He accepted the whole thing without any corrections and changes, and pressed my hand – what did that mean? I don’t know.’30 Lack of reaction from the censor could mean only one thing: that Wajda had not emphasized strongly enough the theme most important to him. A few days later, Wajda finally signed the contract with the theatre. The censors came to life again, however, immediately before the premiere. Doubts were caused by the white and red carnations, the rag over Moczarski’s face after his first interrogation, his brutal shoving into the cell in the first prison scene. Storm clouds were gathering around the spectacle: ‘the idea of a ban has arisen’.31 The premiere nevertheless took place, but after a few weeks the censors again began to demand changes, especially the removal of the image of Moczarski’s brutal shoving into the cell. Hübner fought to preserve the spectacle in its erstwhile form. On 24 January, Wajda notes: ‘Nothing now threatens Conversations with an Executioner, but the situation was dangerous.’32 The above incident proves that censorship was not only an institution inimical to art, but also an important participant in the libidinal process of vetting and constructing artistic transmission, recognizing the themes that were vivid in society and therefore permitting certain images, events, emotions and texts to be captured in an emotionally affective manner. It was not the theme of the ghetto uprising that had aroused the vigilance of the censors. The spectacle was not ultimately about ‘that’. Hence it is precisely the indifference (of the audience, the reviewers and the censors) to the dramaturgically most prominent theme in Wajda’s production, as well as the failure of his account of the ghetto in relation to the power and significance of the main stage image, that require explanation.

2. First of all, we need to question the ‘theatre of fact’: Wajda’s production was recognized as an outstanding realization of this form of theatre. It was praised for its restraint in performance, its concentration on the text and the trust placed in the actors and producers to express only the facts. ‘Andrzej Wajda, otherwise not at all inclined to abstinence, in this production designates to himself the function of a modest documenter of human affairs.’33 Similar statements appear in many reviews. In all reviews,

208

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Kazimierz Moczarski appears as a totally credible, trustworthy witness and participant in historical events: someone who always speaks the truth and does not allow himself to be taken in by the lies of others. Furthermore: he is a guardian of truth with unquestioned social authority. Wajda, by adding the prologue, indeed influenced the triggering of this effect in a crucial way. What is more, one might risk the assertion that both Hübner and Wajda found it hard to resist the temptation to identify with this kind of powerful cultural figure. In the theatre reviews, Moczarski’s work was more or less exempt from critical reading. It was the same with the actual book, which was received uncritically, ranked alongside the prose of Tadeusz Borowski, or even acknowledged by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński as a more outstanding work than Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. It comes as no surprise that theatre reviewers felt so paralysed in writing about Wajda’s production. James E. Young, analysing a different example of documentary theatre, namely Peter Weiss’s play The Investigation (Die Ermittlung, 1965), questioned the ways in which the ‘rhetoric of fact’ operated.34 Although an historical fact is by definition a certain narrational and ideological construction, it always strives to mask the principles that construct it. Young shows how Weiss, ostentatiously flaunting his own ideology, not concealing it in any way, uses the ‘rhetoric of fact’ in order to impose his own, very onesided interpretation of the Holocaust on the audience as an historical fact, in the end allowing himself to be taken in by it: to believe in the infallibility of his own interpretation, and thus recognize it as a fact, naturalize it under the guise of fact. Young shows how Weiss contradicts his own assumptions in his own play. In his own definition of documentary theatre, the author of The Investigation posits three critical principles: ‘critique of concealment’ (‘Who benefits by the omissions?’), ‘critique of distortion’ (‘Whose position is strengthened by this suppression of historical facts?’), and ‘critique of lies’ (‘What does a situation built on lies look like? What difficulties do we have to contend with in searching for the truth?’). In describing, however, his own creative procedures when writing The Investigation, Weiss constantly underlines that his art is based entirely on facts, on the testimonies of witnesses and the accused during the Frankfurt trials. And although he was forced to ‘distil’ the authentic utterances, he maintains this in no way damages the truth of the transmission. Young proves the opposite: the interpretative perspective adopted by the author determines the principles of distillation and choice of facts. He also observes that the materials copiously exploited by Weiss were accounts by journalists, who were themselves embroiled in ‘the bourgeois media’s naturalization of such facts’ and could not be – in the light of Weiss’s own manifesto – a credible source of historical truth. In order to conceal such authorial constructional procedures, Young emphasizes, it is however necessary to create authority and impose it on readers, so as to stop them making enquiries inconvenient to the author.

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

209

Auschwitz in Weiss’s play is interpreted from the perspective of Marxist critique as an extreme example of capitalist exploitation; hence the word ‘Jew’ does not appear in the text once, although other victims of Auschwitz are identified according to their state or national affiliation. Young invokes Weiss’s essay about his visit to Auschwitz (as a place for which he had been ‘destined’, but which he managed however to ‘avoid’), in order to enquire whether Weiss felt himself to be a potential victim as a Jew or as a socialist. In his play, this issue remains in enigmatic suspension also in relation to some of the dramatis personae, indicates the personal position of the author constantly present in this supposedly so objective text and reveals perhaps active processes of denial related to Weiss’s Jewish origins. In this way, ultimate faith in the facts, so important to this dramatist, falls apart. A drama that appears on the surface to be so ‘objective’, ‘to the point’, ‘sticking to the facts’, turns out to be a complex ideological construction, dependent on the biography of its writer, his personal experiences and political choices. Let us try to apply the critical method of reading Weiss’s play proposed by Young to Conversations with an Executioner and its stage version at the Teatr Powszechny. The question of authority, which Young poses as a side issue in his analysis, plays a key role in the case of the stage adaptation of Conversations with an Executioner. Behind the credibility of the facts lies the authority of Moczarski, Wajda and Hübner. It was not they who decided, however, but the object and the circumstances of the account itself in its affective dimension. Weiss presented to the West German audience a version of past events which was uncomfortable for their current good feeling about themselves (for the universal belief that post-war participation in the global capitalist, democratic system would liberate German society from the nightmare of its Nazi past). Wajda’s production, on the other hand, spoke about what the audience wanted to hear (often in spite of Wajda’s intentions). Writing about the sources of tradition and authority in the Cashinahua tribe, Jean-François Lyotard observed: ‘When we directly raise the question of the origin of tradition or authority among the Cashinahua, we come up against the usual paradox in such cases. If we suppose that a phrase cannot be authorised unless the addressor holds some authority, what happens when the addressor’s authority results from the meaning of the phrase?’35 Acceptance of the second option would assume cultural regression: action in the interests of a reactionary archaic community, and not participation in the emancipatory currents of universal history, demanding real working through and abandonment of collective narcissism. Several theatre critics had the impression that the most important theme in Wajda’s production was the circumstances in which Conversations with an Executioner were written. Their analyses, however, took into consideration only the most obvious elements (Moczarski’s sharing the cell with Stroop, his writing down from memory their conversations after his release from prison, the problems associated with publishing the book). The more complex

210

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

ideological questions, which induced them to treat Moczarski as a truthful witness of history endowed with the highest authority, were not subject to analysis. Likewise, the literary approach to Stroop’s recreation on the pages of the Conversations aroused no suspicion – above all, Moczarski’s granting to a Nazi criminal the prerogative of a credible witness of history. Only in a few places does Moczarski describe his own violent reaction to Stroop’s lies; we may therefore assume that where Moczarski remains silent on the matter, we are dealing with an historical communication worthy of trust. Stroop talks while Moczarski acts as the silent controller of meaning and guarantor of truth. Kąkolewski, in his review of Wajda’s spectacle, includes a significant phrase about Moczarski: ‘He regarded – correctly – Stroop as his prisoner of war, as his property.’36 Other reviews confirm this impression. ‘The cynically sincere criminal did not lie in a single passage of his account lasting many months.’37 ‘He is even somehow just in assessing the attitude of those whom he murdered: he will speak of Jews from the fighting ghetto and the Poles who helped them with total respect for their stubbornness and willingness to fight. About Poles in general he knew: cavalrymen well versed in battle.’38 In each of these fragments, the power of the narrator over his subject’s personality can be felt, Moczarski over Stroop. No one wished, however, to analyse such narrative violence. The one-dimensionality of Stroop’s personality was associated rather with the wrongly understood idea of the ‘banality of evil’. Wajda, sensitive – as always – to the phantasmal nature of the theatrical image, revealed in his production this structural principle in Conversations with an Executioner. The fact of Moczarski’s power over Stroop was totally visible here (the prologue, the construction of the stage set, the basis of adaptation). For political and historical reasons (and doubtless also personal ones, given Wajda’s then proximity to the political opposition), he did not subject it to open critique. In the political conditions of the People’s Republic, such a critique (i.e. considering Moczarski’s account to be an ideological construct) could have meant only one thing: collusion with the authorities. To observant spectators, however, it was clear that the spectacle unveiled a paralysis in discovering historical truth. ‘Therefore, the roles were dealt out and thoroughly known before the spectacle properly got going.’39 It was clear that Stroop was Moczarski’s hostage; he does not speak so much with his own voice as with a voice controlled by Moczarski and by the expectations of his readers. Małgorzata Szpakowska wrote most clearly about this, pointing to the lack of drama in the literary material itself, and the use of ready socially accepted truths about the war and Stalinism: ‘Because the presentation at the Teatr Powszechny is above all a presentation about Moczarski, not Stroop. Or, in other words: it is an account of the conditions in which Moczarski’s book arose, not its staging.’40 The issue here is not just the appalling and politically uncomfortable – for the authorities – history of Stalinist trials and the fact of the incarceration in one cell of a Home Army officer and a Nazi dignitary, but more the

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

211

phantasmal image of delivering a history lesson to Polish spectators by invoking on stage the ghost of a Nazi criminal, and the strategy adopted by that ghost of flattery and cooperation in concealing uncomfortable experiences. The eponymous ‘good feeling about himself of Jürgen Stroop’, of Szpakowska’s article, was unfortunately also ‘the good feeling’ about itself of the Polish audience. Wajda, meanwhile, with his unquenchable habit of provoking the Polish public, exposes already in the first prison scene (whether consciously or unconsciously, it is of no significance to me) their astonishing and appalling alliance, when Stroop decides to give up the only bed in the cell to Moczarski, the representative of a victorious nation. He sucks up to him and proposes the rules of the game of truth. There follows a stunning exchange between Stroop and Moczarski, which none of the reviewers – surprise, surprise – took up. In the book, it appears at a later stage and might escape the reader’s attention as just another episode. In the dramaturgy of the spectacle it is a kind of key slipped in by its creators. Something akin to the idea of the ‘purloined letter’ (in the story by Edgar Allan Poe) that no one can find, since all the time it is hidden in plain sight. The overlooking on the part of the reviewers of the questions raised below must have had, in my opinion, a similar justification. Stroop If I am to reveal the truth about the uprising in the ghetto, then I shall say, that the Jews and the Poles assisting them were heroes. But in exchange for public assertion of this truth I must receive payment: life imprisonment. If, on the other hand, I sense that I must lose my head – irrespective of what I say – then I don’t rule out applying the method of lying. And I shall testify that the whole Jewish resistance was shit and a game, and that Poles looked on with indifference, and even with approbation, at the liquidation of the Jews … Moczarski Do you imagine that history won’t expose your lies, if you decide to tell them? After all, you didn’t act alone. You know how it really was. I know too. And thousands of other people know the truth. I understand your calculation, but your case is very special. One of the most important. And because of that, those lies, that falsehood will not pay. And it’s also distasteful. Stroop You are right.41 This most astonishing fragment from Conversations with an Executioner, indicating the need for constant negotiation of the truth about Polish– Jewish relations at the time of the Holocaust, was shown by Hübner and Wajda with great intuition as to its importance. We may start with the question: Did the above conversation really take place between Stroop and Moczarski, or was it one of the fictions in Moczarski’s book, a cunning authorial strategy lending credence to Stroop’s account, full of obsessive expressions of admiration for the fighting spirit and nobility of the Poles? Interestingly, Moczarski, positioned here by Stroop among the ranks of judges, prosecutors and lawyers, does not object in any way. Neither

212

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

did the public or the critics object. Although they all willingly wrote at length about Stroop’s cynicism, no one had a clear wish to undermine his vision of the uprising in the ghetto, so flattering to the Poles. And although it is easy to surmise what Moczarski regards as truth in this case, and what as lies, the quoted fragment upholds, however, a state of suspension, as if handing over the right to decide to the spectators, to their historical knowledge and convictions on the issue. Could Wajda, as the creator of Samson and several other films relating to the extermination of Jews, really have regarded as a lie the assertion that ‘Poles looked on with indifference, and even with approbation, at the liquidation of the Jews’? Could the authority of Moczarski have been so blinding as to treat Polish society, in good faith, to this kind of history lecture performed by Stroop? Or did the therapeutic intensification of the communal spirit, so characteristic of Polish art in the 1970s, enable Stroop’s lies about the attitude of Poles towards the uprising in the ghetto to be smoothly glossed over? Already the first scene devoted to the ghetto is full of expressions of admiration for the fighting spirit and intelligence of the Poles, the universal engagement of the whole of society in underground conspiracy, as well as statements about the great brotherhood between Poles and Jews, the close cooperation between Polish and Jewish combat organizations and the failure of German propaganda aimed at setting Jews and Poles at variance. The roles of ‘nationalists and antisemites’, ‘not the best soldiers’, ‘the uneducated’ and ‘barbarian culture’, on the other hand, are taken by ‘Latvians, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians’.42 Only the epithet ‘Polish bandits’ elicits a reaction from Moczarski (‘I forbid you to say that!’), from which we may conclude that everything we heard previously he regarded as historical truth; in any case, it did not arouse his serious doubts. Moczarski even leads Stroop onto the topic of ‘Aryan’ participation in the ghetto uprising, in order to hear nice words from him about the significant contribution of Polish soldiers to the fighting, and about the symbolic action of hanging up two flags, white-and-red and white-andblue: ‘The matter of the flags was at the time for us the most important. It had momentous political and moral significance. It reminded hundreds of thousands of people about the Polish cause, inspired and excited them. It integrated the population of the General Governorate – but especially Jews and Poles.’ Whose voice really comes through here: that of Stroop, of the narrator, post-war propaganda, the political opposition of the 1970s, the collective libido? In the second scene devoted to events in the ghetto, Stroop describes the reactions of ordinary passers-by on the Aryan side: ‘Poles, as we know, were not warmly disposed towards us, but what I felt, looking at the faces of the passers-by – especially women – terrified me. Perhaps I was tipsy on brandy, but I saw those countless gazes into the sky above the ghetto. All Polish eyes were sad.’ After this comes a remark about how dangerous and cunning Poles could be for the enemy. In the third episode,

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

213

the talk is of close cooperation between the Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizajca Bojowa) and commanders of the Home Army and the Gwardia Ludowa (the underground communist resistance organization). Moczarski admonishes Stroop for calling ŻOB a ‘Party bunker’: ‘In this way you are falsifying Polish history.’ Moczarski also closes in a significant manner Stroop’s statement about Polish support for the ghetto uprising: ‘All organizations active in the Polish underground with the exception of extreme nationalist groups supported it. And passively – the whole of society in the General Governorate.’ The final sentence sounds, given the establishment in the spectacle of the figure of Moczarski as an undisputed authority, as if it represents the ultimate truth about Polish–Jewish relations at the time of the Holocaust. Did Wajda believe it? Also, in this scene, Stroop makes a eulogistic speech about Stefan Grot-Rowecki: ‘A civilian, but you could tell at once that he was a first-class soldier. […] Mr Moczarski, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but General “Grot”, who was by then our prisoner, had a kind of “majesty” about him.’ In the final scene devoted to the ghetto uprising, entitled Rachunek krwi – brat (Reckoning in Blood – Brother), Moczarski reminds Stroop about the execution of prisoners in Pawiak prison, located within the ghetto: ‘You, Herr Stroop, didn’t know that during the final days of the Grossaktion, Jewish corpses in the ghetto were mixed with Polish corpses, prisoners from Pawiak.’ In this context, it is worth recalling what became of the screenplay for Holy Week that Jerzy Andrzejewski and Andrzej Żuławski had written a decade earlier for Andrzej Wajda. The premiere of the film was to celebrate the 1968 twenty-fifth anniversary of the uprising in the ghetto. Written under propagandist pressure from state institutions, the screenplay completely altered the original intention of Andrzejewski’s story: It’s futile to search for what was the main theme of the story – the complexity of Polish attitudes towards the Holocaust and the portrait of the Catholic intelligentsia forced to confront its faith with cruel reality. […] The image of Polish–Jewish relations also underwent change. In his story, Andrzejewski had constructed an atmosphere full of suspense, emphasizing Irena’s fear and disbelief in human decency and solidarity, which were the consequences of her terrible experiences. Meanwhile in the screenplay, people standing by the ghetto wall do not utter a single cruel or stupid comment. Terrified, shocked, they watch the flames in silence.43 Subplots were also expanded showing, significantly, Polish help given both to Jews hiding on the Aryan side and to insurgents in the ghetto. What happened then in the decade 1967–1977 so that Wajda, Hübner, Starski, the actors and reviewers were prepared to accept without murmur the historical lesson given to them by Stroop in Moczarski’s book? A

214

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

lesson, after all, full of lies and falsification, serving exclusively to make Polish society feel better about itself. And moreover similar – in general terms – to the propagandist lies created towards the end of the 1960s under pressure of the antisemitic campaign. It would be absurd, of course, to associate the names of Moczarski, Wajda or Hübner with those shameful events. Their work, biographies and attitudes indicate quite the contrary: revulsion, anger, resistance, which had both political and professional consequences. We are dealing rather with complex ideological negotiations, in which eagerness for historical truth, attempts to mobilize collective energy for action in the new political situation of the second half of the 1970s, the desire to break with the past of the People’s Republic, the search for new sources of political subjectivity and authority, the defence of national traditions against the post-war ideological manipulations and revisionism, created paradoxical and sometimes frankly absurd situations. These negotiations were about sources of authority, and not about the truth of the historical image. Second, Polish–Jewish relations in Polish culture of the 1970s, under the influence of the events of 1967–1968, entered the deep freeze. Their defrosting would depend, by their very nature, on a far-reaching settling of accounts with Polish antisemitism. But at the time, no one was particularly concerned about this: not the authorities, nor the Church, nor the political opposition. And third, opposition and independent milieux tried to protect Polish society from accusations of any significant participation in those events. Awakening Polish society to political resistance (to communism), required a silence to be drawn over certain events in recent history. The image of the ghetto contained in Moczarski’s Conversations with an Executioner was undermined only by Michał Borwicz in a review published in Paris in Zeszyty Historyczne. Borwicz, who after the war initiated in Poland the collection and publication of documents relating to the Holocaust on a grand scale and who emigrated to Paris in 1947, exposed not only the false image of events in the ghetto (‘the divergences between all documents, testimonies of individuals and of Polish underground organizations and […] of Stroop himself, and the relevant pages of Moczarski’s book are fundamental’44), but also the literary and fictional character of Moczarski’s book, proving for example that Stroop spoke here in the language of literati such as Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński and Stefan Wiechecki (pseud. Wiech). A delayed response to Borwicz’s accusations came many years later from Adam Michnik. He reminded readers above all that Moczarski finished writing his book in 1968 (fragments were published at the time in the weekly newspaper Polityka). He did not refer, however, to the argument that Moczarski adjusted his image of Polish– Jewish relations during the ghetto uprising to the requirements of the censorship (as Andrzejewski and Żuławski had felt compelled to do when writing the screenplay for Holy Week) but attempted to ascribe noble intentions to Moczarski’s decisions.

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

215

At that moment every Polish democrat had two subconscious desires: to express their opposition to antisemitic stereotypes among Poles, instilled once again by the communist regime, and to oppose the stereotypical image of the Polish antisemite abroad. Both these oppositional stances I found hidden in the narrative of Moczarski’s book. Finally – a person often remembers what they want to remember, what fortifies the heart. Therefore, in Conversations with an Executioner, Moczarski portrays one noble image of Jews and a different noble image of Poles. From the most recent historical research, we know that both these images are heavily idealized.45 Michnik, however, does not address several uncomfortable questions. First, ‘opposition to antisemitic stereotypes’ expresses itself in Moczarski by means of a vision of Polish history that had grown up on such stereotypes. Second, Moczarski uses the figure of Stroop to deliver to Polish readers a pleasant for them, but patently false, history lesson. Third, it transpires that the sinister consequences of 1968 reached far and embraced significantly wider circles. After all, defending Polish society against the attribution to it in the West of antisemitism was one of the basic ideological dogmas of the 1968 campaign. The attitudes of the political opposition of the 1970s were largely the consequence of the events of 1967–1968. The pact proposed to Moczarski by Stroop during their first conversation in the cell in Wajda’s spectacle, was basically the pact that the opposition proposed to society. Wajda’s production said more about Polish society after 1968 than it did about the ghetto uprising and about Stalinist times. Wajda revealed surprisingly openly the conditions of the social contract with regard to the past, which eventually led to the Polish revolution of August 1980. At this point, we should return to the category of fact and review it in the context of libidinal politics. Wajda’s spectacle was a fact with a curiously arranged network of the flow and paralysis of societal emotions; a fact that had both its historical determinants and libidinal topicality.

3. By 1977, Wajda was already the great narrator of Polish history endowed with colossal credit in social authority following Man of Marble. In 1975, Stefan Morawski had published in Dialog an essay entitled Główny topos Andrzeja Wajdy (The Main Topos of Andrzej Wajda). Morawski put forward the hypothesis that the vision of history in Wajda’s works was always the resultant of two forces, two vectors, two images: ‘bad’ history and ‘good’ history, ‘real’ history and ‘possible’ history, the history of triumph and the history of victims. By 1977, Wajda was not only an artist but a politician who began to believe that the vision of society that he served had

216

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

a chance of victory. Relations between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ history therefore had to be redefined. For this reason, Morawski’s essay did not so much lose currency, as what made ‘bad’ and ‘good’ history had become reset according to different models. ‘The vision of history caught in a conflict between its real course and its possible course’46 acquires new meaning. When staging Conversations with an Executioner, Wajda had to reconcile himself to a triumph of ‘good’ history which was incompatible with the truth, and recognize its social usefulness, its moral and ‘fortifying’ significance as a tool for establishing sources of social authority. Conversations with an Executioner seem to belong – as a literary fact – to the order of ‘good’ history, even if the eponymous conversations tell about ‘bad’ history. Like Bohdan Czeszko’s novel Pokolenie (Generation), the source for Wajda’s film debut, Conversations would seem to co-author just as indisputably the ‘bad’ history, the history of literature subordinated to state ideology. At any rate, this was how Adam Michnik viewed the matter when assessing Wajda’s first film: In Generation, Wajda committed violence against his own memory and own intelligence. Perhaps he was playing an opportunistic game with the authorities. Or perhaps Generation really was the effect of other people’s as well as his own work on constraining the mind of a talented artist. After all, the Nazi occupation and the Polish resistance movement were totally different things. And Wajda must have known this perfectly well.47 Michnik’s questions and doubts could also be applied – suitably reformulated – to Wajda’s production of Conversations with an Executioner. After all, Wajda must also have known perfectly well about the attitude of Polish society to the uprising in the ghetto, about the complexity of this problem. Did he ‘commit violence against his own memory and intelligence’ this time too? Despite Michnik’s radical opinion, I consider Wajda’s Generation to be a fascinating work. It contains hidden within it the almost totally forgotten thread, important to Polish culture, of the uncompromising struggle for a particular image of the recent past. An image linked to the Gorgon myth, which for Siegfried Kracauer became a fundamental principle in film art after the Holocaust. We therefore find ourselves in the midst of a struggle for full visibility of the menace of historical reality and the right to recreate (in film) images of a history that has no higher meaning and which is governed by corporeal materiality and unpredictability.48 Wajda’s insistence on this matter undoubtedly belongs to ‘good’ history. On the other hand, the answer to the question as to whether consolidating collective ‘feeling good about ourselves’ in Conversations with an Executioner also belongs to it involves us in the dialectics of contradictory arguments, worthy of course of consideration, but not devoid of moral relativism.

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

217

Let us return to the initial post-war years when the paradigm of witness to someone else’s suffering took shape in Polish culture. In weighing up the situation in individual fields of art, we should abandon any analogies. The matter presents itself differently in literature (here the testimony is the most painful, shocking, difficult to accept, provoking the most resistance, sensitizing most effectively to the fact of the historic cataclysm) from, for example, in film (here, from the very beginning, there operated efficient mechanisms of ideological control, which did not allow too frightening images of the recent past to be shown on cinema screens). Literary works were fiercely debated in the press, i.e. publicly. The most interesting discussions about films took place in secret, during closed screenings before they were released for distribution. We might ask how much this difference in political control was determined by the very nature of the medium (one connected with the word, the other with the image) and by the extent of its social influence (cinema audiences were larger than the circles of people reading contemporary literature). The problem may be grasped by considering the trials and tribulations associated with the screening of Generation, made into a film by Wajda in 1954 (premiere January 1955). During the ideological adjustment of the already completed film before it was released for distribution, a scene was removed in which one of the heroes, Kostek, carries out of the Jewish cemetery during the ghetto uprising a sack of human heads, in order to rip out the gold teeth later. This scene appears in Czeszko’s novel in no less a brutal form, and yet it had been passed by the censor: let us recall that the novel Generation had appeared in 1951, at the height of Stalinist ideological dogmatism, amid universal acclaim from the critics. In the film adaptation, however, this scene disturbed the commission considering the pre-release version, which led eventually to its removal. It is not hard to imagine what kind of impression such a drastic image would make. In the novel, the scene with the sack of Jewish heads is inscribed in a dense network of ideological arguments aimed at the reader – in this sense it was not so politically harmful perhaps to the authorities; it did not overly awaken the memories of Holocaust witnesses, which almost all the recipients of art at that time in Poland were. In the case of the film, it was feared that the image might break free of its ideological bounds, gain autonomy and awaken memory of the past in an uncontrolled manner. Surviving documentation relating to the making of Wajda’s film provides exceptional insight into the process of ideological negotiations surrounding the topic of the Holocaust in post-war Poland. Although it does not directly touch upon theatre, it throws light on problems associated also with it. To a large extent this is a discussion about dramaturgy, the principles of constructing a spectacle and its affective impact, especially since the discussion used the language of theatre rather than of film. Bohdan Czeszko decided in his screenplay to remove the novel’s subplot set in the Warsaw Ghetto; he justified this by claiming the need to create a

218

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

cohesive plot for the film, and that the Jewish subplot was a sideline in the novel to the main threads and ended abruptly with Dawid’s deportation to Auschwitz. The separateness of this story, its secondary status and slender link to other subplots in Generation, nevertheless not only conveys historical truth about the separation of Polish and Jewish fates during the war (about two cities isolated from one another in the same Warsaw), but also points to the symptomatic difficulty in constructing a cohesive plot that would encompass both Polish and Jewish experience. Discussion of the dramaturgy of the film constantly referred to this fissure, to the impossibility of conducting a common narrative, which would contain both Polish and Jewish history. In the initial version of the screenplay there appear a few scattered references to the uprising in the ghetto; they do not comprise, however, any cohesive thread. However, the drastic scene with Kostek carrying the sack of cut-off Jewish heads does appear. Furthermore, it returns in all versions of the shooting script, despite the criticism with which it met during the peer assessment of the screenplay. In the internal review, the scene was seen to have no justification and as evidence of weakness in the dramatic construction, or dramaturgical coherence of the screenplay, regarded therefore as ‘shallow’ and ‘mere tinkering’.49 The criticism was ruthless and unambiguous. In later versions of the shooting script, the Jewish motif was developed and re-elaborated: it becomes crucial to understanding the motivations of many protagonists and shapes the culminating scenes of the planned film. As Regina Dreyer wrote after the film’s premiere, ‘the newly introduced episode with the Jew, full of dramatic power and truth’50 became ‘a spark which fired Jasio’s [Jasio Krone, one of the main heroes] final decision’ (Dreyer was familiar with the original version of the screenplay, which had been published in Kwartalnik Filmowy).51 This is very significant: a subplot linked to the Holocaust either destroyed the dramaturgical coherence of the film, seemed entirely dispensable and gave the impression of ‘mere tinkering’, or, on the contrary – only its development enabled the motivation of the characters to be understood, brought order to the sequence of events and their historical meaning, and provided the necessary sense of drama. As can be seen, within the sphere of dramatic control, there is a never-ending play between a breach in the narration and the narrative’s coherence, between the rhetoric of forgetting and rhetoric of memory, between absurdity and sense. News of the outbreak of the uprising in the ghetto initiates, in the shooting script, the development of subplots that lead to its narrational and emotional climax. We see, first of all, a scene in a workshop where one of the workers, Ziarno, allows himself to make antisemitic jokes about the Jews fighting in the ghetto and meets with an angry reaction from the remaining workers – the scene ends with one of them bowing in the direction of the burning ghetto. The most important subplot, however, involves Jasio Krone, who refuses to help his friend Abram, an escapee from the ghetto. This is

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

219

the ‘episode with the Jew’ referred to by Regina Dreyer. In the shooting script, it is described in great detail: as he crosses the courtyard, Abram is pursued by the watchful glances of a group of women reciting the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary before her figurine. During his conversation with Abram, Jasio intercepts the glance of one of them. There is no doubt that he perceives a potential threat in the praying group, and that the watchful stare emanating from there influences his decision to send Abram packing. In the film, however, it appears differently. It is worth citing the suggestive description of this scene provided by Bronisława Stolarska in order to articulate the subtle means by which Wajda introduces the refusal of Abram into the very heart of an emotionally, symbolically and religiously concentrated feeling of community: The precise staging paradoxically serves here to eclipse the story. The musical insert at the beginning of the scene introduces a moment of anxiety and disorientation as to the place of action. Then the gloom, the stealthily moving figure, the boy’s face beyond the bars of the gate, the votive candles burning deep in the courtyard before the holy figurine, the women’s sung words ‘Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.’ We read these same words from Jasio’s lips, as he stands in the open doorway of his flat, summoned by the knocking. The space, above which the night-time gloom and prayers spread, ought not to give anything away. And yet at the sight of Abram, who had returned, as he says ‘to our apartment house, to you,’ the liturgical words die on Jasio’s lips. His initial reflex is to shut the door, but then he utters the shameful words: ‘What can I do? What can I do? With your face …’ Then, with literally one contraction of the heart, within the same frame, we see the faces of Jasio and Abram marked by brotherly likeness. Then again, they are separate: a shot, a shot-reverse shot. Imperceptibly, Abram walks away. Jasio runs out after him. Calls to him. Stops by the gate, looks into the dark gloom of the street as if trying to discern among the menacing echoes those which belong to death.52 In the next shot (in Wajda’s script), in a scene taking place already the following day (not included in the film), Jasio finds a corpse on the street with its face covered by a newspaper and a note on its chest: ‘21 hours – Jude’. Jasio lifts the newspaper and looks into the face of the dead Abram. Earlier, in his flat, he had conversed with him with his back turned, staring out of the window, avoiding his gaze. In the shooting script, Wajda’s careful direction of the dramaturgy of gazes, the construction of a web of unspoken dependencies, is remarkable. The fact of his having refused help to Abram determines Jasio’s later behaviour and decision to join Stach’s group, which undertakes to hide several insurgents fleeing from the ghetto on the Aryan side.

220

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Jasio’s decision to join the planned action happens amid significant scenery: right by the ghetto wall, against the background of the rotating roundabout. Scenery obviously familiar from Miłosz’s poem. Wajda carries out here an eloquent symbolic intervention. The square with the rotating roundabout is no longer a symbol only of Polish indifference but also becomes a place of moral transformation. Jasio’s participation in the action to assist the insurgents in the ghetto, and later his death, appear as expiation for his earlier cowardice and refusal to help Abram. His flight up a stairwell from a German patrol is accompanied by the noise of a slamming door, just as Abram’s departure was accompanied by the grating of the bolted gate: he therefore encounters a similar refusal of help. This is precisely when Jasio, so we read in the shooting script, ‘understood that he is beyond life’.53 His running upstairs and suicidal fall contain elements of religious symbolism, which is why the theme of expiation resounds so forcefully. It is immediately after this scene that Stach’s meeting takes place with Kostek, who slips out of the Jewish cemetery with his sack of human heads. In the final version of the screenplay, this scene concludes the Jewish subplot. The juxtaposition of the image of Jasio’s death, as he tries to expiate his sin of indifference, and Kostek’s shameful behaviour, create a dramatic contrast, which would inevitably have provoked shock among the spectators and undermined the ‘positive’ emphasis of the remaining scenes: namely, the ‘comforting’ ideological and symbolic interventions deployed by Wajda. For this reason, no doubt, the episode was removed from the completed film before release, despite its having survived all ideological corrections during work on the screenplay. There may have been further reasons, however, for rejecting that scene. Affective reasons, more than ideological and artistic, although relations between affect and ideology should be regarded – as Judith Butler instructs – as being dialectically connected.54 The affect may break down the ideological frames within which we move, but more often than not the ideological frames define the scope of affects admissible in social life. Wajda accentuates the obscenity of the whole event. Kostek is drunk, aroused, his vulgar behaviour full of sexual connotations. The sack is covered in damp stains. We do not see its contents, but only the reaction of Stach, before whose eyes his friend shoves the open sack. The camera gradually closes in throughout the scene, operating with more and more emotional power. Stach’s reaction at the sight of the heads is one of absolute paralysis: ‘he stands stiffly, like a wooden statue’. He is unable to do or say anything. Kostek therefore throws the sack over his shoulder and walks away laughing. Shock and indifference are therefore juxtaposed. Only after a pause does Stach awake from his numbness, take out his weapon and, waving it in the air, set out in futile pursuit of Kostek. The direct contrast between Jasio’s expiatory death and the obscene scene by the cemetery wall does not so much indicate the potential for using

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

221

techniques of counterpoint in order to capture as full a picture as possible of the attitudes of Poles towards the extermination of Jews, as expose two different, irreconcilable strategies: the attempt to include these experiences within the symbolic universe of Polish culture, and its collapse under impact of images too terrifying and unassimilable within that symbolic space. Jasio’s expiatory death is not so much a weaving of real events as an examination of the Polish conscience, symbolically prepared by Wajda, as a result of guilt perceived as collective guilt. Therefore, the whole sequence with Abram begins with the image of the group of women praying in the courtyard (the supposition of their hostility and indifference, and in the final film version – the symbol of their communal bond) and ends with Jasio’s fall (the supposition of expiation, his tragically belated redemptive sacrifice). Jasio’s avoidance of Abram’s gaze is balanced by his staring at his dead face. Jasio’s refusal to help Abram has its symmetrical reflection in the image of the door closing before him as he runs up the staircase. Wajda wishes at all costs to interweave the Polish and Jewish fates, to open the perspective of compensation and affective identification. At the same time, he records fundamental models of libidinal desire associated with Polish experience of being a witness to the Holocaust. A decade later, Jerzy Grotowski was to work with identical models in the theatre. The scene with the sack of Jewish heads paralyses this whole flow of images and affects. Giving his opinion on the initial version of the screenplay, Adam Ważyk, a well-known Polish writer of Jewish origin, expresses in his opening sentence his conviction that it is outstanding cinematic material. He is fearful, however, of the pessimistic scenes and situations that could prompt moral anxiety in the audience. He also proposes weakening the protagonists’ constant confrontation with death; recommends reworking two episodes afresh, and totally removing one other: precisely the scene portraying the meeting between Stach and Kostek by the wall of the Jewish cemetery: ‘I doubt whether it’s the right time for the scene with “brawn”.’55 This is the exact word used by Ważyk: ‘głowizna’ (brawn, or head meat), the only awkward and obscene word in his entire text. Other suggestions Ważyk justifies with accuracy. We can imagine that in the contemporary political situation, it would have been impossible to exonerate that scene. No argumentation was necessary because everyone knew to what it referred. Clearly, on ‘Jewish issues’ it was possible to understand one another by means of abbreviation. From then on, the meeting between Stach and Kostek was to function in discussions about the screenplay of Generation as the ‘scene with the brawn’. The term ‘brawn’, taken from Czeszko’s novel,56 not only enabled the event to be deciphered (without using the already ideologically uncomfortable words ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’), but also to establish distance from it. It compromised practices of representation that demanded the visibility of historical events: instead of Jewish heads there is ‘brawn’, that is a surrogate, ineptly imitating reality. Instead of the predicted horror, there is unintentional comedy. As we can see, in this one short sentence

222

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

of Ważyk’s, defensive mechanisms are working at full steam – to such an extent that Ważyk eventually falls into the trap of using the language of Nazi propaganda, which excluded Jews from the human order, degraded them to the position of animals and justified feelings of disgust towards them, while making their deaths just as obvious, invisible and indifferent as the death of animals destined for slaughter. Perhaps this type of language represented at that time in Poland a kind of cynical distancing from the facts of collective demoralization, to which the scene with the ‘brawn’ openly referred. Interestingly, all participants in the discussion seized upon Ważyk’s language, regarding the term as comfortable and ideologically safe. Resistance to that scene was expressed, however, rather in the language of affects than of ideology. This was made possible by circumventing the by then, very uncomfortable political issues connected with Polish–Jewish relations. Ideology favoured locating them besides in the sphere of abjection, obscenity, aesthetic inappropriateness. During the two discussions of the screenplay and shooting script of the film, no one undermined the historical credibility of the scene. It was not about truth but about emotions. Appeals were made to affective arguments: ‘Showing Kostek with the brawn is beyond the strength of the spectator. One can talk or read about it, but not show it on a screen,’ Jerzy Teoplitz, a film critic with Jewish roots, said in his review.57 ‘If we’re talking about the matter of the brawn, then I am of the opinion that it is shocking to read and cannot be shown at all on film,’ Ludwik Starski, a screenwriter also of Jewish origin, supported him.58 It was precisely artists of Jewish background who demanded the removal of the scene, no doubt fearing the antisemitic reactions of the Polish audience. Czeszko was prepared to withdraw the scene from the screenplay in exchange for keeping the brutal scene – also criticized by the commission – of a Nazi provocateur being murdered with a knife: ‘If you will grant me the knife, I will grant you the brawn.’59 This was how the visibility of the most important historical and moral events that had branded Polish society with the stigma of indifferent witnesses or murderers corrupted by war was negotiated. Despite Ważyk’s suggestions, the scene with the knife was removed from the shooting script, but the ‘scene with the brawn’ was preserved. To whom then was the scene with Kostek carrying his sack of Jewish heads so important, that he was prepared to reject the unambiguous recommendation to remove it? Was it Wajda? Or was it possible to risk such action without the support of Aleksander Ford, the patron of the whole undertaking? The discussion of the screenplay had concluded after all with the unanimous recommendation to remove the scene, formulated as follows by the chair Stanisław Albrecht: ‘It seems to me that we have reached agreement on the fundamental matters, namely on the brawn, the walk-ons, the silhouette of the boy, the provocateur, the ethical expression of certain misdeeds, the ideological deepening of the screenplay and its perspectives.’60 In the discussion of the shooting script, the issue nevertheless returned: ‘Those certain things, which are fragments, if we are talking about the

ARCHIVE OF THE MISSING IMAGE

223

ghetto, they lead the spectator away from the action rather than underpin it, lead the spectator away from what is going on in the minds and hearts of our heroes.’61 The somewhat coded statement of Karpowski has a distinct nationalistic subtext: ‘If we want to better and more fully understand what is going on with our heroes, then we would do better to show the struggle of the oppressed nation.’62 The theme of ‘the struggle of the oppressed nation’ and the theme of the ghetto went together extremely badly in his opinion. Starski, in turn, repveated his arguments from the previous meeting: ‘As to the matter of the brawn, I don’t want to quarrel now with Czeszko, but I bet that you yourselves won’t endure its expression in film. It is such an unusual sight, cut-off heads, that you yourselves will strive to have the scene excised.’63 The debate was resumed concerning the film’s dramaturgy. It was criticized for being excessively fragmentary, for its lack of plot connections between incidents, for its too loose and open construction. Only Tadeusz Konwicki made an unambiguous, passionate defence of the shooting script. What others had criticized, he considered to be its greatest value. According to him, the shortage of cause-and-effect connections between events enabled the ‘emotional plot’ to be realized. Thanks to this, the wartime past was exposed as a field of still vital affects and, although Konwicki could not fully say it, had freed itself, at least partially, from ideological control: ‘I am partly a nihilist and take no notice of literary rules. I believe no one knows exactly how the dramaturgy will work.’64 Konwicki invoked the authority of Anton Chekhov: ‘In Chekhov’s plays, several characters sit on stage, talk about something, the wind blows, bells ring, and that’s the whole play. I am not able to say whether it’s dramaturgy, it’s only the dynamics of the situation. The dramaturgy is the accumulation of emotional tension.’65 Thus he regarded the scene of Stach’s meeting with Kostek as one of the most important incidents in the film’s ‘emotional plot’. Thanks to this scene, ‘Stach went a long way forward’. According to Konwicki, it was therefore futile to construct his personality according to classic psychological means, using the dramaturgy of small turning points and the gradual development of self-knowledge – which was what the majority of the discussants were proposing. The latter clearly remained under the influence of traditional notions about a well-constructed drama. Konwicki, on the other hand, appeared as spokesman for the modern drama of shock. He knew what the drastic nature of wartime experiences depended on and was deeply convinced that Wajda and Czeszko had captured it. He also recognized the plot about Jasio Krone as an outstanding achievement of the authors of the screenplay. To other participants of the meeting, Jasio’s death was accidental, unjustified and totally unheroic. The subtle dramaturgy of emotions leading Jasio towards his death of expiation for his refusal to help his Jewish friend was summed up as follows by one of the discussants: ‘Jasio seems to me like a boy who cannot control his nerves.’66 Whereas for Konwicki, Jasio’s death had a profound moral sense; it emerged from the whole weave of

224

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

circumstances and emotions. ‘The shooting script is done with concern for the emotional side, for feelings, for imbuing it with vital realism, throwing the light of humanism on human affairs.’67 The scene of the meeting between Stach and Kostek was eventually made. It is clear that it was very important to Wajda. According to the memoir of Kazimierz Kutz, Wajda’s then assistant, it had a shocking impact. To a large extent, it was improvised on location. Zbigniew Cybulski, who played Kostek, was afraid of confrontation with the more experienced Tadeusz Łomnicki, allocated the role of Stach. The scene was to be shot in a single take, in a single camera set-up: ‘Everything was to emerge from the playing of the actors.’68 Cybulski apparently played the scene in such a way that Łomnicki was confounded: ‘And when the camera was eventually stopped, Tadeusz burst into tears like a little child. He cried out of impotence, helplessness and fury at Cybulski.’69 The scene was not included in the final version of the film released to cinemas. Yet we should acknowledge that getting it to the phase of realization was in itself an incredible achievement, considering the intense criticism during work on both the screenplay and shooting script. Whoever’s resistance lay behind this, the focus was to rescue the utmost visibility of past events. And also to remain loyal to the very fact that they were visible and seen, that they belonged to social experience. The cutting of this scene out of the finished film was an event of great consequence for Polish culture. It indicated the necessity to mobilize in the field of absent history, to compensate for invisibility by intensifying the affect. The fate of the scene discussed above is proof of the creation within Polish post-war culture of an archive of excluded images. We should remember, however, that these images were recorded, registered, played, shown. Someone was their reader, viewer, witness. But someone also decided to remove them from the field of visibility and social circulation. The existence of such an archive is not immaterial to the destiny of a culture, especially when not only images are subject to denial, but also the very event of seeing. One image always lay at the heart of it: showing the complicity and moral indifference of Polish witnesses to the Holocaust. Even if theatre could not restore visibility to the events (although in this respect too, it had remarkable achievements), it was able to expose the very situation of denial. Staging two decades later Conversations with an Executioner, Wajda knew perfectly well what images had been excluded from Moczarski’s narrative; after all, he had fought for their inclusion in his film Generation. Furthermore, he exposed with lucidity the libidinal bases of this contract – though this time he was ready to authenticate them with his own authority. Despite this being a contract concluded in entirely new conditions, he nevertheless supported a similar principle of invisibility at the intersection of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ history.

10 Duplicitous spectator, helpless spectator

1. Theodor Adorno, writing about the problems associated with working through Germany’s Nazi past, refers twice to the theatre, to two concrete productions identified by name: Les Morts Sans Sépulture (The Unburied Dead), a play by Jean-Paul Sartre,1 and one of the German performances of the Broadway adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank.2 He was not interested in the productions themselves but in the reactions of the spectators – different in the extreme in their affective expression, but similar as symptoms of their psychological defence against the past. In both cases, he was concerned with the exposure of the defensive mechanisms that societies have at their disposal in order not to confront too horrific a history. Adorno mentions the impression made on him by a review of Sartre’s play, which he read in one of the local newspapers during a cruise on Lake Constance. The drastic nature of the spectacle clearly provoked the unease of the reviewer. ‘By means of noble existential cant’ and defending ‘an appreciation of the higher things’, the critic had no intention of engaging himself in the horror presented by Sartre. He therefore saddles the ‘speaker’ with blame, and not the real historical perpetrators. Mistaking reality for its representation, he evidently regarded it as the duty of theatre to protect the spectators from images of their recent past. However, he was unable to formulate his credo openly, since then the defensive mechanism would not have functioned efficiently; he therefore had to appeal to the communal interests of culture, which theatre likes to represent in its zealous, self-appointed way. Adorno describes reading this review as ‘a very shocking experience’. He uses the example of theatre in order to demonstrate that the idea of ‘culture’ should not be automatically opposed to manifestations of ‘barbarism’, but on the contrary: its significant participation both in the very fact of the perpetrated evil and in later attempts to cover it up should be hunted down.

226

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

The second theatrical example, which Adorno uses, relates to the Broadway version of The Diary of Anne Frank, which played in almost all major cities in West Germany in the mid-1950s. Adorno recalls the reaction of a certain woman spectator, told to him by someone else: ‘Yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live’ [italics in original]. In the voice of this genuinely ‘upset’ spectator, Adorno heard the demons of the recent past. The principle, elaborated on the basis of American popular culture, that any mass evil should be portrayed by means of ‘individual cases’ turns out to cooperate effectively with the defensive mechanisms of German society. The rule of presenting ‘individual cases’ therefore becomes a means for forgetting the ‘totality’, while automatic linguistic gestures, which captured the powerful emotions of the spectator, continually legitimatized the right – once granted to themselves by the Germans – to decide who was worthy of life, and who not. Linguistic cliché therefore not only exposed what had not been worked through, but also found an alibi for itself in the mechanisms of popular culture. The ‘new’ – because felt for the first time – authentic affect of sympathy for the Jewish fate, aroused by theatrical performance, became stuck in ‘old’ ideological frameworks. The careful attention with which Adorno usually illuminates episodes of social life, exposes the emotional and moral monstrosity of this incident. Precisely theatre becomes the place, in Adorno’s words, of those ‘shocking experiences’, which depend on the inadequacy of affect and language, of the affect and its object, of the practices of aesthetic and social experiences. The examples taken from theatre enable us to illustrate very clearly the question, constantly raised by Adorno, about the possibility of working through the past, a process that cannot be identified with attempts to quickly efface it. It seems that theatre is precisely the institution that notoriously mistakes denial for the process of ‘working through’, because it is too willing – as if by definition – to proclaim the triumph of culture over barbarism and automatically make itself an advocate of communal integration. Adorno, in contrast, relates highly critically to the post-war ideological fetishization of social ‘bonds’ as a remedy for the social pathology of fascism. The rhetoric of ‘social bonds’ becomes a smokescreen for nurturing former collective ideologies and fresh ressentiments. The image of the tortured person contains, according to Adorno, the ultimate truth about social ‘bonds’ in modern society: it unmasks the violence upon which they are founded, and at the same time stages experiences of the denied, effaced past. Theatre is often a place for presenting histories that ‘have already been told’; it therefore puts the spectator in a position of superiority (in the position of someone who knows what is being talked about) and as such makes him or her the owner, or depository, of cultural assets. Hence the category of universality, abused in theatrical jargon more than in any other (film, literary, musical), enables any contemporary historical experience, once incorporated into one of the established mythical plots (Antigone, Hamlet, Forefathers’ Eve), to be regarded as assimilated (if only dialectically) within

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

227

the symbolic order of a given culture. It therefore allows the illusion of ‘social bonds’ to be created in the form of shared, common symbolic codes that are constantly topical or being put to the test. Adorno’s conclusions concerning the possibilities for working through the past, meanwhile, are more pessimistic (although in their own way, heroic). Defensive mechanisms are so deeply rooted in collective life, and social reality is so undisturbed in its essentials (despite Germany losing the war), that all available tools of pedagogic persuasion should be regarded in advance as insufficient. In addition, the process of working through must – by its very nature – take place in the psychological sphere, not in the political and social. The subjective result of working through may therefore have no real influence on objective social reality. ‘Subjective enlightenment’, even when applied with renewed energy and new psychoanalytical approaches, can prove powerless in the face of the objective power sustaining dominant social attitudes, for example antisemitism. This is especially the case as there exists the phenomenon of ‘nonpublic opinion’,3 which allows ‘enlightened’ society to practise old habits and prejudices behind the mask of publicly stated beliefs. This does not mean that efforts in social education should be renounced, but it also does not mean that the illusions prompted by these practices should automatically be admired. The transference of social problems into the sphere of psychology often leads, for example, to the perception of guilt as an issue requiring therapy – and therefore as something seen as personal baggage, from which one can and should liberate oneself. In the rhetoric of guilt, Adorno sees a kind of social game resorting to worthless chips. It concerns people who have lost the ability to accumulate and impart experiences (‘guilt’ therefore becomes for them exclusively an ideological, absolutory construct). The one experience, to which they can genuinely relate, is violence from outside. In this sense, Adorno’s pessimism regarding the chances for working through the past comes close to Freud’s doubts about the possibility of curing psychotics, where damage to subjective structures is of a permanent nature. For this reason, after the war, an implacable struggle was unleashed (psychologically justified, but politically absurd and morally scandalous) over the position of victim, in which the perpetrators as well as passive observers of past crimes also joined. They all felt caught up in a web of external oppression, determined by circumstances over which they had no influence. On the other hand, however, Adorno regards the appeal to historical facts, and hence the diametrically opposed attempt to radically objectify past experiences, as totally ineffective: since every fact may be treated and analysed as an ‘exception’. The example of the woman bemoaning in a theatre the fate of Anne Frank, mentioned by Adorno, perfectly illustrates this mechanism. Adorno poses the question, uncomfortable for himself, as to ‘how far it is advisable to go into the past when attempting to raise public awareness, and whether precisely the insistence on it does not provoke a defiant resistance and produce the opposite of what it intends. It seems to me, rather, that

228

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

what is conscious could never prove so fateful as what remains unconscious, half-conscious or preconscious’.4 And yet negotiation of the image of the past, its dependency on short-term political aims, Adorno rejects at the outset of his reflections on the process of working through. He therefore introduces a distinction between condemnation of the past and the readiness to understand what appears to be impossible to accept. Precisely theatre, with its ability to invoke provisional social realities and arrange temporary configurations of the flow of social energy and affects, seems to serve well this ‘readiness to understand’, constantly initiated afresh – perhaps flawed, but indefatigable, and institutionally guaranteed (the foundation of theatre is after all repetition). Freud mentions such ‘temporariness’ when recalling a scene of transference where a patient unconsciously re-enacts with the participation of the therapist past situations and experiences, to which the patient no longer has access through consciousness and memory5 – for example, relations with parents. Precisely transference enables the roots of this resistance to be examined more thoroughly. And although we know that Adorno was sceptical towards the Freudian concept of transference, he nevertheless made use of it when analysing his two cases connected with theatre. Although the institution of theatre always appears to support communal defensive mechanisms, it does not generally serve strategies of unambiguous ‘condemnation’, since it cannot tolerate discourse that is too didactic, always smuggles in uncontrolled affective potential and allows for incorrect interpretations. By this same token, it opens side gates to those experiences before which the main doors are slammed shut. Theatre is therefore fundamentally a model for the process of working through, since it performs transferences of social energy into the psychological sphere. This does not place theatre, however, in any privileged position; on the contrary: it is precisely the ‘theatricality’ of the process of working through that is the source of Adorno’s scepticism about its real social effectiveness. The tale of the woman who took pity on Anne Frank after the event and wished her life to be spared, Adorno ends with a bitter and unpleasant conclusion: such theatrical spectacles as that about Anne Frank can nonetheless feed into the potential for social improvement ‘however repugnant they also are and however much they seem to be a profanation of the dead’. It is difficult to imagine a more humiliating contract between theatre and social life. Although the term ‘working through’ is usually used in positive contexts, in the light of Adorno’s remarks its ambivalence is unmasked, as is – most importantly – the pressure inscribed into it to be reconciled to processes that are hard to accept from the ethical and aesthetic point of view. Especially since ‘working through’ is a term used disproportionately eagerly amid a general lack of knowledge of what it really signifies. Working through is associated above all with a patient’s overcoming of his or her resistance to interpretations of the past established during the course of psychoanalytic therapy. The construction of an appropriate interpretation of past events and experiences, as well as its acceptance by the patient, allegedly leads

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

229

to the disappearance of symptoms, to liberation from a past that keeps returning in the form of repetition and to its assimilation by the subject in narrational form as a memory. Working through may be regarded as the transition from ‘theatrical’, compulsive repetition of the past, as though it were a present situation, to a ‘narrative’ memory that establishes a suitable distance between the present and the past. The crux of working through is therefore concealment of the aspect of violence associated with it (the paradox of imposed ‘voluntariness’) or the provision of arguments that allow the violence to be accepted as an essential element of therapy. Adorno perceived in a similar light the attitude of West Germany to the democracy imposed on it after the war: the social passivity accompanying such processes had to undergo ideological masking. This aspect of violence can also be applied to theatre, provided a distinction is observed between the invisible violence of cultural models accepted by the collective (for example, traditional theatrical plots or models of mourning), and the violence of accounts heard and watched in the public space of a theatre ‘for the first time’. Every such ‘first time’ is a source of shock. The reviewer of Sartre’s The Unburied Dead writing in a Baden newspaper felt the vision of the recent past presented in the drama as violence, and correctly identified its source in the author, although he did not wish to look for the sources of his own resistance to this vision in recent historical experiences to which he was witness. The woman who was upset by the spectacle about Anne Frank continued to feel her power over the object of her pity, was prepared to accept the new (for her) feeling of empathy, but only on condition she kept the illusion of her own subjectivity as constantly felt power over someone else’s life. Understood in this sense, the collective weeping that resounded in post-war German theatres at performances of The Diary of Anne Frank, should be treated as a phenomenon that is fundamentally obscene. Adorno, as we recall, mentioned in this context, a sense of ‘repugnance’. The ‘theatrical’ cases mentioned by Adorno point to the divided and dramatized aspect of every process of denial: the vicissitudes of the representation and the vicissitudes of the affect part company on the stage of consciousness; their mutual relations cease to be visible to the subject experiencing denial – they perform their drama beyond the stage. This does not mean that they are entirely invisible: it is enough to point the spotlight at the audience, behind the scenes or at the theatrical environment. Only then can their translocations be grasped. The critic’s aggression towards the reality presented by Sartre’s play is ethically justified, but inappropriately motivated. The sentimental affect prompted by the stage version of Anne Frank’s diaries, on the other hand, not worth a great deal in itself, enables us to reach representations that continually resist working through. In Adorno’s understanding, working through reveals itself as yet one more repetition rather than as a narrative arrangement of the past, more as defeat than victory, a project rather than its realization. By the same token, theatre as the psychological equivalent of social processes – as a space of

230

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

displaced and translocating experiences – never achieves either full catharsis or full anagnorisis, while, in addition, it positions these two experiences (purification and recognition) in a relationship of mutual exclusion. Correct recognition by the spectator of the historical references behind the stage image makes catharsis impossible, while the experience of catharsis is conditioned by the unconscious and by celebration of social denial. Theatre that grapples with the past of the Holocaust must therefore say goodbye to the ideal theatrical model of tragedy, reconcile itself to social ineffectiveness and accept the humiliating contract. And it usually stands in absolute opposition to the model of working through, which Adorno ultimately declares himself in favour of: individual autonomy and full self-reflection. Theatre instead enables its participants, its performers and spectators, to remain within the network of ‘social bonds’ and replace acts of self-reflection with ‘experiences’. Working through, identified with ‘theatre’, therefore reveals itself as a never-ending process of recognizing defensive mechanisms and instances of resistance in relation to certain images and narratives, rather than as an effective transition from repetition to memory, from the symptom to the symbol; more as paralysis than as the discharging of affects and liberation from them. Working through is therefore not an ideal model of procedure or collection of procedures capable of putting right our experiences and guaranteeing, in so doing, the casting off of the burden of the past, but a defeat, a test, a spectacle produced at risk of being misunderstood (just as happened with the examples of the impact of theatrical spectacles analysed by Adorno). As Yasco Horsman6 claims, working through is repetition interpreted by a therapist, and subsequently by the patient, as a spectacle – and hence repetition that is now conscious. This does not imply, however, that all mechanisms governing repetition are conscious. Caution in defining the ‘positive’ aspect of working through is noticeable here – it is far from any kind of narrative fullness. Emphasis is on the attempt rather than on the effect, on the effort rather than the finished work. Horsman makes use of both Freud’s and Adorno’s conceptions of working through in order to interpret in their light, for example, trials of war criminals, or literary and dramatic texts related to the traumatic past of twentieth-century Europe. Working through is a spectacle, which sets itself three goals at the same time: didactic, legal and therapeutic; but it always achieves, in fact, only one – it reveals the helplessness of the spectator when confronted by content that he or she cannot assimilate, control or include in any known language and system of symbolic social communication. An example of this kind of working through, the one speaking perhaps most powerfully to the imagination, is ‘Arendt’s Laughter’ – highly audible, according to Horsman, in her account of the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann. This is not, however, laughter that enables distancing from and full understanding of the phenomenon that is the cause of the laughter. On the

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

231

contrary: it is uncontrolled laughter, sudden, incomprehensible, unwanted, but at the same time a source of secret pleasure, which overtakes us in the face of something we cannot comprehend. Hence it is an affect, and not the result of an intellectual process, in this case laughter aimed also at the ideological aims of the Eichmann trial formulated by Ben Gurion, the then Israeli prime minister. Horsman links precisely this affective, irrepressible outburst of laughter to the notorious, and for many people morally sensitive, category of the banality of evil, introduced by Arendt. The banality of evil is interpreted here as a stage effect, before which the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem herself remains helpless, but which she does not want – unlike others – to ignore. Quite the contrary: she wishes to emphasize it, make it visible. It is the result, put briefly, of the incompatibility between the comic figure of Eichmann, an impotent clown imprisoned in a bulletproof glass cage on the stage of a Jerusalem courtroom, and the enormity of the crimes of which he was the perpetrator. The banality of evil is therefore not an intellectual (philosophical, political, legal) concept, a theory explaining the mechanisms that led to the extermination of Europe’s Jews, but an attempt to expose the affects most heavily censored by post-war culture: those that are inconvenient and undermine traditional forms of political moralism. Horsman suggests that Arendt interpreted the Eichmann trial in terms of comedy understood as a genre, and not – like the majority of commentators – as a tragedy. Even Susan Sontag, no stranger to intellectual provocation, compared the trial to a great tragic spectacle, which placed unimaginable evil and suffering before an entire world audience, and by this very fact, opened the perspective for catharsis.7 Recognition was therefore made a condition for, and at the same time a guarantee of, catharsis – which would seem to prove the existence of a habit, difficult to root out, of appealing to ‘consoling’ and ‘salutary’ models of culture, allowing new historical experience to be absorbed under the guise of universal truths, rather than the opening up of processes of working through in the sense of Freud or Adorno. Horsman also refers to Arendt’s essay about Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (1963),8 translated into English as The Representative (Britain, 1963) or The Deputy (United States, 1964). The political scandal provoked by this play at the beginning of the 1960s was without precedent in the history of European theatre. Arendt linked the scale of the spectacle’s political influence to the fact that the audience was adjudged the right to judge the past. Because of this, Arendt, who had mistrustfully watched the theatricality of the Eichmann trial (in her opinion, the organizers were as much concerned to create a propagandistic spectacle as mete out justice), saw in theatre the potential to practise the politics of responsibility for the past without attempting to impose a feeling of guilt on the audience. Moreover, she makes the basis of her own conception of moral judgement Kant’s ‘aesthetic judgement’, which does not depend on applying general principles to concrete situations, but is always linked to the risk of individual judgement, not sanctioned by universal truths.9 According to Arendt, the controversy

232

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

surrounding The Deputy was not provoked by the facts portrayed on stage, but above all by the very fact that members of the audience were granted the privilege of making their own independent judgements about a figure such as Pope Pius XII. The controversy therefore did not relate to past history, but to the way the public space for debate about it was organized. As a result, we find ourselves at the extremities of the theatricality – full of defects – of the processes of working through indicated by Adorno. The judgement of the individual theatre spectator is not, admittedly, for Arendt a fully ‘cognitive judgement’, but it is communicative: the community is therefore not the mythical foundation of theatre, but the result of a multiplicity of judgements and their communicability which ‘being essentially an approval of taste by common sense […] defies understanding’.10

2. Nasza klasa (Our Class) by Tadeusz Słobodzianek staged at the Teatr na Woli (Wola District Theatre, Warsaw) begins with a situational reference to The Dead Class. The premiere of Tadeusz Kantor’s play took place in 1975, the premiere of Słobodzianek’s thirty-five years later (2010). Kantor’s spectacle was everywhere interpreted as a séance of social amnesia: ‘in The Dead Class, everything that is on stage, what we hear and see, is less important than what is not there’.11 Słobodzianek’s drama should be treated, however, as a testimony to memory regained. Słobodzianek evidently desired not so much to pit himself against Kantor’s work, as to make Our Class, with the aid of this distinct reference, a paradigm of the worked-through historical traumas of Polish society. It comes as no surprise then that he takes as his theme the most emblematic event and experience: the murders in Jedwabne and the public debate about them. The actors sit at five school desks. They put their hands up, ready to answer. Not so timidly as in Kantor’s play, but decidedly and eagerly. Unlike the characters in The Dead Class, they know the answers. They introduce themselves at the beginning and are keen to take part later in the spectacle. They rearrange the desks, recite verses, dance, sing, constantly composing new dramatic scenes, but above all, they speak: without stuttering, without hesitation, without interruption. All are top of the class at something. They know perfectly their own history and the history of their class. They relate it from the perspective of the end. First – the end of their own lives; hence they are dressed in the costumes of adult people, of the time when they meet their deaths. Heniek therefore wears a cassock from the start, Dora a dress from the 1940s, and Menachem the jumpsuit of an Israeli soldier. Second – they relate their lives from the perspective of the end of history, of issues now closed, like Nazism or communism. Or rather – as we should say, following Jan Assmann – from the perspective of the limits to communicative memory, that is the end of the history living in the memories of direct participants

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

233

in events. All witnesses to the history portrayed here are no longer alive. Their account is therefore free of the lies told in life; it resounds confidently, resolutely, powerfully – assuming the orderly form of a collective memory, cultural memory. All their sins, culpabilities and shameful deeds are presented on stage and related according to a maxim announced in the play itself: ‘Truth cannot be buried’.12 The gesture of demonstrating ‘the truth’ is in fact the one raison d’être of the whole drama and of each character separately, irrespective of whether the self-denunciation is deliberate or unintentional. History can be told, if we stop lying: this is the conviction emanating from Our Class. Słobodzianek’s play, therefore, does not so much provoke social efforts to work through an uncomfortable past, as appear to express social satisfaction with a task that has already been accomplished. This is the first feature of Słobodzianek’s drama: everything that is evil, criminal and so far concealed becomes visible and nameable. Furthermore, the evil is scenic, good material for a drama, according to the author. On this depends the rhetoric supplied by the author of ‘dugup truth’. The measure of the author’s uncompromising attitude and the method of its legitimization is the characters’ candour about their sexual experiences. When Dora is raped by her former classmates, she confesses to the audience the secret sexual pleasure she felt at the time. We do not feel surprised or shocked by her confession, because we have already grasped the rules gravitating the drama towards the narrated body rather than the experiencing body. Meanwhile Heniek, who held down Dora’s legs at the time, wears a cassock, which casts in advance the shadow of our suspicion over his future vocation as a priest. He does not penetrate the victim, and at the end of the drama we learn about the rumour that in later life, he had a weakness for ‘rosy-cheeked altar boys’.13 Both the circumstances surrounding the murder of Jakub Kac (Katz in the English version), punished for his alleged collaboration with the Soviet occupiers, and the nuptial night of Władek and Rachelka are presented candidly and unceremoniously to the audience. Any cruelty can be narrated, Słobodzianek appears to be saying. The violence present in these accounts differs not at all (perhaps only in the level of escalation, but definitely not in ‘substance’) from the violence portrayed in accounts of the events of 10 July 1941, when Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbours; it was then that Dora perished with her child. We move constantly in the same space of exposed motives of human action. We cannot say that we listen to these accounts totally indifferently, yet we sense the whole time a distinct pattern in which they have grown entangled: this has a stabilizing effect on the emotions of the spectators and strengthens their conviction that there exist universal rules of human behaviour. Someone is leading us by a powerful hand, skilfully compiling the accounts. Nothing is said here in vain, nothing is subjected to our judgement, nothing provokes doubts and questions. Nothing unsettles the worldview of the author, who aspires here to the function of a mouthpiece for collective memory.

234

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

There is a contradiction, however, between the impression given to the spectators that an uncomfortable truth about Polish history is being ‘dug up’ before their eyes, and the dramatist’s aspiration to portray this ‘truth’ skilfully and tactfully. Questioned by Anna Bikont about which of the characters in Our Class he improved for the longest, Słobodzianek replied: Zygmunt. I did not want him to be the personification of evil. In the original version, this role was to be played by Robert Więckiewicz, who constantly grumbled that the character was superficial, that he always played dark characters, and yet he had inside him a little velvet box which he would like to show. When I finally understood what that little velvet box depended on, and reconstrued the role in such a way that the box was present, it transpired that Więckiewicz had no time to play it, because he had some film, in which, I hope, he succeeded in finding the velvet box. Bikont then expresses her reservation about the issue posed in this way: I found it hard to interpret Zygmunt as an exemplary father of a family or as someone capable of serious reflection. ‘We pissed our lives away Heniek. What a Godless waste,’14 he says to his classmate who became a priest. I spoke to the prototype, Zygmunt Laudański, who along with his brother Jerzy stood out even among the most active perpetrators of the Jedwabne murders of 10 July 1941. And although so many years have elapsed since the crime, it was a paralysing meeting. Bikont was clearly prepared to stand by the conception of ‘evil personified’ in relation to Zygmunt, or rather his prototype. Słobodzianek had a ready answer: ‘But Our Class is not a play about the Laudański brothers.’15 Bikont asked him several times again about the difference between the version of events she herself had established in her book My z Jedwabnego (translated as The Crime and the Silence by Alissa Valles) and their theatrical transformation in his play. This was not about deciding for the umpteenth time which was most fundamental to the writing of such a play as Our Class: fact or imagination, non-artistic truth or artistic truth? It was about the absolutory and conformist effect of the ambiguous strategy applied by theatre in this specific case. This is how Cezary Michalski interprets the political nature of Słobodzianek’s play: We have a political play from Słobodzianek and so you will get a political review from me. Because Słobodzianek’s text is political, and if advocates of the ‘political turn’ [in Polish theatre] don’t like it, then it is only because Słobodzianek occupies the position of radical centrist, very close to my own. Yet the centre in Poland today (at least the ‘intelligentsia’ shaped to some extent by [Jan Tomasz] Gross’s publications and Gazeta Wyborcza,

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

235

since in ‘people’s’ Poland, the centre might look quite different) is defined precisely by that 60 per cent who incline towards Gross, but respect however the arguments of [Tomasz] Strzembosz. Hence in favour of the suffering of Jews – since it was they who were burned in a stable by Poles, and not the other way around – but with understanding however for the suffering of Poles, even those from Jedwabne.16 Michalski therefore interprets Słobodzianek’s play as a summary of the erstwhile debate, an ultimate weighing up of arguments, the establishment of a truth that would reconcile the opposing sides. Every effect has its cause, every suffering its other side, and every evil – its reflection. Following the scene of Jakub Katz’s bestial murder by his former classmates, Abram’s letter is read out, in which he mentions his first ritual slaughter of a calf after finishing his yeshiva in New York. Let us add one more detail: this letter is drawn from the pocket of the dead Jakub Katz. The ritual action immediately exposes its real basis in human nature. The motif returns in the culminating Lesson IX when we hear the tale about the butcher Sielawa, who killed with professional skill the local rabbi during the collective murder of Jews by their Polish neighbours: thumping him first with an axe and then slitting his throat with one stroke of his knife. ‘Sielawa said they should be pleased we’re slaughtering them in the Christian way. Not like their lot […] bleeding their beasts to death.’17 Presented in this context, the reference to ritual killing conveys several things: it exposes the primitivism of the murderers, reveals antisemitic stereotypes inherent in Poles, constructs a vision of history as a series of tortures and massacres, and makes us distrustful of any kind of religious and cultural ritual. The only rituality which is not unmasked in Słobodzianek’s drama is the mechanism of the well-cut piece of theatre, functioning unfailingly and establishing equilibrium in places where it is most endangered. ‘Morality without a moral,’ Cezary Michalski suggests, is the key to interpreting Our Class. Semiotic obsession is another feature of Our Class. Everything here is a sign, everything means something, becomes entangled with everything else, combines with it, complements or counterpoints it. For example, the Jewish exclamation ‘Mazel tov’ (meaning: congratulations) occurs jokingly in one of the early scenes when the children discover Rysiek’s feelings for Dora, only to return as a vulgar gibe when the adult Rysiek rapes her. Many scenes take place simultaneously: Zocha gives herself to Menachem in the same moment that Rachelka and Władek experience their wedding night; Heniek dies at the same time as Władek. In the second part of the drama, we follow for a long time the parallel lives of Menachem in Israel and Zygmunt in Poland. During the war, Menachem hid from his friends, including Zygmunt, in Zocha’s stable: he was threatened by a cruel death at their hands, like the one experienced by Jakub Katz. But after the war, it was precisely he, as a security service officer, who tortured Zygmunt. Years later, both of them lose their sons at the same time. The impression is powerful and unambiguous:

236

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

life balances the books. The death of the sons appears as punishment for past crimes, yet at the same time brings former executioners and victims closer together, who appear here in interchangeable roles, mirrored positions. So, what is the lack of moral that Michalski writes about? Joanna Tokarska-Bakir has the following explanation: Both things at the same time – determinism on the level of life and formulaic speech on the level of language, and also the eponymous metaphor ‘class’ – provide in Słobodzianek’s play access to what, in theatre, is the most difficult: collective categories that ensnare the duplicitous spectator or reader in a weft so tight his (or her) freedom is strangled and, deprived of choice, he/she begins finally to think.18 Hence Słobodzianek’s play would fulfil the function of a ‘mousetrap’: i.e. not give the spectators any choice, and imprison them in an unnegotiable truth world (just as Claudius in Hamlet is imprisoned by his crime). There is thus no escaping the past, but there is also no escaping the very act of telling the ‘truth’ about it. In the audience, instead of real spectators, there sits the figure of the ‘duplicitous spectator’ who, grabbed by the throat, ‘finally begins to think’ – which in this case can only mean being forced to accept a denied or suppressed truth. The freedom of the ‘duplicitous spectator’, meanwhile, can therefore only be the freedom of his (or her) lies and self-deception, hence he/she has to be deprived of this freedom and made to see the unambiguous ‘truth’ about the past. The metaphors of ‘class’ and ‘lessons’, into which Słobodzianek divides the drama, expose the violence lying behind them. The spectators, however, are compensated for the violence of the lessons imparted to them (history is brutal; Polish– Jewish relations are always complicated; Poles were and are antisemites; no one who lives in the real world has pure intentions): the lessons are given in a form that the spectators are prepared to accept and be reconciled to. Here the ‘kitsch’ of alleged ambiguity is in operation, which always finds solace in such sober and commonsense formulae as ‘that’s how it is’, ‘such is the course of history’, ‘there are no totally evil and totally good people’, ‘there’s another side to every story’. The violence of theatre therefore turns out to be pleasant, while the ‘duplicitous spectator’ becomes the beneficiary of the social work of working through: since the spectator knows the ‘truth’ before he or she comes to the theatre. While celebrating the success of working through, they can simultaneously surrender to cultivating their own ‘unpublicized opinions’, which for some reason are kept tightly guarded by Słobodzianek. The lesson the spectators receive in the scene showing simultaneously the stories of Menachem and Zygmunt and their shared experience of the death of a son, implies an extreme conformism which leads them both to believe that life itself indeed balances the books. I hesitate to claim that this is the philosophy of tabloid newspapers, but it is certainly the worldview of

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

237

a society that has not acknowledged the ressentiments upon which its sense of ‘community’ is founded. Appreciation of such ressentiment becomes the basis of secret negotiation with the spectator, the condition for moving the spectators with what is ‘ours’: Polish and Jewish. Słobodzianek, by a roundabout route and certainly unconsciously, returns to the principle of settling accounts between Poles and Jews, against which Jan Błoński once warned. This was explicitly understood by a German reviewer: The murder of Jews in the play is rather unambiguously motivated by the belief they collaborated with the Soviets and informed on Poles. But it is not only the evil Polish antisemite Zygmunt, but also the Jew Menachem (saved by the Polish girl Zocha, who was in love with him), who after the war enters the UB [Urząd Bezpieczeństwa: the communist security service] in order to take revenge on Poles who had played an active role in the murders of July 1941. At this moment, he matches the stereotype of the sadistic ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’.19 The principle of settling scores enables Słobodzianek to defend the idea of a common history and gain for this cause – thanks to demonstrating his own objectivity – the trust of the audience. Settling scores, so condemned by Błoński, is smuggled in (not used openly or provocatively) thanks to Słobodzianek’s application of the rules of a well-cut drama: figures of ambiguity and the method of counterpoint, as well as discovery of ‘velvet boxes’ inside the criminals. This was exposed by Anna Bikont in the interview quoted above, where she confronts the dramatis personae with their real-life prototypes. First, she asks about the figure of Zocha: ‘Zocha saves Menachem, but refuses to give water to Dora, his wife, who on the hot sultry day of the murder, holding her baby in her arms, faints of thirst in the marketplace. Wyrzykowska did the opposite. She drove to the ghetto and smuggled in food.’ Then Bikont asks about Menachem: You created the figure of Menachem, who is as if taken from an antisemitic stereotype: a Jew who gets his revenge on Poles, tormenting Polish patriots in UB casemates. Menachem, like Szmul Wasersztajn, spent the war hidden by a Polish peasant woman. Even such a respectable historian as Tomasz Strzembosz believed, without checking the facts, that Wasersztajn was in the UB, and for a long time could not part with this attractive version. Meanwhile, thanks to his enterprising spirit, Wasersztjan became a Costa Rican footwear tycoon and never had anything to do with the UB.20 Both examples raised by Bikont show Słobodzianek’s tendency to equate the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deeds of his protagonists. It is hard to resist the impression that in this case the conflict between artistic truth and ‘non-artistic truth’, about which Henryk Grynberg wrote, consolidates conservative and

238

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

defensive attitudes. Questioned by Joanna Derkaczew as to whether the work of mourning was carried out in Our Class, Słobodzianek replied: Maybe it sounds pretentious, but I am attempting to lead to catharsis. That’s the point of theatre: to cause things to happen so that people can survive. Enter into intensive enough contact with their inner dirty linen, so that room might be made for something else. The director Paweł Wodziński believes that catharsis is almost a physiological activity: the violent removal from the organism of all concretions, the regeneration of a free mental space. This interpretation is close to mine both as director of the Laboratory of Drama (Laboratorium Dramatu) and as a writer. I try to reach for what has the greatest emotional charge and power to influence the spectator.21 The repeated standing ovations following performances of Our Class testify to the powerful emotions of the audiences. Several reviewers also mention catharsis. Although much desired, catharsis appears in this case to be first and foremost a form of expressing relief that the process of working through the past is already behind us. As a conclusion to these remarks, let us propose a hypothesis: the rhetoric of catharsis and working through, abused in relation to Our Class both by the author himself and by critics, would seem to be an imitation of the rhetoric employed ten years earlier in the debate about the crime in Jedwabne. A ready language already existed therefore in media circulation, which was mobilized anew in connection with the theatrical event that was Our Class. Repetition guaranteed the lack of risk and established a firm foundation of truths already ‘dug up’ a long time before. The laughter that rang out in the auditorium was therefore certainly not the laughter of Hannah Arendt; it was not untimely laughter, but laughter fully deserved and having its appropriate place in the drama’s finale: In the end Adam Piekarz, who left to study in America in 1938, relates how his family has grown. He enumerates the names of his sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There are so many of them that the audience begins at a certain moment to laugh. Is this a sign that the Jewish people, who perished in Poland, have been thus resurrected?22

3. The rhetoric of ‘working through’ dominated the Polish debate about Jedwabne; although, of course, only on the part of those who did not deny Polish perpetration of that crime. The centre of attention was not so

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

239

much the actual historical crimes as the moral and social results of society’s acceptance of the ‘truth’ about the past and its taking responsibility for it. The beneficiaries of ‘working through’ were to be solely those who did not reject the truth about the past. The promise of collective catharsis weighed heavily on the nature of the debate; its efficacy was dependent on society’s expressing agreement to the image of Poles bestially murdering their Jewish neighbours being absorbed into Polish culture and history. Not everyone, admittedly, was equally optimistic as to the liberating power of confessing the truth. Marcin Król poured cold water on this kind of expectation, as if recalling the erstwhile doubts of Adorno: ‘it is necessary to invest long years of educational work, and not place hope only in the liberating, cathartic power of the truth’.23 Even when scepticism is expressed, however, the cathartic model remains a positive one, except that it is not so easily accessible and functions with considerable delay. In this sense, the ‘Jedwabne affair’ may have seemed to be a highly desirable political event, because it hastened the processes transforming Polish society, the ‘modernization of its mentality’,24 on the eve of its entry into the European Union: the revision of its cultural myths and one-sided image of the past. Marcin Król, although expressing scepticism towards the chances for sudden catharsis, also indicated the irrevocable end to certain collective notions, such as ‘Polishness’ and the ‘fatherland’, or at least the need to rebuild them from the foundations, on the ruins – but now without the participation of Romantic myths and notions. He was therefore ready to ascribe an electrifying social impact to the public debate about Jedwabne. He repeated Czesław Miłosz’s former arguments from 1945, which had proved then to be ‘untimely’ in the Nietzschean sense, impossible to accept for a society thirsty for Romantic consolation. The success of Our Class disproved Król’s diagnoses and hopes.25 It transpired that after Jedwabne too, collective codes of Romantic provenance were operating at full capacity. The debate surrounding Jedwabne also seemed a good opportunity for an open struggle against Polish antisemitism, which after 1989, usually semi-openly (but occasionally entirely openly) undermined Polish political life. On the one hand, hope surfaced for a fundamental reformulation of the symbolic codes of Polish culture; on the other, for a chance for a general re-education of society, well motivated by the historical revelations, on questions that in everyday life were denied and suppressed (such as antisemitism). Both aspects of the anticipated process of working through were closely interconnected and mutually conditioned one another. The effectiveness of persuasion, re-education and symbolic revolt was linked here to the rhetoric of theatricality and strategies of pure pageantry. The debate had to become, by its very nature, a ‘drama’, and the past events a ‘spectacle’. The conflict between contemporary political arguments was accompanied by constant attempts to virtually stage history: to establish who was where in Jedwabne on that tragic day; in what place on the ‘stage’; how

240

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

many people were there; on what depended the ‘activeness’ or ‘passivity’ of individual participants in the events (Poles, Jews, Germans). Which elements of the picture were significant and which were not. All later commentators draw attention also to the very quick polarization of attitudes in the debate. In the first of these visions, Poles were the most active side: it was on their initiative and by their hands that Jews were murdered in Jedwabne. The Germans in this picture disappear or play only episodic roles. Stage direction depended here on using clear-cut methods of montage, aimed at splitting up rather than combining the sequence of events: the effect of alienation, not cohesion. Neither earlier events (the Soviet occupation) nor the wider background to the event itself (the German occupation) played a significant role, although they have contributed to an inappropriate – from the ethical point of view – relativization of the actual crime. A strategy prevailed of isolating one single, terrifying, shocking image, which Polish society was supposed to confront without any possibility for self-justification. The single permissible ‘larger’ narrative related in this version to Polish antisemitism, which had already assumed a menacing form before the war, in the 1930s. Precisely in this way, the aim of the social drama was defined: a struggle against Polish antisemitism, recognition of it as a widespread and shameful phenomenon. In the other, opposing vision, Poles played the role of powerless witnesses to murders committed by the Germans, of performers of someone else’s criminal will. In this vision, care was taken over the sequence of events and emphasizing connections in the plot (the behaviour of Jews during the Soviet occupation influenced Polish attitudes towards them during the German occupation), as well as the broad canvas of Nazi crimes. On the one hand, therefore, the struggle was about acknowledging Polish ‘blame’; on the other, about defending Polish ‘innocence’.26 The context of the Holocaust, meanwhile, was truly uncomfortable for both sides of the argument. For some, the context relativized the Polish crime (and yet it was about the Polish crime’s absolutization and the efficacious, ethically justified violence of the spectacle so staged at the time of the Jedwabne debate); for others, the context of the Holocaust demanded the posing once again of questions about the whole spectrum of Polish attitudes towards the extermination of Jews, always so disagreeable for Polish nationalism. The Jedwabne debate fits perfectly into the model of social drama outlined by Victor Turner. Furthermore, it seems that participation in Turner’s drama was important to the participants themselves of the Jedwabne debate (especially those supporting Jan Tomasz Gross and his book), as was playing an active constructive role in it by aiming at real results (such as, for example, working through social attitudes, transformation of the symbolic paradigms of Polish culture, the strengthening of affective attitudes towards the past and the liberation of empathy towards another’s suffering). The debate was therefore accompanied by a peculiar metatheatrical consciousness. Let us recall that the social drama in Turner’s understanding usually anticipates a positive resolution; it should lead to the overcoming of the crisis. This

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

241

is indicated by the dramaturgy of the individual phases, which make up a comprehensive sequence of social transformation. The first phase is the destruction of equilibrium, the undermining of universally accepted norms so far guaranteeing the community’s cohesion (in Poland’s case – the myth of its innocence). The second phase is the crisis leading to a polarization of attitudes, during which ‘old grudges are reanimated, old wounds reopened, buried memories of victory or defeat in former struggles are disinterred’.27 The third phase hinges on restoring equilibrium with the aid of symbolic and ritual activities, although at the same time this is a liminal phase of transition, anticipating the suspension of previous norms, allowing social experiments with previous identity (including in the form of theatrical spectacles), and ushering in a state of heightened reflexivity (in a dual sense: both reflection of social life in symbolic forms of spectacle, and reflection on them). The fourth phase establishes a new order and a new social equilibrium. In the various proposals for structuring the Jedwabne debate, there appears a distinctly Turner-like rhetoric of social drama: the moment when discussion begins (the publication of Gross’s book), the intensification of the discussion (the intervention of successive newspapers, successive voices), the polarization of attitudes (the argument between Strzembosz and Gross), the transition from an historical discussion to a discussion about the social ceremonies linked to commemorating the crime in Jedwabne and its political effectiveness (religious service at All Saints’ Church, Warsaw; commemoration ceremony in Jedwabne with the participation of then-president Aleksander Kwaśniewski; the IPN [Institute of National Remembrance] investigation and announcement of its ‘verdict’). The spontaneous subsidence of the discussion may have indicated the fulfilment of the social drama; it allowed the positive social effect of the whole debate to be taken for granted as well as creating the illusion of having been worked through. This is how the debate registered itself in the general consciousness: as a fact of great, unprecedented social resonance, but now definitely closed due to the fair judgement of the past (Polish guilt had been confirmed). Public opinion polls conducted immediately after the close of the debate, just like those organized many years later, should force us, however, to maintain greater caution on this point. The strategy of shock encountered, or so it would seem, powerful defensive mechanisms (such as Adorno warned about in connection with the historical re-education of German society after the Second World War) or, what is worse, a state of social indifference. Even the fact of Poles’ ‘reconciliation’ or ‘resignation’ (‘pogodzenie się’, as it was expressed in one press commentary) to the truth about Jedwabne, indicated by several later polls, is not necessarily interpreted as a constructive, edifying event. The model of social drama generating the dynamics of the Jedwabne discussion turned out to be a trap also for the lobby demanding the ‘working through’ – however valid and desirable – of Polish consciousness, history and culture. The principles adopted by it for restaging the past proved to be just as limited as the former. The rhetoric of blame itself already presupposed the

242

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

unarguable functioning of the tragic model with its categories of recognition and purgation. It would suffice to analyse the high-style rhetorical figures of confessing guilt and accepting responsibility for past crime, which people worked on then collectively. No one dared – like Hannah Arendt did in relation to the Eichmann trial – to use in relation to the Jedwabne debate the comic model, which presupposes movement within a completely different field of affects, reveals what goes on behind the scenes, demands the exposure of metatheatrical tricks, does not shun obscenity and low style and does not deceive with the promise of catharsis. The comic model, however, would have had to totally resign from the rhetoric of blame and denial, trauma and sublimity, and take into consideration the categories of indifference, stupidity and obscenity – much more painful for Polish sensibilities. The lobby demanding in the argument over Jedwabne, the acceptance by Poles of responsibility for the crime, did not reveal its own defensive mechanisms or deconstruct its own rhetoric; instead, it insisted almost unanimously on a spectacle that was painful, terrifying, traumatic and sublime – and hence one still located in the codes of Polish Romantic culture, especially its masochistic current. It is not true that Polish culture knows only one model (collective innocence) and only one myth (the Christ of Nations). Yet such an impression was recreated in order to increase the impact of rhetorical persuasion. Perhaps what should have been attacked were not obvious targets such as Polish messianism and Polish innocence, but the adaptive masochistic strategies of Polish culture that enable Poles, in a way that is basically always ‘agreeable’ for them, to cope with Polish ‘sins’. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, during the course of the Jedwabne debate, attacked the Polish tendency to ‘confess other people’s sins’,28 when the way Poles revel in their own sins should be examined equally critically. If society’s reaction to the debate, which went on for so long and received so much media attention, proved to be disappointing, then perhaps this testifies both to the strength of social denial and to a poorly chosen strategy, to the application of a false theatrical model. Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class proved emphatically that the truth about Jedwabne, which had been negotiated during the course of the social drama, slots perfectly into the traditional frames of Polish theatre, and may allude to Kantor and Wyspiański and exploit Romantic topoi. It is certainly not, however, a drama about the Holocaust. Polish antisemitism is undoubtedly repressed in everyday social practice. The Jedwabne debate was held within the framework of precisely this narrative, and thereby enabled reference to be made legitimately to categories of denial and to the hope of working through, and even to catharsis. Were we, however, to alter the perspective and ask questions about Polish participation in the Holocaust, and not about Polish antisemitism, then the rhetoric both of denial and of working through begins to falter. Because the problem is that Polish memory of the Holocaust appears to be dominated rather by indifference and stupidity (in the Kantian sense, as in the reading proposed by Arendt29) – and thus by experiences morally more

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

243

grievous than denial. The debate about Jedwabne was not fundamentally a debate about the Holocaust; it was a debate about Polish antisemitism that upheld narcissistic and defensive attitudes on both sides of the barricade. The audience for the arguments perpetuated in almost all Polish newspapers was a society that had not dealt with the truth about the Holocaust in a wider context other than the constantly revived (since 1945) account of its ‘own sins’ (in my opinion, the source of narcissism on the part of those who defended Gross’s book and the ‘precedentedness’ rather than unprecedentedness of the debate). Not only ‘Polish guilt’ is terrible but also its ‘episodic nature’ and ‘redundancy’ within the larger picture of the Holocaust’s monstrous work, as well as the distressing fact of such limited social empathy for the suffering to which Polish society was a witness. And if, in the 1940s, it was necessary to draw attention above all to the indifference of Polish society to the mass crime committed against Jews, then in our own day we should assume general ignorance, lack of adequate historical knowledge and above all knowledge based on empathy and knowledge based on experience, affectively assimilated. For this reason, the hypothesis of ‘denial’ is psychoanalytically ineffectual, dead, and therefore correctly interpreted by a significant section of society as having been thrust upon it, and difficult to identify with. In my opinion, the question as to whether the inclusion of Jedwabne in the history of Polish antisemitism explains too one-sidedly and too rationally the issue of Polish participation in the Holocaust has not yet been asked sufficiently loudly. The crime in Jedwabne has been reduced to yet another pogrom (thereby restricting the field of vision for the umpteenth time), while the horror of this pogrom fulfils a perfect climactic moment in the constructed drama of Polish antisemitism. But only the hypothesis of stupidity (the stupidity of Polish witnesses of the Holocaust so well captured by Lanzmann in Shoah), and not the denial of guilt, places Polish participation in the Holocaust in its proper light. Seen from this perspective, situating the Jedwabne village mob on the side of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, despite the undeniable truth in this case of Polish perpetration, seems absurd and serves merely to satisfy the appetite for Polish guilt. During the debate on Jedwabne, Hanna Świda-Ziemba emphasized how Poles refused to confront the reality of the Holocaust: ‘The Holocaust did not change the attitude of many (the majority of?) Poles, did not plough any furrows in Polish consciousness. Attitudes towards Jews continued in their undisturbed form.’30 For precisely this reason the Jedwabne debate, dominated by the context of antisemitism, appeared, on the one hand, to be so justified and necessary, but on the other upheld the existing state of affairs, did not transcend the horizon of ‘Polish guilt’, enclosed the events of the Holocaust within a narrative comprehensible to Polish society, as well as within the framework of a social drama the stakes of which were immediate political aims connected with European integration. From the point of view of the Holocaust as a modern event, in Bauman’s sense, ‘Polish guilt’ would

244

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

not so much require recognition and catharsis within the frames of a tragic spectacle, as the ‘laughter of Hannah Arendt’ – recognition of the comic error of a fraud, who has been made a fool of, to whom perpetration of the crime has been irrevocably and justly attributed, but from whom it has also equally irrevocably been taken away. The fate of the Jews of Jedwabne was anyway preordained within the ‘modern’ framework of the Holocaust, yet the guilt of the passive bystander appears to be no less than the guilt of a perpetrator who ‘makes the most of the opportunity’ and arranges the anachronistic spectacle of a pogrom, which the ‘perpetrators of a higher order’ record with a film camera, perhaps as future research material for social anthropologists. The irony of the entire event is captured by ŚwidaZiemba: Irrespective of whether there were more or fewer Germans in Jedwabne, whether 1,632 people were burned in the stable or considerably fewer (let’s say, for example, 933), irrespective of how many Poles took part, independently finally of whether the Germans played the role of acquiescent observers or active provocateurs, it does not change the simple and, for us today, cruel truth – the aim was to burn all the Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne, and the crime was committed by the local population.31 The cruelty consists precisely in this, by definition comic ‘irrespective of everything’, which should perhaps be used in the context of Jedwabne in an even more radical way. Imre Kertész, in his essay The Holocaust as Culture, formulates a warning against mistaking Auschwitz for traditional antisemitism: Our age is not the age of anti-Semitism but of Auschwitz. And the antiSemite of our age no longer spurns Jews; rather, he longs for Auschwitz. At his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann confessed that he had never been an anti-Semite. And while the audience burst into laughter at these words, I by no means considered it impossible that he was telling the truth. In order to murder millions of Jews, the totalitarian state needs not antiSemites but good organizers.32 The crime in Jedwabne, seen in the perspective of the whole Holocaust, was therefore a redundant crime, anachronistically ‘theatrical’ in relation to the obscene and assiduously concealed death on a massive scale. Why did no laughter ring out during the Jedwabne debate? Why was it not accompanied by a showing of the film Shoah during peak viewing hours? The debate about Jedwabne became a provincial discussion, of no particular significance for perceptions of the Holocaust in Poland and with limited impact on the reconstruction of Polish consciousness, although highly significant in the context of the rich tradition of struggle against Polish

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

245

antisemitism. For example, the condition of the ‘bystanders’, which since the 1990s had become an increasingly burning topic in discussions about the Holocaust as a modern undertaking, disappeared from the field of vision. I am not belittling the local significance of the debate, or the importance of its immediate political aim; I am merely criticizing the excessive amplification of its significance from the point of view of Polish memory of the Holocaust. Concentrating on the topic of Polish antisemitism and reducing the stage to Jedwabne has allowed more difficult questions to be reduced to easier ones, the unknown to the known and the state of society’s general ignorance about events of the Holocaust to be maintained, when its epicentre was the Polish lands. Instead of interpreting Jedwabne as an anachronistic and superfluous episode of the Holocaust, it has been turned into a crucial event of Polish history. The tragic spectacle of guilt has become an aesthetic fetish in this debate. Kertész believed that only the aesthetic work of the imagination, and not sticking to facts and documents, enables deep understanding of the reality of the Holocaust and its ethical results. However, it has to be risky work (because previous culture, according to Kertész, had become the property of the enemy) exacerbating the irresolvable contradiction between imagination and reality. It is difficult to grasp with the imagination the things that happened, but ‘of the Holocaust, of this inconceivable and unfathomable reality we can form a realistic notion only with the help of aesthetic imagination’.33 If figures of working through cannot be grasped without a theatrical model, and the medium of theatre rests on a foundation of powerful defensive mechanisms operating in a given society, the danger exists that the process of working through will become basically the triumph of defensive forces: it creates its own simulacra, devoid of any real social influence. This was Adorno’s bad dream, and – to a large extent – the case of the Polish debate about Jedwabne. And also of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class.

4. In Krzysztof Warlikowski’s play (A)pollonia, during the scene where Apolonia Machczyńska is posthumously awarded The Righteous Among the Nations medal, the laughter of the fool or joker resounds many times. Andrzej Chyra, who played this role, bases his characterization on Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s film The Dark Knight: blood-red mouth mutilated by a Glasgow smile. Ledger called the Joker a ‘psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy’,34 thereby acknowledging him as a figure without a ‘velvet box’. The Joker in Warlikowski’s production fulfils the function of a judge of an Israeli court who confers the title of Righteous on Apolonia Machczyńska. It is he who opens the scene with a sneering reference to the

246

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Talmud: ‘Whoever saves a single life, saves the whole world.’ Circus music plays in the background, like during the entry of a tightrope walker onto the high wire. The range of musical motifs introduced in this scene by Paweł Mykietyn (the circus fanfare, the motif from one of Sergio Leone’s westerns, Chopin’s lullaby) already indicates that we are dealing with tonalities that cannot be tuned to one another. Chyra the Joker explodes the ritual of which he is high priest, makes fun of it, undermines its sense: ‘We award the medal to Apolonia Machczyńska, who saved one life … And so, did she save the whole world? Is it still possible to save that world?’35

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

247

FIGURES 10.1–10.5  Frames from the documentation records of (A)pollonia, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Nowy Teatr (New Theatre), Warsaw, 2009. Video production by Marcin Latałło, Nowy Teatr/Camera Obscura.

248

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Why does an Israeli judge morph into a Joker, ‘a schizophrenic clown with zero empathy’? Warlikowski appears to apply here a forbidden stratagem: he lays hands on the symbolic resources of someone else’s culture, and moreover, pokes fun at them. We should not underestimate the courage of this parody, because a ritual is being derided which is not ‘ours’, while at the same time this is a ceremony of great political significance not only for the state of Israel. Warlikowski targets simultaneously the institution of the Righteous and the way it has been abused in Poland for propagandist purposes, both during the People’s Republic and after 1989, justifying the compulsive underlining at every stage of Poles’ services in rescuing Jews. The matter gets even more complicated when we realize that the creator of (A)pollonia indeed discredits the ritual itself, but not the event that takes place within its framework. But perhaps Warlikowski was concerned not so much to make fun of the ritual, as to radically expose its symbolic ineffectualness, its weakness. For the ineffectual ritual is the prerequisite for an event of great emotional force: something here evades control. The symbolic ‘weakness’ of the ritual enhances the dramatism of the event: it no longer finds support in any symbolic order that can stabilize its dramaturgy and meaning. The Joker thus indicates what will happen: ‘And now, at last the impossible will happen. Transcending the boundaries of the imagination.’36 Apolonia’s son Sławek, Ryfka, who was saved by Apolonia, and Ryfka’s grandson Hain meet; it was Hain who lodged the application for Machczyńska to be awarded the status of Righteous. Events from the past (Ryfka’s rescue, Apolonia’s death) hang over them constantly and mean something different to each. Every word uttered among this constellation of characters threatens to explode in misunderstanding; emotion verges on aggression, empathy on hostility or alienation. The grandson does not understand why the fact of sewing a fur collar onto Ryfka’s overcoat was so important when she embarked on her journey to Warsaw (fur had been confiscated from Jews, so the collar indicated that she was not Jewish). He regards it as an inessential detail for the whole story, unnecessarily complicating the narration of past events. Ryfka, meanwhile, is offended when Sławek calls the Jews sheltering in their home ‘odd people’; she is alert to how a Pole talks about Jews. Sławek, in turn, is irritated by the emphasis that Ryfka places in her account on the intimacy between Apolonia and a German officer, fearing a truth that may be too painful for him. Ryfka quotes with irony Apolonia’s words about his ‘good looks’, which he should not ‘squander’ – as if she wanted to unmask the bad intentions of the person who saved her. According to Ryfka, her grandson Hain understands nothing of the past, because he was shocked and disgusted by how a group of Jews in hiding smothered a crying baby. On the other hand, she does not want to understand the pain with which Sławek relates the death of his mother, treating his account as emotional blackmail: ‘Am I supposed to say sorry to you? Because I survived?’37 Warlikowski’s hints here are very strong: in this scene, the characters speak in a language left by the Holocaust.

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

249

FIGURES 10.6–10.8  Frames from the documentation records of (A)pollonia, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Nowy Teatr (New Theatre), Warsaw, 2009. Video production by Marcin Latałło, Nowy Teatr/Camera Obscura.

250

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

In Słobodzianek’s play, the existence of an ‘our class’ is obvious; the community of Polish and Jewish lives is guaranteed by cultural codes accessible to his audience. In the final scene, the whole class meet again on the ‘other’ side. Upstage, beyond the open door, the image from the beginning of the performance is reconstructed: the pupils sitting at their desks. Throughout the spectacle, the dead protagonists constantly return to the stage, scrutinize events, sometimes participate in them. The scene portraying the wedding of Władek and Rachelka is modelled on Wyspiański’s Wesele (The Wedding, 1901): the returning ghosts of Jewish victims of Polish crimes; the two alien worlds, which nevertheless continue to create a common history. The utopian nature of such thinking is not exposed in the spectacle – despite the fact that the common history of Poles and Jews had fallen apart irrevocably. In (A)pollonia, the very meeting between Sławek and Ryfka already belongs to the order of what is unimaginable. Their momentary intimacy comes as a surprise to them and is not a dramaturgical or ideological premise contributing to the symbolic meaning of this scene. Ryfka is moved: ‘Excuse me, but can I touch your face? What happiness that I have lived to see the moment when I can kiss you?’38 Yet throughout the meeting they are unable to find a common language; they are divided by emotions, words, memories, biographies. The only thing that unites the characters gathered on stage is helplessness towards the past and vulnerability in their mutual relations. Sławek conveys the pain of his mother’s loss in the words of a poem by the Jewish composer André Tchaikowsky (aka Andrzej Czajkowski), whose mother had died in the gas chamber at Treblinka. These are words that do not fit any social rituals of mourning, expressing emotions without the prospect of consolation: ‘Do I long for you? / You stupid, sentimental cunt. / No doubt you went to a lot of trouble, so that swine Albert would not long for you. / He was let into Treblinka, not me. / Was your honeymoon a success?’39 Here, the figure of Sławek is afforded Hamlet’s passionate sense of injustice in his judgement of reality. Małgorzata Dziewulska speaks, in connection with (A)pollonia, of ‘awkward facts’ that ‘cannot be arranged into any useful meanings’. Warlikowski upsets the mechanisms of the social drama and does not allow himself or the spectators to draw optimistic conclusions: ‘He enters deep into the relationship between spectator and actor, while by manipulating the sensibility of the spectator, he achieves a state of agonizing disarray in the field of rational, but perhaps in particular sentimental justifications for various collective and individual illusions’.40 The scene where the medal is conferred is organized according to the Bakhtinian idea of scandal – as an event mixing different symbolic orders and languages, which mutually undermine each other and threaten catastrophe, because there are characters in this scene prepared to follow the irrational impulse to tell the truth, which they still do not fully know. And if the courtroom ritual may be regarded as an attempt at rational control of the processes of working through, then Warlikowski seeks in them the potential for catastrophe rather than felicitous control of crisis. He goes after

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

251

the movement of ‘inarticulate affects’,41 which have the power to abuse and reject languages of different kinds. On large screens, we see close-ups of the protagonists’ faces. Uncontrolled flows and collisions of affects create the dramaturgy of this scene: patterns of its unpredictability. The independence of the dramaturgy of affects from the dramaturgy of plot was noted by Siegfried Kracauer: ‘A face on the screen may attract us as a singular manifestation of fear or happiness regardless of the events which motivate its expression.’42 The crime in Słobodzianek’s play is not a scandal,43 but an event determined by a number of factors (human nature, history treated as a chain of injuries and reactions to them). Meanwhile, laying down your life for someone else becomes in Warlikowski’s spectacle an unassimilable event: on the narrative level and on the ethical. It leaves disarray in its wake which cannot be contained with the help of accessible social rituals. Warlikowski exposes – no doubt unwittingly – the falsity of the discourse of ‘working through’ and ‘guilt’ such as was mobilized in the public sphere by the debate surrounding Jedwabne. Since in (A)pollonia he rejected the structure of the social drama. He was interested not so much in the endurance or transformation of symbolic orders in relation to such ‘critical’ experiences as the Holocaust, as going after the affect, still present in current social experience, and constantly shifting its position within the shattered symbolic structures. It is this movement of the affect that unites the fragments of various languages and assembles them into a heterogeneous whole. In his conception of theatre, Jean-François Lyotard distinguishes two models.44 One is based on the principle of change (re-placement), and the second on the principle of shifting position (dis-placement). The first is governed by a strategy of representation: we show on stage something that once took place or is located elsewhere. Between position A and position B a principle of inferiority is established, and, as a result, it comes under the control of power relations and begins to succumb to various forms of ideological surveillance. Lyotard designates this kind of theatre religious and nihilistic because it relies on an experience of absence (what is on stage is not the object of representation). Absence, subordinated to the rules of representation, serves meanwhile collective goals. The second type of theatre is driven by a transfer of energy, shifting between representations, actions and words. In itself, energy knows no principle of purposefulness, it strives only for self-revelation. In order to illustrate the difference between the two models of theatre, Lyotard makes use of the metaphor of a toothache, clenched fist and palm: ‘I have a toothache, I clench my fist, my nails dig into the palm of my hand.’ In the first type of theatre, the palm represents the ‘passion of the tooth’, indicates its source which is not on stage, and thereby establishes rules of dependency, causality, purposefulness. In the second type, the most important event is the flow of energy itself between the toothache, the clenched fist and the palm – a flow that is unpredictable, but real. This flow of energy Lyotard calls an ‘inexpressible affect’, an event outside the order of social communication. Even if we are aware of

252

THE POLISH THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST

the connection between the source of pain and the reaction to it, the very experience of the pain resists this kind of articulation, becomes absolutely present-moment, refers to nothing outside of itself. The affect is not a sign of something absent: it signifies exactly what it is. Lyotard’s libidinal theatre cannot therefore be a place for celebrating rituals of mourning, because it cannot capture the experience of loss. But in so doing it protects mourning from ideological violence. ‘The tooth and the palm no longer mean anything, they are forces, intensities, present affects.’45 Affects indicate pain, but they do not allow any kind of meaning to be ascribed to it. In (A)pollonia, affective disarray is guarded by the Joker; he stipulates moments of misunderstanding between the characters, situations where the meaning  of the uttered words is lost. He is the guardian of collision, not in the sense of conflict, but of the leap between accessible languages. The attempt to force an affect to speak by means of articulated speech is, for Lyotard, an act of pure violence. The affect, however, always resists this violence, remains in some part inexpressible. This does not prove the existence of defensive mechanisms blocking the process of working through, but it does demonstrate the violence contained in therapeutic procedures themselves and in cultural conceptions of catharsis. The affect’s resistance to therapeutic violence indicates the place where, for Lyotard, art begins. The theme of implanting a feeling of guilt in the audience is introduced in Warlikowski’s spectacle by the figure of Agamemnon, who speaks to the audience in the words of the protagonist of Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), former SS officer Maximilien von Aue: ‘You will never be able to say: I shall not kill; the only thing that you can say is: I hope I shall not kill.’46 It is not here, however, that Warlikowski’s greatest provocation resides. The demonism of von Aue is subject in (A)pollonia to self-compromise. What’s the point of imagining that we might, in particular circumstances, become criminals, when we can easily imagine that we might become passive witnesses of someone else’s suffering, or might refuse help? Cynthia Ozick once wrote about this: identification with the victims or the perpetrators requires a stretch of the imagination and always remains a kind of empty speculation. Identification with the position of the ‘bystanders’, on the other hand, is alarmingly easy, since this is what we are in fact the whole time, especially in our daily contact with media reports of violence done to others. Warlikowski clearly places the spectators in this position: he upholds it (for example, through the mediatization of the actions on stage, transmitting them on large screens) and attacks it at the same time (by means of direct verbal attack, a constantly reiterated strategy of accusations). These are not duplicitous spectators, but helpless spectators, masking their own helplessness with a never-ceasing procedure of passing judgement on everything. For this reason too Warlikowski’s greatest provocation is not judgement of the criminal but judgement of the Righteous woman. This is best captured by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir:

DUPLICITOUS SPECTATOR, HELPLESS SPECTATOR

253

The divergence between intentions and deeds, and hence the thing over which the not entirely evil von Aue despairs, becomes the fate of the wholly good, genuinely Righteous woman, Apolonia Machczyńska (prototype: Hanna Krall’s Pola, from the volume of essays Tu już nie ma żadnej rzeki [There is no longer any river here], Warsaw, 1998). The heroine, the figurative and literal, individual and collective ‘metaphysical object’ of the spectacle, who wanted to save twenty-six Jews, but saved only the one Ryfka. She wanted to save the whole world, yet she destroyed herself and her unborn child, deprived another child of his mother, and a husband of his wife. We would not be ourselves, if we did not enter all this soberly today in the ‘debit’ column. This is specifically done by ‘one of us’, Apolonia’s son, who receives the Righteous medal on her behalf, blaming his mother for his lonely childhood and the fact that although ‘she had us’, she preferred Jews. Just like the numerous real children of the Righteous, who blame their parents for the fact they inherited only problems from them, plus once a year a box of oranges from Israel.47 At the same time Tokarska-Bakir in her discussion of (A)pollonia returns to the rhetoric of the Jedwabne debate, interpreting Warlikowski’s spectacle as a bitter commentary on the lost chance for collective purification: ‘You didn’t wish to say sorry for Jedwabne? Fine, so now you can live without forgiveness.’ The balancing of blames, which takes place in Warlikowski’s spectacle, is provocatively open and does not flatter any ‘nonpublic opinions’ of the spectators. Warlikowski is not concerned, however, with balancing the books, but with exposing the disarray in the practice of making moral judgements about the past. The state of ethical disarray becomes the basis for the spectacle’s aesthetics: the mobility of affects, changeability of perspectives, heterogeneity of texts, hybridity of the theatrical medium. Hanna Krall is therefore right to claim that: ‘the Holocaust appeared in Warlikowski’s production together with life. The farther the spectacle got from invention, the closer it got to the Holocaust’.48 Warlikowski inverts the argumentation of Hannah Arendt, who wished to transfer the principle of aesthetic judgements to moral judgements. At the same time, he remained true to her basic demand to make theatre a place for cultivating responsibility for events that are beyond our control. He created a spectacle that establishes its aesthetic rules on the foundation of difficult-to-grasp – because based on ‘inexpressible affects’ – practices of moral judgement of reality.

254

NOTES

Introduction 1 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 2 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 3 Stanisław Lem, Prowokacja (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1984). 4 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 5 Imre Kertész, Dossier K., translated by Tim Wilkinson (New York, NY: Melville House, 2013). 6 Leonia Jabłonkówna, ‘Klucz od przepaści’, Teatr 18 (1969), p. 5.

Chapter 1 1 Kazimierz Brandys, Samson (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1953), p. 118. 2 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Street Scene: A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre’, in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 121–29. 3 Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992; London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. x. 4 Brandys, Samson, p. 118. 5 Cynthia Ozick, ‘Prologue’, in Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, edited by Gay Block and Malka Drucker (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1992), p. xiv. 6 This is how the position of the bystanders is defined by Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1988). 7 Dori Laub, ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 75–92.

256

NOTES

  8 The quotation is from an ‘afterword’ that appears in the Polish edition: Raul Hilberg, Sprawcy. Ofiary. Świadkowie. Zagłada Żydów 1933–1945, translated by Jerzy Giebułtowski (Warsaw: Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów; Wydawnictwo Cyklady, 2007), p. 397. This is not included in Hilberg (1992) nor in the London: Secker and Warburg 1995 reissue.   9 Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1987), p. 157. 10 Feliks Tych, Długi cień Zagłady. Szkice historyczne (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 1999), p. 13. 11 Tych, Długi cień Zagłady, p. 27. 12 Tych, Długi cień Zagłady, p. 27. 13 The presence of a psychoanalyst was part of the established procedure for recording testimonies by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, located at Yale University. 14 Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 31. 15 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 45. 16 Michał Głowiński, ‘Wielkie zderzenie’, Teksty Drugie 3 (2002), p. 201. 17 Jan Błoński, ‘Autoportret żydowski, czyli o żydowskiej szkole w literaturze polskiej’, in his Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008), pp. 85–86. 18 Władysław Panas, Pisma i rana. Szkice o problematyce żydowskiej w literaturze polskiej (Lublin: Wydawnictwo DABAR, 1996), p. 100. 19 Panas, Pisma i rana, p. 100. 20 Henryk Grynberg, ‘Życie jako dezintegracja’, in his Prawda nieartytsyczna (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2002), p. 37. 21 Henryk Grynberg, Życie osobiste (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza ‘Pokolenie’, 1989), p. 22. 22 Excellent examples are Leonia Jabłonkówna’s reviews of two of Jerzy Grotowski’s productions: Książę Niezłomny (‘Książę Niezłomny w Teatrze 13 Rzędów’, Teatr 2 (1966), pp. 8–9) and Apocalypsis cum figuris (‘Klucz od przepaści’, pp. 4–5). Jabłonkówna, in an unrivalled manner, interpreted the affective, under-the-skin, traumatic speech of both productions, and the hidden message of Grotowski’s last production: ‘A crucial ceremony took place, the ritual of a peculiar religious service, a mystery play of holiness and sin, adoration and desecration, martyrdom and profanation, but without leaving a single trace [… ]. Perhaps this is precisely the key to the secrets of this new Apocalypse: that martyrdom leaves no trace, that every victim is a void?’ 23 ‘The performance was so permeated with respect for the suffering described in the play that we were not only in a state to listen to the text, but we even allowed ourselves to be enthralled by its terrible beauty.’ Zbigniew Raszewski, the author of these words, remembers Axer’s production as one of the most important productions he had seen in his lifetime. He wrote with pathos of Tadeusz Łomnicki’s performance: ‘If cold ashes could speak, they would surely

NOTES

257

sound like Łomnicki’s voice in this role’. Zbigniew Raszewski, ‘Wspomnienie (Dochodzenie Weissa, 1966)’, in his Spacerek w labiryncie. O teatrze polskim po roku 1958, compiled and edited by Jerzy Timoszewicz (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Errata, 2007), p. 258. 24 Several of the reviewers explained interest in the topic of the Holocaust as a ‘fashion’:



The author was endeavouring to carry out an artistic synthesis of the Jewish nation’s Gehenna during the Second World War. I will leave aside the transitory nature of this idea stemming from the current fashion for interest in this cultural exoticism [sic!] – the impurity of the intention depends on something else: someone who is not ‘from there’ should surely not be writing about the metaphysical arcana of Judaism, even if he has studied the Talmud for his own use. (Elżbieta Konieczna, ‘Słuchaj, Izraelu!’, Echo Krakowa 140 (1989)). The author of this review likewise mentions, cryptically, that the performance ‘prompted various malicious comments from the spectators’. ‘The very theme may guarantee success, but not triumph. Especially artistic. Even if it is attractive and hits the mark, aimed purely at social demand. We might call this pandering to a passing fashion. Elegantly and honestly done’ (Bożena Winnicka, ‘Zdążyć przed Habimą’, Życie Literackie 38 (1989)). Paweł Wroński (‘Izraelu, litości!’, Młoda Polska 23 (1990)) called Jarocki’s production an example of ‘intellectual antisemitism’, cynically overturning the director’s genuine intentions.

25 Rafał Węgrzyniak, ‘Słuchaj, Izraelu! w Starym Teatrze’, Odra 3 (1990), pp. 109–10. 26 Jan Kłossowicz, ‘Temat’, Literatura 2 (1990), p. 55. 27 Agnieszka Baranowska, ‘Obróceni w żużel’, Kultura 27 (1989). 28 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated from the German and edited by James Strachey (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954), p. 431. 29 Jerzy Jedlicki, ‘Dzieje doświadczone i dzieje zaświadczone’, in Dzieło literackie jako źródło historyczne, edited by Zofia Stefanowska and Janusz Sławiński (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1978), pp. 341–71. 30 Jedlicki, ‘Dzieje doświadczone i dzieje zaświadczone’, p. 368. 31 Jan Błoński, ‘Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto’, Tygodnik Powszechny 2 (1987). Reprinted in his Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008). English translation of the original single article: ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’, Polin 2 (1987), pp. 321–36. 32 Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, translated by Frank Wynne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), pp. 477–78. 33 Błoński, ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’, p. 322. 34 Roman Zimand, Piołun i popiół (Czy Polacy i Żydzi wzajem się nienawidzą?) (Warsaw: Biblioteka Kultury Niezależnej, 1987), p. 22. On arguments surrounding the use of the term ‘Holocaust’, see: Monika AdamczykGarbowska and Henryk Duda, ‘Terminy: Holokaust, Zagłada i Szoa oraz ich konotacje leksykalno-kulturowe w polszczyźnie i potocznej i dyskursie

258

NOTES

naukowym’, in Żydzi i judaizm we współczesnych badaniach polskich, vol. 3, edited by Krzysztof Pilarczyk (Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, Polskie Towarzystwo Studiów Żydowskich, 2003), pp. 237–53. 35 Hannah Arendt, ‘“Eichmann Was Outrageously Stupid”: Interview with Joachim Fest (9 November 1964)’, in The Last Interview and Other Conversations, translated by Andrew Brown (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2013). 36 Michał Głowiński, ‘Potęga stereotypu’, in his Magdalenka z razowego chleba (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), pp. 151–52. 37 Głowiński, ‘Potęga stereotypu’, p. 152. 38 Głowiński, ‘Potęga stereotypu’, p. 153. 39 Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 143. 40 Raz Segal, ‘Becoming Bystanders: Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, and the Politics of Narcissism in Subcarpathian Rus’, Holocaust Studies 16 (2012), nos. 1–2, pp. 129–56. 41 Ulrich Frisse, ‘The Bystander’s Perspective: The Toronto Daily Star and Its Coverage of the Persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust in Canada, 1933– 1945’, Yad Vashem Studies 39 (2011), no. 1, pp. 213–43. 42 Fredric Jameson associates the model of postmodern culture known as ‘total flow’ with Lacan’s understanding of psychotic structure. Polish culture remains, or so it would seem, within a neurotic model based on processes of denial and attempts to overcome them. Though there are, of course, significant exceptions. 43 Dominick LaCapra, ‘Lanzmann’s Shoah: Here There Is No Why?’ in Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’: Key Essays, edited by Stuart Liebman (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 121–230. 44 Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 85. 45 Georges Didi-Huberman speaks of the continually changing ‘forms of indifference and ignorance in relation to images of history’; see ‘Uśmiech Gorgony’, translated by Piotr Olkusz, Dialog 55 (2010), no. 1, p. 84, this being the text of a lecture delivered in Łódź at the Festival of Dialogue between Four Cultures (Festiwal Dialogu Czterech Kultur). 46 Interest in this topic was sparked by Michał Cichy’s article ‘Polacy – Żydzy. Czarne karty powstania’ published in Gazeta Wyborcza 24 (1994):



This article not only indicates a clear turning point in looking at issues connected with the [Warsaw] Uprising, but also opens up a new stage in the debate about Polish/Jewish relations during the Second World War. Cichy’s article, despite bringing into circulation much interesting source material and knowledge of little known episodes from the time of the Uprising, has contributed to a fierce rise in the emotional temperature surrounding this topic. See: Barbara Engelking and Dariusz Libionka, Żydzi w powstańczej Warszawy (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2009), p. 12.

47 Tony Judt, ‘From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’, in his Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Heinemann, 2005), pp. 803–29.

NOTES

259

48 Feliks Tych suggested (1999) what might help overcome ‘the Holocaust block’ in Polish society: it was necessary to dispel ignorance about ‘what really took place in these lands between 1939 and 1945’ (Tych, Długi cień Zagłady, p. 71). 49 The term was introduced for the first time by Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 50 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, translated with an introduction by Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), pp. 57–64. 51 The exhibition was shown in Warsaw’s Zachęta Gallery from 8 March to 18 May 2008. 52 Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 29 (2008), no. 1, pp. 103–28.

Chapter 2 1 Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance, edited by Claude Schumacher (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 4–5. 2 Samuel Weber refers to these categories when he discusses the marginalization, typical of Aristotle’s synoptic approach to theatre, of ‘everything having to do with opsis’, with theatre as scenic spectacle, with the spatio-temporal mode of staging the present moment. Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 99. 3 Understood in this way, the medium serves to elicit ‘an indescribable effect’ and allows the spectators to assume the risks of a ‘lack of knowledge and control’. Weber, Theatricality as Medium, pp. 219–20. 4 The category of repetition, as opposed to the principle of representing reality, is used by Piotr Piotrowski when introducing the situation of Polish art after the Second World War based on the work of Tadeusz Kantor and Andrzej Wróblewski. Piotrowski refers to Jacques Lacan’s concept of repetition in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1978). Piotr Piotrowski, Znaczenia modernizmu. W stronę historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku (Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy REBIS, 1999). 5 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 9. 6 Vivian M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 7 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 82. 8 Dominick LaCapra has polemicized many times with a trauma that cannot be accommodated within Lacan’s formulation. See: Dominick LaCapra, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Critical Inquiry 25 (Summer 1999), pp. 696–727.

260

NOTES

  9 Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 36–37. 10 Lang, Holocaust Representation, p. 92. 11 I find a contradiction to this argument in Derrida’s proposed interpretation of the poetry of Paul Celan. At no point in his reflections does Derrida directly link Celan’s poems to the Holocaust, consistently blocking mechanisms of referentiality. Since the object of his attention is the ‘spectral errancy of words’, the repetition ‘without a first time’ and not poetical strategies of representation: the date of a poem, and not the date of which the poem speaks. Not the ‘date of that holocaust we know’ but ‘the holocaust for every date’ and its spectral return. And so, invoking precisely the image of watchtowers seems an astonishing act of violence towards the reader (and of Derrida himself towards the poetry of Celan). Responsibility for this image falls not on the poet, but on the author of the commentary, and later on the reader of Derrida’s text. The image of the watchtower, however, has nothing to do with the act, suggested by Berel Lang, of correctly situating the literary text within the framework of historical narration; on the contrary: it turns out to be a severe critique of this kind of corrective reading. See: Jacques Derrida, ‘Shibboleth: For Paul Celan’, translated by Joshua Wilner, in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, edited by Aris Fioretis (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 3–72. 12 ‘A genuine diary is always a gauntlet thrown down to death. But to read a diary is one thing, and to see it on stage quite another. Throughout the whole performance I felt a heavy weight pressing on my heart. I had the impression that we were transgressing the natural boundary of art.’ Jan Kott, ‘Prawda i zmyślenie’, Przegląd Kulturalny 12 (1957). 13 Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003). See Chapter 6: ‘The Representation of Evil: Ethical Content as Literary Form’, pp. 117–61, quote on p. 132. 14 See, for example: Zbigniew Majchrowski, Cela Konrada. Powracając do Mickiewicza (Gdańsk: słowo/ obraz terytoria, 1998); Michał Masłowski, Gest, symbol i rytuały polskiego teatru romantycznego (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1998); Leszek Kolankiewicz, Dziady. Teatr święta zmarłych (Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 1999); Dariusz Kosiński, Polski teatr przemiany (Wrocław: Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego, 2007); Dariusz Kosiński, Teatra polskie. Historie (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Instytut Teatralny, 2010). 15 Aleksandra Ubertowska draws attention to this in the introduction to her book, formulating at the same time the thesis that Polish culture is a place from which the Holocaust is ‘poorly visible’. I might add that the modalities and forms of this ‘poor visibility’ have shaped some of the most outstanding events in Polish theatre. Aleksandra Ubertowska, Świadectwo – trauma – głos. Literackie reprezentacje Holokaustu (Kraków: Universitas, 2007), pp. 22–23. 16 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

NOTES

261

17 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 96. 18 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 97. 19 Ernst van Alphen, ‘Affective Reading: Loss of Self in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’, in The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, edited by Mieke Bal with the assistance of Bryan Gonzales (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 151–70. 20 Van Alphen, ‘Affective Reading’, p. 170. 21 Robert Eaglestone, ‘Identification and the Genre of Testimony’, Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora 21 (2002), nos. 1–2, pp. 117–40. 22 Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 23 Ernst van Alphen, ‘Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory and Trauma’, in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH and London: Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, 1999), pp. 24–38.

Chapter 3 1 As an aside, I should stress that all these types of metaphor describe at the same time the medium of theatre as conceived by Samuel Weber. We should therefore assume the historicity of such a way of perceiving theatre, shaped in conditions of post-traumatic culture. Weber admittedly does not point directly to these contexts, but he distinctly writes that his conception of the theatrical medium is historical by nature, and inscribed into the perspective of radical philosophical and aesthetic revisions (linked to the development of new media). One could say that he develops the intention of Deleuze, who in contrasting the ‘theatre of representation’ with the ‘theatre of repetition’ points to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as thinkers, who ‘invent an incredible equivalent of the theatre within philosophy, thereby founding simultaneously this theatre of the future and a new philosophy’. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 9. 2 Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992; London: HarperCollins, 1993). 3 Nachman Blumental, ‘Żydzi na aryjskich papierach (Ze słownictwa czasów okupacji)’, Przełom 20 (1949). 4 Małgorzata Melchior, Zagłada a tożsamość. Polscy Żydzi ocaleni ‘na aryjskich papierach’ (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 2004). See also: Marta Pietrzykowska, ‘Ciało pod powierzchnią i na powierzchni. O ukrywaniu się Żydów po aryjskiej stronie’, in Ucieleśnienia. Ciało w zwierciadle współczesnej humanistyki, edited by Anna Wieczorkiewicz and Joanna Bator (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 2007), pp. 102–21.

262

NOTES

  5 ‘[… ] the execution of the Holocaust was treated by the Nazi apparatus itself as a kind of obscene dirty secret, not publicly acknowledged [… ].’ Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 55.   6 James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 84.This does not mean, however, that metaphor has to be rejected, condemned. Metaphors do not only falsify reality and threaten the facts, they also facilitate access to them. To place Auschwitz beyond any kind of metaphors would mean excluding it from language, and that would mean its ultimate mystification.   7 Stanisław Lem, ‘Horst Aspernicus, Der Völkermord. I. Die Endlösung als Erlösung. II. Fremdkörper Tod (Getynga, 1980)’ in his Biblioteka XXI wieku. Golem XIV (Warsaw: Biblioteka Gazety Wyborczej, 2009), p. 95.   8 Lem, ‘Horst Aspernicus’, p. 91.   9 Lem, ‘Horst Aspernicus’, p. 95. 10 Lem, ‘Horst Aspernicus’, pp. 91–92. 11 Lem, ‘Horst Aspernicus’, p. 105. 12 Lem, ‘Horst Aspernicus’, p. 104. 13 Adam Lipszyc, Sprawiedliwość na końcu języka. Czytanie Waltera Benjamina (Kraków: Universitas, 2012), p. 196. 14 Lipszyc, Sprawiedliwość na końcu języka, pp. 198–99. 15 A specific variant of the repetition was the rejection by critics and the public of Krzysztof Penderecki’s thirty-minute opera Brygada śmierci (Death Brigade, 1963) inspired by Leon Weliczker’s journal. The premiere took place on 24 April 1964 at a concert organized by the music publishers Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne. ‘All this should remain in a museum and shown to those who want to learn about people’s lives in the camps.’ See zmc [pseud. of Zygmunt Mycielski], ‘Nieporozumienie’, Ruch Muzyczny 5 (1964), p. 9. 16 Leon Weliczker Wells, The Death Brigade (The Janowska Road) (New York: Holocaust Library, 1963, repr. 1978), p. 187. 17 Weliczker Wells, The Death Brigade, p. 190. 18 Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), p. 44. 19 Rachela Auerbach, ‘Uwagi wstępne’, in Leon Weliczker, Brygada śmierci (Sonderkommando 1005). Pamiętnik. (Łódź: Wydawnictwa Centralnej Żydowskiej Komisji Historycznej przy Centralnym Komitecie Żydów Polskich, 1946; reprint: Lublin: Ośrodek Brama Grodzka, 2012), p. 13. Auerbach’s introductory remarks do not appear in the English version. 20 Weliczker Wells, The Death Brigade, p. 173. 21 Robert Eaglestone, ‘Derrida and Legacies of the Holocaust’, in Derrida’s Legacies. Literature and Philosophy, edited by Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 66–75.

NOTES

263

22 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1980). 23 Quoted in Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 84. 24 Hayden White, ‘Figural Realism in Witness Literature’, parallax 10 (2004), no. 1, pp. 113–24. www.culturahistorica.es/hayden_white/figural_realism.pdf. 25 Anna Ziębińska, ‘Metafora w funkcji poznawczej – doświadczenie Holokaustu’, Studia Judaica 3 (2000), no. 1 (5), p. 53. 26 Henryk Grynberg, Żydowska wojna (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1965). English translation in: The Jewish War and The Victory, translated by Richard Lourie and Celina Wieniewska (Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 2001). 27 Tadeusz Peiper, Pierwsze trzy miesiące, in his Pisma, vol. 5 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1991). 28 Jarosław Fazan, Od metafory do urojenia. Próba patografii Tadeusza Peipera (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2010). 29 Peiper, Pierwsze trzy miesiące, pp. 212–13. 30 Peiper, Pierwsze trzy miesiące, p. 213. 31 Łucja Iwanczewska, Samoprezentacje. Sade i Witkacy (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2010), p. 32. 32 Iwanczewska, Samoprezentacje, p. 36. 33 Peiper, Pierwsze trzy miesiące, p. 216. 34 An example might be Kantor’s happening entitled Spotkanie z nosorożcem Dürera (Meeting with Dürer’s Rhinoceros) realized in Nuremberg in 1968, during which the artist, in a public place, in a café, before the eyes of guests and the gapers gathered outside the window, attacked his interlocutor (a rhinoceros man) with systematic gestures of violence, and cut open and tore his clothes. Meanwhile in the performance Studium o Hamlecie, realized in the Teatr 13 Rzędów (Theatre of 13 Rows) in Opole in 1964, Grotowski referred to the traumatic, and hence denied, suppressed image of Polish soldiers (from the Warsaw Uprising) humiliating and tormenting Jews. 35 The images of Auschwitz in Acropolis were interpreted by critics solely within a universal paradigm and subjected to heavy metaphorization; obvious references to the extermination of Jews were not the object of interest or analysis (the exposition of the biblical Jacob, suggestive visual and musical allusions). Similarly, with the Polish reception of The Dead Class, critics tried to metaphorize and universalize its images and motifs; even Tadeusz Różewicz in a discussion about The Dead Class underestimated the significance of Jewish motifs. See Konstanty Puzyna, Tadeusz Różewicz and Andrzej Wajda, ‘O Umarłej klasie’, Dialog 2 (1977), pp. 135–42. 36 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 15. 37 James E. Young polemicizes with the ethical demand to ban the use of metaphors in relation to the Holocaust, even if such metaphors (for example, comparing Jews to vermin) are partly responsible for it. First, it is impossible to introduce such a ban in a situation where every name used to describe the event (Holocaust, Szoah, Churban) is already itself a metaphor. Second, metaphors do not only falsify or allow the gaze to be ‘averted’, they also make

264

NOTES

it possible to grasp the ‘calculated error’, upon which every metaphorical comparison between two incomparable things is based. By this same token, metaphor makes possible a deep reworking of the resources of language, notions and symbols, to which we refer when speaking about the Holocaust. It enables us to undermine, make fun of and parody the inadequate models imposed upon this experience. Finally, seeking metaphors for the Holocaust within the confines of its reality turns metaphor into metonymy (in such discourse, Auschwitz is both metaphor and metonymy). See Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, pp. 83–98. 38 Eelco Runia, ‘Presence’, History and Theory 45 (2006), no. 1, pp. 1–29; quotation on p. 27. 39 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 15. 40 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory.

Chapter 4   1 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988).   2 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 6.   3 Jedlicki, ‘Dzieje doświadczone i dzieje zaświadczone’, p. 368.   4 Alphen, ‘Affective Reading’, pp. 151–70.   5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, see http://users.clas.ufl. edu/burt/freud%20fleiss%20letters/200711781-013.pdf.   6 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Painting as a Libidinal Setup (Genre: Improvised Speech)’, in The Lyotard Reader & Guide, edited by Keith Crome and James Williams (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 309.   7 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Libidinal Economy’, quoted here from: Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 26.   8 See Chapter 8, ‘A crushed audience’.   9 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, translated by Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 3. 10 Sigmund Freud, ‘Repression (1915)’, in his Complete Works, p. 2983. Available at: http://freudians.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Freud-Repression-19151. pdf. 11 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 94. 12 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, translated by Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003). 13 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the Symptom Paradigm’, Art History 24 (November 2001), no. 5, pp. 621–45.

NOTES

265

14 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, translated by John Goodman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 232. 15 Żywa dokumentacja – 20 lat rozwoju Teatru Cricot 2 [unauthorized record of meeting] (Kraków: Galeria ‘Krzysztofory’, 1976), tape II, p. 6. 16 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Powrót Odysa. Partytura sztuki Stanisława Wyspiańskiego Powrót Odysa Teatr Podziemny 1944 rok’, in Tadeusz Kantor, Metamorfozy. Teksty o latach 1934–1974. Pisma, vol. 1, edited by Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz (Wrocław–Kraków: Ossolineum, Cricoteka, 2005), p. 88. 17 Kantor, ‘Powrót Odysa’, p. 88. 18 Kantor, ‘Powrót Odysa’, p. 89. 19 Marta Stebnicka, ‘Co się z przyjaciółmi stało… ’, in Zostawiam światło, bo zaraz wrócę’ – Tadeusz Kantor we wspomnieniach swoich aktorów, edited by Jolanta Kunowska (Kraków: Cricoteka, 2005), p. 240. 20 Statement made during a meeting at the ‘Stodoła’ Student Club of Warsaw Polytechnic, 2 December 1983, quoted according to Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz, ‘Odys musi powrócić naprawdę… ’, in Tadeusz Kantor. ‘Powrót Odysa’. Podziemny Teatr Niezależny 1944 (Kraków: Cricoteka, 1994), p. 3. 21 Mieczysław Porębski, T. Kantor. Świadectwa. Rozmowy. Komentarze (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo MURATOR, 1997), p. 96. 22 Jan Józef Szczepański, quoted in: ‘Powrót Odysa’ i Podziemny Teatr Niezależny Tadeusza Kantora w latach 1942–1944, edited by Józef Chrobak, Ewa Kulka and Tomasz Tomaszewski, part 1 (Kraków: Cricoteka, 2004), p. 66. 23 Mieczysław Porębski, ‘Iluzja. Przypadek. Struktura (w związku z ostatnimi i dawniejszymi pracami Tadeusza Kantora)’, Przegląd Artystyczny 1 (1957), p. 23. 24 Juliusz Kydryński, ‘Krakowski teatr konspiracyjny’, Twórczość 3 (1946), p. 174. 25 Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, ‘Teatr w pokoju’, Dziennik Zachodni 311 (1945). 26 Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, ‘Krakowski teatr konspiracyjny’, Pamiętnik Teatralny 1–4 (1963), p. 148. 27 Piotr Piotrowski, Znaczenia modernizmu. W stronę historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku (Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2011), p. 27. 28 Franciszek Bunsch, ‘Pogmatwane początki’, in I Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej. Pięćdziesiąt lat później (Kraków: Starmach Gallery, 1998); reprinted in: Kunstgewerbeschule 1939–1943 i Podziemny Teatr Niezależny Tadeusza Kantora w latach 1942–1944, edited by Józef Chrobak, Katarzyna Ramut, Tomasz Tomaszewski and Marek Wilk (Kraków: Cricoteka, 2007), p. 13. Bunsch recalled that his brother, Ali Bunsch, made Odysseus’s helmet from a papier-mâché cast of a Polish helmet from 1939. 29 Kantor, ‘Powrót Odysa’, p. 90. 30 Inhabitants of Kraków who remembered the Occupation mention tunes of German military marches resounding through the streets. 31 Jan Józef Szczepański, Historyjki (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1990), p. 199.

266

NOTES

32 Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (1909), translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1955; reprinted London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 3–152. 33 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre IV. La relation d’objet, 1956–57, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 5–98. 34 Kantor, ‘Powrót Odysa’, p. 92. 35 ‘At press premieres, the audience is generally cool, restrained, critical. Applause is scanty and often an expression of casual politeness. On that evening there were no cold, indifferent, unconvinced spectators. Our theatre had not noted such an excited audience for a long time. After the performance, people fell into each other’s arms, kissed one another, threw flowers onto the stage. They were on the point of singing in chorus “Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła…” (Poland is not yet lost) [i.e. the national anthem]’. Bronisław Mamoń, ‘Dziady 1962’, Tygodnik Powszechny 25 (1962). 36 Maria Czanerle, ‘Szajna i morze’, in her Szajna (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1974), pp. 14–15. 37 Krzysztof Wolicki, ‘Dziadów tekst a inscenizacja’, Dialog 8 (1962), p. 149. 38 Conversation with Józef Szajna, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 15 May 1998, videotape no. RG50.030*0391, http://collections.ushmm.org/ search/ catalog/irn506412. 39 Conversation with Józef Szajna. 40 Conversation with Józef Szajna. 41 Mieczysław Jastrun, ‘Dwie współczesności Dziadów drezdeńskich’, 1945; quoted according to: Listy Teatru Polskiego 78 (1964), p. 46. 42 Wacław Kubacki, ‘Jeszcze raz Dziady’, Teatr 19 (1962). 43 Zygmunt Greń, ‘… Każdy z nas mógłby samotny… ’, in his Godzina przestrogi. Szkice z teatru 1955–1963, (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1964), p. 55. 44 Leonia Jabłonkówna, ‘Teatru nowohuckiego droga do nieba’, Teatr 21 (1962). 45 Mamoń, ‘Dziady 1962’. 46 Elżbieta Morawiec and Jerzy Madeyski, Józef Szajna (plastyka, teatr) (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1974), p. 22. 47 Majchrowski, Cela Konrada, p. 128. 48 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993). 49 Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and Memory of His Childhood, translated by Alan Tyson with an introduction by Brian Farrell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 117. 50 Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 118. 51 Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 157–58.

NOTES

267

Chapter 5 1 Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 39. 2 Jedlicki, ‘Dzieje doświadczone i dzieje zaświadczone’, p. 346. 3 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 4. 4 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2010), p. 2. 5 Tych, Długi cień Zagłady, p. 44. 6 See for example, Joanna Preizner, Kamienie na macewie. Holokaust w polskim kinie (Kraków and Budapest: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2012). 7 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000). 8 Butler, Frames of War, p. 50. 9 Tadeusz Różewicz, ‘“Birth Rate”: The Biography of a Play for the Theatre’, translated by Daniel C. Gerould, Performing Arts Journal 1 (1976), no. 2, pp. 67–75; quotation on p. 67. 10 Różewicz, ‘“Birth Rate”: The Biography of a Play’, p. 68. 11 Różewicz, ‘“Birth Rate”: The Biography of a Play’, p. 69. 12 Abject images of death and birth are interchangeable in Różewicz’s work, see: Helmut Kajzar, ‘Kara śmieszności, czyli tłumaczenie Śmiesznego staruszka’, in his Sztuki i eseje (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Centralnego Ośrodka Metodyki Upowszechniania Kultury, 1976), pp. 209–13. 13 Różewicz, ‘“Birth Rate”: The Biography of a Play’, p. 74. 14 Różewicz, ‘“Birth Rate”: The Biography of a Play’, p. 68. 15 Różewicz, ‘“Birth Rate”: The Biography of a Play’, p. 68.

Chapter 6 1 Column entitled ‘U pisarzy’, Dziennik Polski 43 (1945). 2 ‘U pisarzy’. 3 See the author’s introduction to the play in: Stefan Otwinowski, Wielkanoc (Kraków: Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, 1946), p. 16. 4 Czesław Miłosz, ‘Resztki i początki’, from the cycle ‘Przejażdżki literackie’, Dziennik Polski 43 (1945). 5 Czesław Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie. Korespondencja z pisarzami 1945–1950 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1998), p. 67. The quotation is from a letter to Jerzy Andrzejewski after Miłosz read the latter’s novel Popiół i diament (Ashes and Diamonds): ‘it is imporant to remember that literature has greater power than naked and defenceless, and chaotic reality, and that the truth about 1945 will be what literature has to say about it’.

268

NOTES

6 Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, p. 277. 7 Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, p. 278. 8 Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, pp. 230–31. 9 Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, p. 230. 10 Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, p. 71. 11 Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, p. 283. 12 Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, p. 283. 13 Stanisław Witold Balicki, ‘Odwiedziny teatralne’, Odrodzenie 9 (1946). 14 W.S., ‘W rocznicę wyzwolenia Stolicy otworzy podwoje Teatr Polski’, Robotnik 11 (1946). 15 W.S., ‘W rocznicę wyzwolenia Stolicy otworzy podwoje Teatr Polski’. 16 Jan Nepomucen Miller, ‘Juliusz Słowacki Lilla Weneda’, Robotnik 21 (1946). 17 Wanda Bacewiczówna, ‘Lilla Weneda’, Dziś i Jutro 5 (1946). 18 ‘Lilla Veneda, in the production directed by Osterwa, being not to the taste of the state authorities as “a tragedy about a nation defeated by foreign violence and condemned by the invader to annihilation”, prompted the ministry to pay closer attention to the repertoire and speed up activities aimed at influencing the plans of theatres, thereby enabling top-down control of what plays were performed’ (Marzena Kuraś, ‘Zniewalanie teatru. Polityka teatralna 1944–1949’, Pamiętnik Teatralny 3–4 (2008), p. 119). The authorities’ dissatisfaction, however, did not prevent 100 performances seen by almost 100,000 viewers, while critical reactions to the production also appeared in the Catholic press. 19 Janina Siwkowska, ‘O zakończeniu Lilli Wenedy’, Dziś i Jutro 15 (1946). 20 Kuźnica’s reviewer discussed how Słowacki’s tribal conceptions could be read mistakenly in the context of European and Polish experiences of the past decade. 21 A. S r., ‘Co myślisz starcze o ludach zachodnich? (z powodu wystawienia Lilli Wenedy)’, Kuźnica 5 (1946). 22 Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, p. 59. 23 Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, p. 159. 24 Quoted from Alina Madej, ‘Falstart Przedsiębiorstwa Państwowego Film Polski’, in Historia kina polskiego, edited by Tadeusz Lubelski and Konrad J. Zarębski (Warsaw: Fundacja Kino, 2007), p. 66. 25 Otwinowski, Wielkanoc, p. 7. 26 Leon Schiller, ‘Z tej drogi teatr nie zejdzie. Wywiad z dyrektorem teatrów łódzkich Leonem Schillerem’ [interview with Schiller conducted by Jan Sokolicz Wroczyński]’, in Rozmowy z Leonem Schillerem 1923–1953, edited by Jerzy Timoszewicz (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1996), p. 250; originally published in Głos Robotniczy 282 (1946). 27 Schiller, ‘Z tej drogi teatr nie zejdzie’, p. 250. 28 Jan Błoński, ‘Polak-katolik i katolik-Polak. Nakaz ewangeliczny, interes narodowy i solidarność obywatelska wobec zagłady getta warszawskiego’, in

NOTES

269

his Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008), pp. 49–74. 29 This was how Andrzej Łapicki remembered reactions to the performance. Important information relating to Schiller’s production of Easter may be found in: Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, ‘Między Zagładą a pogromem. Wielkanoc Stefana Otwinowskiego w reżyserii Leona Schillera’, Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 1 (2005), pp. 51–68. This article was the first in-depth study on the ‘forgotten’ production. In her introduction, Kuligowska questions both why Schiller should have devoted his first post-war spectacle to the subject of the Holocaust, and the reasons for it being susbequently marginalized in the director’s artistic biography. She bases her arguments on published sources and on conversations with people who saw the Łódź performance. 30 Błoński, Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto, p. 26. 31 Quoted in Kuligowska-Korzeniewska ‘Między Zagładą a pogromem’, p. 65. 32 Stanisława Mrozińska, ‘Z wywiadu ze Stefanem Otwinowskim, przeprowadzonego dn. 16 VII 1962 w Krakowie’, Zbiory Specjalne Instytutu Sztuki PAN w Warszawie; quoted in Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, ‘Między Zagładą a pogromem’, p. 66. 33 Renata Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata. Rozmowy z Czesławem Miłoszem. Komentarze (New York: Bicentennial Publishing Corporation, 1983), p. 119; quoted in Błoński, Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto, p. 15. 34 Stanisław Janicki, Aleksander Ford (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1967), p. 54. 35 Alina Madej, ‘Na tej ulicy nikt już nie mieszka’, in her Kino, władza, publiczność. Kinematografia polska w latach 1944–1949 (Bielsko-Biała: Wydawnictwo Prasa Beskidzka, 2002), p. 185. 36 Maria Dąbrowska, Dzienniki powojenne 1945–1965, vol. 1, edited and introduced by Tadeusz Drewnowski (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1997), p. 374. 37 Dąbrowska, Dzienniki powojenne 1945–1965, p. 374. 38 Dąbrowska, Dzienniki powojenne 1945–1965, p. 374. 39 On Dąbrowska’s often conflicted attitude to the Jews, see Hanna Kirchner: ‘After the war, despite the massive wave of information about the enormity of the Holocaust, contradictory judgments and emotional reactions with regard to Jews continued to exist, doubtless because of the disproportionate representation of Jews in the structures of the imposed regime. There is a need, still evident today, for rivalry in suffering, as if the Holocaust – that other, foreign death – somehow threatened the martyrology of Poles’. Hanna Kirchner, ‘Holocaust w dziennikach Zofii Nałkowskiej i Marii Dąbrowskiej’, in Literatura polska wobec Zagłady, edited by Alina Brodzka-Wald, Dorota Krawczyńska and Jacek Leociak (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; Instytut Naukowo-Badawczy, 2000), p. 113. 40 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Rozważania o kwestii żydowskiej’, translated [into Polish] by Jerzy Lisowski, Twórczość 10 (1956), p. 98. The quotation is translated here from the Polish translation, due to the inaccessibility of the English-language edition. The original French text (1945–46) was translated in 1948: Jean-Paul

270

NOTES

Sartre, Reflections on the Jewish Question, translated by George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948). 41 Sartre, ‘Rozważania o kwestii żydowskiej’, p. 98. 42 Przemysław Czapliński, ‘Prześladowcy, pomocnicy, świadkowie. Zagłada i polska literatura późnej nowoczesności’, in Zagłada. Współczesne problemy rozumienia i przedstawiania, edited by Przemysław Czapliński and Ewa Domańska (Poznań: Wydawnictwo ‘Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne’, 2009), pp. 155–82. 43 Czapliński, ‘Prześladowcy, pomocnicy, świadkowie’, p. 172. 44 Jedlicki, ‘Dzieje doświadczone i dzieje zaświadczone’, pp. 341–71. 45 Jan Błoński, ‘Myśleć przeciw własnemu komfortowi’, in his Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto, p. 44. 46 Henryk Grynberg, ‘Holocaust w literaturze polskiej’, in his Prawda nieartystyczna (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2002), p. 141. 47 Imre Kertész, ‘Język na wygnaniu (Mowa wygłoszona w berlińskim Renaissance-Theater, 2000)’, in Imre Kertész, Język na wygnaniu, translated [into Polish] by Elżbieta Sobolewska (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2004), p. 177. Translation here from the Polish edition. On a similar topic which repeats some of the same points, see ‘The Language of Exile’, translated by Ivan Sanders published in The Guardian on 19 October 2002: www. theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/19/featuresreviews.guardianreview12. 48 Kertész, ‘Język na wygnaniu’, p. 183. 49 Władysław Panas, ‘Zagłada od zagłady. Szoah w literaturze polskiej’, in his Pismo i rana. Szkice o problematyce żydowskiej w literaturze polskiej (Lublin: Wydawnictwo DABAR, 1996), pp. 1–24. 50 Jedlicki, ‘Dzieje doświadczone i dzieje zaświadczone’, p. 353. 51 Jedlicki, ‘Dzieje doświadczone i dzieje zaświadczone’, pp. 345–46. 52 Kertész, ‘Język na wygnaniu’, p. 185. 53 Antoni Kępiński, ‘Dulce et decorum’, in Antoni Kępiński, Refleksje oświęcimskie, edited with introduction by Zdzisław Jan Ryn (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005), pp. 117–30. 54 Kazimierz Wyka, Życie na niby. Pamiętnik po klęsce (Kraków and Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1984), p. 157. 55 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Fact-Image or Fetish-Image’, in Georges DidiHuberman, Images in Spite of All, translated by Shane B. Lillis (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 51–88. 56 The premiere of the Kraków production directed by Władysław Woźnik took place in the Stary Teatr (Old Theatre) on 4 December 1946. 57 Jerzy Andrzejewski, ‘Zagadnienie polskiego antysemityzmu’, Odrodzenie 27 and 28 (1946). 58 Tadeusz Breza, ‘Wielkanoc Stefana Otwinowskiego’, Odrodzenie 19 (1946). 59 Andrzejewski, ‘Zagadnienie polskiego antysemityzmu’. 60 Kazimierz Wyka, ‘Potęga ciemnoty potwierdzona’, Odrodzenie 43 (1945).

NOTES

271

61 Wyka, Życie na niby, p. 155. 62 Mieczysław Jastrun, ‘Potęga ciemnoty’, Odrodzenie 29 (1945). 63 Zbigniew Wolak, ‘Efektowny symbol literacki, ale fałszywy’, quoted in: Tomasz Szarota, ‘Karuzela na placu Krasińskich. Czy śmiały się tłumy wesołe? Spór o postawę warszawiaków wobec powstania w getcie’, in his Karuzela na placu Krasińskich. Studia i szkice z lat wojny i okupacji (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza RYTM, Fundacja ‘Historia i Kultura’, 2007), p. 159. 64 Jan Gross, ‘Raport Jana Karskiego o stosunkach polsko-żydowskich w czasie wojny’, Mówią Wieki 11 (1992); Zygmunt Klukowski, Dziennik z lat okupacji Zamojszczyzny (1939–1944) (Lublin: Lubelska Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1958). Emanuel Ringelblum, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej. Uwagi i spostrzeżenia (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1988). 65 Stanisław Dygat, ‘Wielkanoc’, Kuźnica 41 (1946). 66 Breza, ‘Wielkanoc Stefana Otwinowskiego’. 67 Władysław Szlengel, ‘Kartka z dziennika akcji’, Odrodzenie (1945). www. zchor.org/szlengel/szlengel.htm [translation by John Nowik and Ada Holtzman as ‘A Page from the Diary of the Actions’]. ‘Shameful’ is closer to the Polish ‘haniebna’ than the translators’ ‘accursed’ (translator’s note). This translation (as another available on the internet) omits the final reference to Westerplatte. 68 Breza, ‘Wielkanoc Stefana Otwinowskiego’. 69 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 2nd edn (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 102–05. 70 Edward Csató, ‘Wielkanoc Otwinowskiego’, in his Interpretacje. Recenzje teatralne 1945–1964, (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1979), p. 99. 71 Leon Bukowiecki, ‘Prawda nie ma granic’, Kuźnica 14 (1949). 72 The reviewer for the Jewish journal Opinia liked this approach: ‘The legendary-and-real Jew at the bottom of a deep well… The throwing in of the Jew at the beginning of the action and the Jew’s jump at the end: these overlapping edges to the framework of the author’s canvas are like a symbol, a successful compositional idea’. Sz. Sp., ‘Dwa oblicza jednego problemu’, Opinia 7 (1946). 73 Otwinowski, Wielkanoc, p. 91. 74 Stefan Otwinowski, ‘Wspólny los’, Odrodzenie 37 (1945). 75 Csató, ‘Wielkanoc Otwinowskiego’, p. 99. 76 Tadeusz Peiper, ‘Stefana Otwinowskiego Wielkanoc’, Odrodzenie 51–52 (1946). 77 Peiper, ‘Stefana Otwinowskiego Wielkanoc’. 78 Otwinowski, Wielkanoc, pp. 73–74. 79 Stefan Otwinowski, ‘O Leonie Schillerze (W dziesiątą rocznicę śmierci)’, Dialog 3 (1964), p. 102. 80 Quoted in: Stanisława Mrozińska, Trzy sezony teatralne Leona Schillera. Łódź 1946–1949 (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1971), p. 52. 81 Edward Csató, ‘O niektórych powojennych inscenizacjach Schillerowskich’, Pamiętnik Teatralny 3–4 (1955), p. 269.

272

NOTES

82 Interview with Dejmek: ‘Wokół Wielkanocy’, z Kazimierzem Dejmkiem rozmawiała Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, Dialog 7–8 (2003), p. 166. 83 Dygat, ‘Wielkanoc’. 84 Csató, ‘Wielkanoc Otwinowskiego’, p. 101. 85 ‘Stanisław Łaski has an attack of hysteria only because a Jewish woman is residing under the same roof as himself, at the very thought that he would have to keep her hidden’ (Dygat, ‘Wielkanoc’). 86 Rachela Auerbach, ‘O Wielkanocy Otwinowskiego’, Nasze Słowo 9 (1946). All Auerbach’s opinions about Easter are quoted from this text. 87 [Rachela Auerbach Dziennik]. ‘Materiały Racheli Auerbach, Dok. 10. 4.08.1941–26.07.1942, Rachela Auerbach, ‘Dziennik (fragmenty, brak zakończenia)’, in Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, t. 7, Spuścizny, edited by Katarzyna Person (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2012), p. 173. 88 Auerbach, Dziennik, p. 194. 89 Auerbach, Dziennik, p. 172. 90 Rachela Auerbach, ‘Urywki z dziennika przechowanego w tajnym archiwum pod ruinami ghetta’, Nasze Słowo 4 (1947). 91 Auerbach, ‘Urywki z dziennika przechowanego w tajnym archiwum’. 92 Auerbach, Dziennik, p. 190. 93 Auerbach, Dziennik, p. 173. 94 Rachela Auerbach, ‘Lament rzeczy martwych’, Przełom 2 (1946). 95 Auerbach, ‘Lament rzeczy martwych’. 96 Auerbach, ‘Lament rzeczy martwych’. 97 Auerbach, ‘Lament rzeczy martwych’. 98 Auerbach, ‘Lament rzeczy martwych’. 99 This is what Andrzejewski wrote in his author’s note to the first publication in the volume Night from 1945. See Jerzy Andrzejewski, Noc. Opowiadania (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1945), p. 7. 100 Artur Sandauer, O sytuacji pisarza polskiego pochodzenia żydowskiego w XX wieku (Rzecz, którą nie ja powinienem był napisać… ) (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1982), p. 41. 101 Jerzy Andrzejewski, Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto, foreword by Jan Gross, introduction and commentary by Oscar Swan (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), p. 12. 102 Andrzejewski, Holy Week, p. 14. 103 Andrzejewski, Holy Week, p. 14. 104 See Henryk Grynberg, ‘Życie jako dezintegracja’, in his Prawda nieartystyczna, pp. 7–41. 105 Paweł Dybel, Dialog i represja. Antynomie psychoanalizy Freuda (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 1995), pp. 37–38.

NOTES

273

106 Barbara Engelking, Zagłada i pamięć (Warsaw: Instytut Filizofii i Socjologii PAN, 2001); quoted in Alina Madej, ‘Aleksander Ford kończy realizację Ulicy Granicznej’, in Historia kina polskiego, p. 72. 107 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 189. 108 Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. 189. 109 Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. 189.

Chapter 7 1 ‘For the group [… ] Hamlet was an exceedingly important experience, without which it would not have been possible to prepare The Constant Prince, not to mention Apocalypsis cum figuris’, wrote Zbigniew Osiński in the first Polish monograph devoted to Jerzy Grotowski (1980). Zbigniew Osiński, Grotowski and his Laboratory, translated and abridged by Lillian Vallee and Robert Findlay (New York, NY: PAJ Publications, 1986), p. 78. 2 Ludwik Flaszen, ‘Hamlet in the Theatrical Laboratory’, in his Grotowski & Company, translated by Andrzej Wojtasik with Paul Allain, edited with an introduction by Paul Allain (London et al.: Routledge, 2010), p. 102. Flaszen’s text was written in 1964 for a foreign journal but was never sent: ‘it was feared that its publication could prove dangerous to the future of the institution whose existence stood at that time under a big question mark’. Zbigniew Osiński, ‘Komentarz do artykułu Ludwika Flaszena’, Notatnik Teatralny 4 (1992), p. 172. 3 Eugenio Barba, Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland. Followed by 26 Letters from Jerzy Grotowski (Aberystwyth: Black Mountain Press, 1999), p. 81. 4 Stanisław Lack, ‘Studium Szekspirowskiego Hamleta’, in his Wybór pism krytycznych, introduced, selected and edited by Wojciech Głowala (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1980), pp. 175–203; originally published: Nowe Słowo 6 (1905), pp.135–44; 7 (1905), pp. 162–68; 8 (1905), pp. 189–92. 5 Stanisław Wyspiański, Hamlet, edited by Maria Prussak, Seria: Biblioteka Narodowa I 225 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1976), p. 79. 6 Barba, Land of Ashes and Diamonds, p. 81. 7 ‘Żydek piskliwy i podskakujący’. Ludwik Flaszen, ‘Hamlet Study’, in his Grotowski & Company, p. 99. In describing the hero in such terms, Flaszen was referring to stereotypical popular notions of the Jew. 8 Jerzy Grotowski, ‘The Theatre’s New Testament: An Interview with Jerzy Grotowski by Eugenio Barba’, in Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, edited by Eugenio Barba, preface by Peter Brook (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 44. 9 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Louis S. Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 15–16. 10 Grotowski, ‘The Theatre’s New Testament’, p. 42.

274

NOTES

11 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, translated by Rodney Livingstone, foreword by Slavoj Žižek (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2005). 12 Alina Cała, Wizerunek Żyda w polskiej kulturze ludowej (Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2005); Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Rzeczy mgliste (Sejny: Fundacja Pogranicze, 2004); Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesądu (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2008). 13 Cała, Wizerunek Żyda, p. 175. 14 Cała, Wizerunek Żyda, pp. 32–35. 15 Krystyna Kersten, Polacy – Żydzi – Komunizm. Anatomia półprawd 1939– 1968 (Warsaw: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1992). 16 See Kersten, Polacy – Żydzi – Komunizm; Michael C. Steinlauf, Bondage of the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997). 17 Elżbieta Morawiec, Powidoki teatru. Świadomość teatralna w polskim teatrze powojennym (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1991), p. 210. 18 Morawiec, Powidoki teatru, p. 217. 19 Ludwik Flaszen gave this ironic name to his programme notes for the performance of Siakuntali. The name aptly conveys the character and function of other texts by Flaszen published on the occasions of Grotowski’s later productions. 20 Flaszen, ‘Hamlet Study’, p. 99. 21 Flaszen, ‘Hamlet in the Theatrical Laboratory’, p. 101. 22 Barba, Land of Ashes and Diamonds, pp. 82–83. 23 The second quotation is not included in the abridged English version, see Zbigniew Osiński, Grotowski i jego labotorium (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1980), pp. 122–23. 24 Józef Kelera, ‘Hamlet i inni’, Odra 5 (1964), p. 77; reprinted in Misterium zgrozy i urzeczenia. Przedstawienia Jerzego Grotowskiego i Teatru Laboratorium, edited by Janusz Degler and Grzegorz Ziółkowski (Wrocław: Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego, 2006), p. 175. 25 Zbigniew Raszewski, ‘Teatr 13 Rzędów’, Pamiętnik Teatralny 3 (1964); przedruk: Misterium zgrozy i urzeczenia, p. 235. 26 Zbigniew Raszewski, ‘Z listów do Jerzego Gota 1960–1975’, in Zbigniew Raszewski, Spacerek w labiryncie, selected and edited by Jerzy Timoszewicz (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Errata, 2007), p. 223. 27 Raszewski, ‘Teatr 13 Rzędów’, p. 235. 28 Situated in an area backing onto Gęsia Street, the camp was a branch of Majdanek. 29 A detailed reconstruction of the spectacle was made by Agnieszka Wójtowicz in her book Od ‘Orfeusza’ do ‘Studium o Hamlecie’. Teatr 13 Rzędów w Opolu (1959–1964) (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2004). 30 Zygmunt Klukowski, Diary of the Years of Occupation, 1939–44, translated from the Polish by George Klukowski, edited by Andrew Klukowski and Helen Klukowski May (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 102, 197, 220.

NOTES

275

31 Grotowski, ‘The Theatre’s New Testament’, p. 42. 32 Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust: The Complete Text of the Film, prelude by Simone de Beauvoir (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 31. 33 Flaszen, ‘Hamlet in the Theatrical Laboratory’, p. 103. 34 Flaszen, ‘Hamlet Study’, p. 100. 35 Jerzy Grotowski, ‘Skara Speech’, in his Towards a Poor Theatre (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 233. 36 Grotowski, ‘Skara Speech’, p. 234. 37 Grotowski, ‘Skara Speech’, p. 234. 38 Grotowski, ‘Skara Speech’, p. 234. 39 It first appeared in Italian in Eugenio Barba, Alla ricerca del teatro perduto. Una proposta dell’avanguardia pollaca (Padua: Marsylio Editori, 1965). The first English edition was Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (Holstebro: Odin Teatrets Forlag, 1968). A Polish translation appeared forty years later as Jerzy Grotowski, Ku teatrowi ubogiemu, edited by Eugenio Barba, preface by Peter Brook, translated by Grzegorz Ziółkowski, edited by Leszek Kolankiewicz (Wrocław: Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego, 2007), pp. 25–50. 40 Jerzy Grotowski, ‘Aktor ogołocony’, Teatr 17 (1965), pp. 8–10. 41 Barba, Land of Ashes and Diamonds, p. 131. 42 Grotowski, ‘The Theatre’s New Testament’, p. 31. 43 Grotowski, ‘The Theatre’s New Testament’, p. 44. 44 Flaszen, ‘Hamlet in the Theatrical Laboratory’, p. 105. 45 Paweł Dybel, ‘Urwane ścieżki, czyli z dziejów psychoanalizy w Polsce zaborów i międzywojnia’, in his Urwane ścieżki. Przybyszewski – Freud – Lacan (Kraków: Universitas, 2000), pp. 17–44. 46 Dybel, ‘Urwane ścieżki’, p. 44. 47 Gustaw Bychowski, Słowacki i jego dusza. Studium psychoanalityczne (Warsaw and Kraków: Wydawnictwo J. Mortkowicza, Towarzystwo Wydawnicze w Warszawie, 1930). 48 Helmut Kajzar, ‘O cudach teatru Grotowskiego’, Teatr 19 (1968), pp. 9–10. 49 Jan Kott, ‘Czemu mam tańczyć w tym tragicznym chórze… (o Grotowskim)’, in his Kamienny Potok. Eseje (London: Aneks, 1986), pp. 105–11. 50 Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychopathic Characters on Stage’, translated by Henry Aldon Bunker. First published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11 (1952), pp. 459–64: https://vtblogwatch.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/1124852.pdf. 51 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 8–11.

Chapter 8 1 Zbigniew Warpechowski, ‘To była naprawdę awangarda’, [Interview with Jan Trzupek], in Tadeusz Kantor. Niemożliwe/Impossible, edited by Jarosław Suchan (Kraków: Bunkier Sztuki, 2000), p. 140.

276

NOTES

2 When the production of Country House was revived by Kantor in BadenBaden in 1966, Günther Rühle wrote cryptically that ‘Witkiewicz’s heroes survived extermination’, which may be understood, or so it would seem, in two ways. First, that Witkiewicz’s work had not lost its relevance after the experiences of the war. Second, that the experience of the Holocaust had been inscribed into Kantor’s spectacle. See: Günther Rühle, ‘Kantor jest tu’, in Sztuka jest przestępstwem. Tadeusz Kantor a Niemcy i Szwajcaria, edited by Uta Schorlemer (Kraków and Nuremberg: Cricoteka; Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2007), p. 151. 3 Ludwik Flaszen, ‘Sabat w Krzysztoforach’, Echo Krakowa 50 (1961). 4 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Teatr: autonomiczny – informel – zerowy’, [Interview with Zbigniew Taranienko], Argumenty 14 (1973). 5 Kantor eagerly made use of the concepts of the subconscious and unconscious, claiming that ‘the discovery of the subconscious was the first human step towards freedom’. Quoted from Wiesław Borowski, Tadeusz Kantor (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1982), p. 162. 6 Kantor explained that in art, every experience should be located in the sphere of the impossible and the subconscious – in this way, art creates an autonomous circuit in which the artist gains the possibility of ‘total control over reality’. Tadeusz Kantor, ‘The Impossible Theatre’, in Tadeusz Kantor, A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944–1990, edited and translated by Michal Kobialka (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 87–105. 7 I take this concept from Dori Laub, ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), pp. 75–92. 8 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Litania sztuki informel’, in Kantor, Metamorfozy Teksty o latach 1934–1974, Pisma, vol. 1, edited by Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz (Wrocław and Kraków: Ossolineum; Cricoteka, 2005), p. 179. See also: Tadeusz Kantor, ‘The Informel Theatre Definitions’, in Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces, pp. 54–58. 9 In 1961, the year of the premiere of Country House, Kantor drafted his note ‘Czy możliwy jest powrót Orfeusza!!!!!!’ (Kantor, Metamorfozy, p. 181). 10 Zygmunt Bauman writes about adiaphorization (neutralization of moral evaluations and reflexes) in relation to experience of the Holocaust. See Zygmunt Bauman, Ciało i przemoc w obliczu ponowoczesności (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 1995), p. 46. 11 The happenings were recorded in Dietrich Mahlow’s film Der Kunstler und Seine Welt. Kantor ist da. 12 ‘Rozmowa z Tadeuszem Kantorem’, in Borowski, Tadeusz Kantor, p. 69. 13 The machine had its own history, a history of disappearance and reappearance, destruction and reconstruction, erasure and re-emergence, so characteristic of Kantor. Kantor described it as follows:

The work was done in 1963. The metal structure was made by locksmiths and paid for out of city funds, a sum of about 500 zlotys. The chairs were

NOTES

277

borrowed. In 1964, the metal structure was sent for scrap to the boiler room of the Krzysztofory Gallery, and the chairs were given back. The machine ceased to exist, but no one except its creator regarded it as a work of art. In 1982, he recreated this object. The old metal structure was re-used after the rust had been removed. The chairs were found in an old warehouse (Author’s original manuscript, Archiwum Cricoteki).

In 1967 a photograph of the machine appeared in the catalogue of the Prague Quadrennial of Theatre Design and Architecture. Following its reconstruction, it was shown in almost all Kantor exhibitions in the 1980s. I am grateful to Anna Halczak and Małgorzata Paluch-Cybulska of the Cricoteka Archive for this information.

14 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘The Zero Theatre’, in A Journey Through Other Spaces, pp. 68–69. 15 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun & The Crazy Locomotive: Three Plays (including The Water Hen), edited, translated and with an introduction by Daniel C. Gerould and C. S. Durer, foreword by Jan Kott (New York, NY: Applause Theater Book Publishers, 1989), p. 13. 16 Łucja Iwanczewska discusses this in her book on Witkiewicz’s dramas, referring to Lacan and Žižek: ‘the narrative construction of the phantasm assumes the exaggeratedness, grotesqueness and caricature-like quality of its images’. Łucja Iwanczewska, ‘Muszę się odrodzić’. Inne spotkania z dramatami Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2007), p. 20. 17 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Wariat i zakonnica (opis akcji)’, in Kantor, Metamorfozy, p. 238. 18 Kantor, ‘Wariat i zakonnica (opis akcji)’, p. 238. 19 ‘There remains a ridiculously small space for acting and living. Actors resist being pushed aside, try to keep their balance and cling to the surface as does a drowning man, wage a hopeless struggle, but fall off’ – thus Kantor describes the fundamental scene in The Madman and the Nun (Kantor, ‘The Zero Theatre’, p. 68). 20 Kantor often made use of the situation of human bodies crushed together; apart from the already mentioned examples, one could recall at least two others: the happening Pralnia (The Laundry, 1971) and the cupboard in the Cricot 2 production of Witkiewicz’s Nadobnisie i koczkodany (Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes) in 1973. 21 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Panoramiczny happening morski’, in Kantor, Metamorfozy, p. 367. 22 Antoine Etex, ‘Trzy nagrobki Géricaulta’, in Kantor, Metamorfozy, p. 365. 23 ‘It is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the phantasmal kernel of my being: when I venture too close, what occurs is what Lacan calls aphanisis (the self-obliteration) of the subject: the subject loses his/her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates’. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Books, 2006), p. 55. 24 Kantor, ‘Panoramiczny happening morski’, p. 366.

278

NOTES

25 Kantor uses the same metaphors of investigation, detective-like vigilance and importance of apparently insignificant details as Freud in his Introduction to Psychoanalysis to describe the behaviour of the psychoanalyst. 26 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Cambriolage’, in Kantor, Metamorfozy, p. 467. 27 Richard Eyre, ‘Inside the human corral’, the Scotsman, 21 August 1972, p. 5. 28 Lawrence L. Langer, ‘The Literature of Auschwitz’, in Literature of the Holocaust, introduction by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004), p. 171. 29 Calendars of the Occupation period of Kantor’s biography may be found in the following publications: ‘Powrót Odysa’ i Podziemny Teatr Niezależny Tadeusza Kantora w latach 1942–1944, edited by Józef Chrobak, Ewa Kulka and Tomasz Tomaszewski (Kraków: Ośrodek Dokumentacji Sztuki Tadeusza Kantora CRICOTEKA, 2004); Kunstgewerbeschule 1939–1943 i Podziemny Teatr Niezależny Tadeusza Kantora w latach 1942–1944, edited by Józef Chrobak, Katarzyna Ramut, Tomasz Tomaszewski and Marek Wilk (Kraków: Ośrodek Dokumentacji Sztuki Tadeusza Kantora CRIKOTEKA, 2007); and Teatr Pamięci Tadeusza Kantora. Wypisy z przeszłości, edited by Józef Chrobak and Marek Wilk (Kraków: Muzeum Regionalne w Dębicy, 2008). 30 Raul Radice, ‘La Gallinella d’Acqua: Teatro pollaco’, Corriere della Sera, 4 May 1969. 31 Radice, ‘La Gallinella d’Acqua: Teatro pollaco’. 32 Charles Lewsen, ‘Actors’ series of living sculptures’, The Times, 29 August 1972, p. 10. 33 Hanna Ptaszkowska, ‘Cricot 2 Tadeusza Kantora’, Współczesność 13 (1967). 34 Harold Hobson, ‘The funniest farce of the festival’, The Sunday Times, 3 September 1972, p. 37. 35 Lewsen, ‘Actor’s series of living sculptures’, p. 10. 36 Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun & The Crazy Locomotive: Three Plays (including The Water Hen), p. 49. 37 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Kurka Wodna. Partytura’, in Kantor, Metamorfozy, p. 421. 38 Kantor, ‘Kurka Wodna. Partytura’, p. 424. 39 Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, authorized translation by Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), p. 157. 40 Kantor, ‘Kurka Wodna. Partytura’, p. 407. 41 Elio Pagliarani, ‘Gallinella: grottesca commedia dell’arte’, Paese sera, 4 May 1969. 42 Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun & The Crazy Locomotive: Three Plays (including The Water Hen), p. 62. 43 Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun & The Crazy Locomotive: Three Plays (including The Water Hen), p. 62. 44 Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun & The Crazy Locomotive: Three Plays (including The Water Hen), p. 78. 45 Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun & The Crazy Locomotive: Three Plays (including The Water Hen), p. 78.

NOTES

279

46 Kantor, ‘Kurka Wodna. Partytura’, p. 427. 47 Laub, ‘An Event Without a Witness’, p. 80. 48 Robert Eaglestone, ‘Identification and the Genre of Testimony’, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora 21, nos. 1–2 (2002), pp. 117–40. 49 Laub, ‘An Event Without a Witness’, p. 76. 50 Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations’, in Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 48–83. 51 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Od ambalażu do idei podróży’, in Kantor, Metamorfozy, p. 318. 52 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, translated by Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts, foreword by David Carroll (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 53 Comparing primary and secondary repression, Lyotard refers to aesthetic categories. Primary repression is connected with the category of the sublime, that is with the disappearance and collapse of forms of representation, with the incidentality of the symptom (of terror, fear, feeling of threatening excess), which finds no justification within the framework of the realistic situation. Secondary repression (or denial), on the other hand, is associated with the idea of the beautiful and loss of the Forgotten, since, as Lyotard explains, only recorded memory can undergo erasure, while the unconscious affect does not shape memories. 54 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, pp. 3–5, 15–17. 55 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), p. 50. 56 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 54. 57 Andrzej Turowski, ‘W Dourdan’, in Tadeusz Kantor. Z archiwum Galerii Foksal, edited by Małgorzata Jurkiewicz, Joanna Mytkowska and Andrzej Przywara (Warsaw: Galeria Foksal, 1998), p. 49; quoted from Jeden (Warsaw: Galeria Foksal PSP, 1972). 58 Tadeusz Kantor, Notes to the production of Nadobnisie i koczkodany, unpublished manuscript in Cricoteka collection, Kraków. Catalogue no. I/000286, I/000203. 59 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Actions in Human Society (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 239–40. Italics are in the original. 60 Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, p. 250. 61 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York, NY: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), p. 58. 62 Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, p. 253. Italics are in the original. 63 Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, p. 54. 64 Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, p. 53. 65 Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, p. 31.

280

NOTES

66 Pierre Le Fort, ‘Tadeusz Kantor: un théâtre zero’, Quotidien de Paris, 11 April 1974. 67 Krystian Lupa, ‘Aktor w obnażających sytuacjach’, Grzegorz Niziołek interview with Krystian Lupa, Didaskalia 10 (1995), p. 10. 68 Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz, Kantor. Artysta końca wieku (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1997), p. 203. 69 Agamben portrays the cultural function of parody in this way. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, translated by Jeff Fort (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 41–42. 70 Agamben, Profanations, p. 42. 71 Kantor’s statement from an unauthenticated record of the meeting entitled Żywa dokumentacja – 20 lat rozwoju Teatru Cricot 2 (Kraków: Galeria Krzysztofory, 1976), notebook 2. 72 Lupa, ‘Aktor w obnażających sytuacjach’, p. 10. 73 Quoted from Krzysztof Miklaszewski, Spotkania z Tadeuszem Kantorem (Kraków: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1989), p. 26. 74 Alex Volkoff, ‘Kantor’s Negative Theatre’, The Teheran Journal, 21 August 1974. 75 André Bercoff, ‘Les Polonais de Cricot II’, L’Express, 15–21 April 1974. 76 Michael Billington, ‘Lovelies and Dowdies in Edinburgh’, The Guardian, 23 August 1973, p. 10. 77 Artur Sandauer, ‘Awangarda i awangarda’, Kultura 20 (1973). 78 Tadeusz Kantor, Notes to the production of Nadobnisie i koczkodany, unpublished manuscript in Cricoteka collection, Kraków. Catalogue no. I/000286, I/000203. 79 Marlis Haase, ‘Neue Ruhr Zeitung’, quoted in Le Théâtre en Pologne 4–5 (1975), p. 68. 80 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2009). 81 Kantor, Notes to the production of Nadobnisie i koczkodany, I/000286, I/000203. 82 Kantor, Notes to the production of Nadobnisie i koczkodany, I/000286, I/000203. 83 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Seven Plays, translated and edited by Daniel Gerould (New York, NY: Martin E. Segal Theatre Centre Publications, 2004), p. 317. 84 Tadeusz Kantor, ‘Ulisses. 1944’, in Kantor, Metamorfozy, p. 85. 85 Kantor, ‘Ulisses. 1944’, p. 85. 86 Haase, ‘Neue Ruhr Zeitung’. 87 John Barber, ‘Polish Accents Add to Play’s Surrealism’, Daily Telegraph, 23 August 1973, p. 13. 88 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), quoted in Derrida’s Legacies:

NOTES

281

Literature and Philosophy, edited by Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), p. 69. 89 Robert Eaglestone, ‘Derrida and Legacies of the Holocaust’, in Derrida’s Legacies, p. 68.

Chapter 9 1 See the artist’s notebooks held by Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy (Andrzej Wajda Archive) at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków. 2 The dismissal of Zbigniew Kubikowski was prompted by his publishing, also in Odra, Hanna Krall’s Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem (Shielding the Flame), a book about the Warsaw Ghetto. Krall writes about the circumstances surrounding the publication in an interview given to Katarzyna Janowska and Witold Bereś, ‘Hanny Krall dowiadywanie się świata’, Kontrapunkt – Magazyn Kulturalny Tygodnika Powszechnego 3, Tygodnik Powszechny 17 (1996). 3 Andrzej Wajda, Notebook, 4 October 1977 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 4 Marta Fik, Kultura polska po Jałcie. Kronika lat 1944–1981 (London: Polonia, 1989), p. 600. 5 See my two earlier chapters: ‘The theatre of gapers’ and ‘Who was not in Auschwitz?’, Chapters 1 and 2 respectively. 6 These events were recounted in detail by Joanna Preizner, Kamienie na macewie. Holokaust w polskim kinie (Kraków and Budapest: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2012), pp. 450–60. 7 Roman Zimand notes a typical scene: Paris, suppertime, Polish émigrés, discussion of antisemitism in Wajda’s films. One participant in the supper says: ‘‘‘Well, look how he represents that Jew – thin, pale, with hooked nose and sidelocks, it’s a caricature!” It was more than that one sentence, of course, and I did not realize at once that he was talking about The Birch Wood.’ Zimand, Piołun i popiół (Czy Polacy i Żydzi wzajem się nienawidzą?) (Warsaw: Biblioteka Kultury Niezależnej, 1987), p. 27. 8 Zimand, Piołun i popiół, p. 29. 9 Hanna Węgrzynek, ‘Tematyka Zagłady w podręcznikach szkolnych (1945– 2009)’, in Następstwa zagłady Żydów. Polska 1944–2010, edited by Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej; Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2011), p. 603. 10 Wajda, Notebook, 6 November 1977 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 11 Zimand, Piołun i popiół, p. 34. 12 Marta Fik, ‘Paradoks autentyzmu’, in her Przeciw, czyli za (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1983), p. 216. 13 Fik, ‘Paradoks autentyzmu’, p. 217. 14 Roman Szydłowski, ‘Przed sądem historii’, Życie Literackie 8 (1978).

282

NOTES

15 Jerzy Andrzejewski, ‘Święta w Krakowie’, Literatura 2 (1978). 16 Andrzejewski, ‘Święta w Krakowie’. 17 Andrzejewski, ‘Święta w Krakowie’ (that is, the published version). 18 Andrzejewski, ‘Święta w Krakowie’ (fragment from uncensored version, Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 19 Jan Kłossowicz, ‘Sytuacja’, in his Mgliste sezony (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1981), pp. 140–41. 20 Andrzej Wajda, Letter to Rafał Sabara, 11 June 1996 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 21 Fik, ‘Paradoks autentyzmu’, p. 219. 22 Fik, ‘Paradoks autentyzmu’, p. 218. 23 Wajda, Notebook, 27 October 1977 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 24 Krzysztof Kąkolewski, ‘Żołnierz w szarym garniturze’, Teatr 7 (1978), pp. 4–5. 25 Adam Zarzycki, ‘Rozmowy z katem’, Za Wolność i Lud 9 (1978). 26 Zuzanna Jastrzębska, ‘Rozmowy z katem’, Filipinka 6 (1978). 27 Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz, Teatr Śmierci Tadeusza Kantora (Chotomów: VERBA, 1990), p. 52. 28 Konstanty Puzyna, ‘My, umarli’, in his Półmrok. Felietony teatralne i szkice (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1982), p. 102. 29 Wajda, Notebook, 26 November 1977 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 30 Wajda, Notebook, 15 December 1977 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 31 Wajda, Notebook, 22 December 1977 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 32 Wajda, Notebook, 24 January 1978 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 33 Elżbieta Morawiec, ‘Pamięć i tożsamość’, in her Mitologie i przeceny (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1982), p. 192. 34 Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, pp. 64–80. 35 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1988, translations edited by Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (Sydney: Power Publications, 1992), pp. 43–44. 36 Kąkolewski, ‘Żołnierz w szarym garniturze’, pp. 4–5. 37 Zarzycki, ‘Rozmowy z katem’. 38 Zarzycki, ‘Rozmowy z katem’. 39 Małgorzata Szpakowska, ‘Dobre samopoczucie Jürgena Stroopa’, Dialog 4 (1978), p. 138. 40 Szpakowska, ‘Dobre samopoczucie Jürgena Stroopa’, p. 138. 41 Egzemplarz teatralny Rozmów z katem w adaptacji Zygmunta Hübnera [Director’s copy of Conversations with an Executioner in Zygmunt Hübner’s adaptation] (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy), henceforth: Hübner, ‘Egzemplarz teatralny’. 42 All quotations in this part of the text are from Hübner, ‘Egzemplarz teatralny’.

NOTES

283

43 Preizner, Kamienie na macewie, pp. 452–53. 44 Michał Borwicz, ‘Kazimierza Moczarskiego Rozmowy z katem’, Zeszyty Historyczne 53 (1980), p. 184. 45 Adam Michnik, ‘Z dziejów honoru i zgnilizny’, Gazeta Wyborcza 251 (2008). 46 Stefan Morawski, ‘Główny topos Andrzeja Wajdy’, Dialog 9 (1975), p. 135. 47 Wajdy. Filmy, edited by Adam Michnik (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1996), p. 10. 48 Tomasz Majewski, Dialektyczne feerie. Szkoła frankfurcka i kultura popularna (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Officyna, 2011), p. 356. 49 Ocena scenariusza Bohdana Czeszki Staż kandydacki, Łódź, 7 July 1953 [anonymous review of the screenplay, Filmoteka Narodowa Collections, S1034]. 50 Regina Dreyer, ‘Pokolenie’, Kwartalnik Filmowy 1 (1955), p. 36. 51 Bohdan Czeszko, ‘Projekt scenariusza do filmu Staż kandydacki na postawie powieści Pokolenie’, Kwartalnik Filmowy 11–12 (1953), pp. 62–99. 52 Bronisława Stolarska, ‘Pokoleniowe doświadczenie sacrum. O debiucie Andrzeja Wajdy’, in Filmowy świat Andrzeja Wajdy, edited by Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska and Piotr Sitarski (Kraków: Universitas, 2003), p. 244. 53 Scenopis filmu [Shooting script] held in Filmoteka Narodowa Collections. 54 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2009), pp. 101–37. 55 Adam Ważyk, Opinia. ‘Staż kandydacki’ – projekt scenariusza, 29 June 1953, maszynopis [typescript] (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 56 ‘Perhaps you’ll buy my brawn?’ The drunk Kostek addresses Stach with these words. Bohdan Czeszko, Pokolenie (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1953), p. 158. 57 Jerzy Toeplitz, Ocena scenariusza filmowego ‘Staż kandydacki’ na podstawie powieści ‘Pokolenie’ B. Czeszki, Warsaw, 8 July 1953, maszynopis [typescript] (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 58 Protokół z posiedzenia Komisji Ocen Filmów i Scenariuszy, 8 July 1953, maszynopis [typescript], p. 2 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 59 Protokół z posiedzenia, 8 July 1953, p. 5. 60 Protokół z posiedzenia, 8 July 1953, p. 7. 61 Protokół z posiedzenia Komisji Ocen Filmów i Scenariuszy, 18 November 1953, maszynopis [typescript], p. 2 (Archiwum Andrzeja Wajdy). 62 Protokół z posiedzenia, 18 November 1953, p. 2. 63 Protokół z posiedzenia, 18 November 1953, p. 5. 64 Protokół z posiedzenia, 18 November 1953, p. 3. 65 Protokół z posiedzenia, 18 November 1953, p. 3. 66 Protokół z posiedzenia, 18 November 1953, p. 2. 67 Protokół z posiedzenia, 18 November 1953, p. 3. 68 Kazimierz Kutz, ‘Tadźko’, Dialog 7 (1992), p. 99. 69 Kutz, ‘Tadźko’, p. 99.

284

NOTES

Chapter 10 1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Rodney Livingstone et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 23–24. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, in his Can One Live after Auschwitz? p. 16. 3 Adorno takes this concept from Franz Böhm. Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, p. 6. 4 Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, p. 6. 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-analysis II)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), pp. 147–56. 6 Yasco Horsman, Theaters of Justice. Judging, Staging and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 7 Susan Sontag, ‘Reflections on The Deputy’, in Storm over ‘The Deputy’, edited by Eric Bentley (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1964), pp. 117–23. 8 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?’ New York Herald Magazine, 23 February 1964, pp. 6–9. Reprinted in Bentley, Storm over ‘The Deputy’, pp. 85–94. 9 Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative, translated by Frank Collins (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001), pp. 73–91. 10 Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, p. 75. 11 Konstanty Puzyna, ‘My, umarli’, in his Półmrok. Felietony teatralne i szkice (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1982), p. 111. 12 These words are spoken by Jakub Kac (Katz), whose ghost appears at the wedding of Rachelka and Władek to one of his murderers, Zygmunt. Quotations are from the English adaptation: Tadeusz Słobodzianek, Our Class, in a version by Ryan Craig from a literal translation by Catherine Grosvenor (London: Oberon Books, 2009), p. 62. 13 Słobodzianek, Our Class, p. 98. 14 Słobodzianek, Our Class, p. 94. 15 Tadeusz Słobodzianek, ‘Fikcja, która szuka prawdy’, interview with Tadeusz Słobodzianek by Anna Bikont, Gazeta Wyborcza 221 (2010). 16 Cezary Michalski, ‘Moralitet bez morału’, www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/105565. html 17 Słobodzianek, Our Class, p. 48. 18 Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, ‘Nasza klasa na wspak’, dwutygodnik.com 42 (2010). 19 Karol Sauerland, ‘Lächeln über das Grauen. Polens Bühne: Das Massaker von Jedwabne im Theater’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 April 2011, p. 29.

NOTES

285

Translated into Polish as ‘Śmiech po okrucieństwie’, quoted in: www.e-teatr.pl/ pl/artykuly/116237.html 20 Słobodzianek, ‘Fikcja, która szuka prawdy’. 21 Tadeusz Słobodzianek, ‘Tadeusz Słobodzianek dla Gazety’, interview by Joanna Derkaczew, Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 232 (2010). 22 Sauerland, ‘Lächeln über das Grauen’, p. 29. 23 Marcin Król, ‘Akt skruchy i co dalej?’ editorial discussion between Marcin Król, Paweł Śpiewak and Marek Zaleski, Res Publica Nowa 7 (2001), p. 7. 24 Król, ‘Akt skruchy i co dalej?’, p. 10. 25 ‘For me, this is the end of the possibility for Poles to think about themselves in a certain way, connected with traditions, of which I won’t speak. For our thinking. Which says, namely, that we belong to some kind of collective defined as “Polishness” or “fatherland”. I wrote a lot about that fatherland and believed it was essential to us. No longer. That old “Polishness” and that “fatherland” have had their day’. Król, ‘Akt skruchy i co dalej?’, p. 6. 26 See, for example: Piotr Forecki, Od ‘Shoah’ do ‘Strachu’. Spory o polskożydowską przeszłość i pamięć w debatach publicznych (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2010), pp. 281–381; Przeciw antysemityzmowi 1936–2009, vol. 3, compiled and editied by Adam Michnik (Kraków: Universitas, 2010), pp. 570– 675; Dariusz Libionka, ‘Debata wokół Jedwabnego’, in Następstwa Zagłady Żydów. Polska 1944–2010, edited by Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Feliks Tych (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej; Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2011), pp. 733–73. 27 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, p. 108. 28 Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, ‘Obsesja niewinności’, Gazeta Wyborcza 11 (2001); reprinted in Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Rzeczy mgliste. Eseje i studia, introduction by Maria Janion (Sejny: Pogranicze, 2004), p. 17. 29 Arendt, ‘Eichmann Was Outrageously Stupid.’ 30 Hanna Świda-Ziemba, ‘Krótkowzroczność kulturalnych’, Gazeta Wyborcza 83 (2001). 31 Świda-Ziemba, ‘Krótkowzroczność kulturalnych’. 32 Imre Kertész, The Holocaust as Culture, translated by Thomas Cooper (London: Seagull Books, 2011), p. 70. 33 Imre Kertész, ‘Long Dark Shadow’, translated by Imre Goldstein, in Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman and Éva Forgács (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), p. 172. 34 Heath Ledger quoted in Sarah Lyall, ‘In Stetson or Wig, He’s Hard to Pin Down’, New York Times 11 June 2007, p. 24. 35 Krzysztof Warlikowski, (A)pollonia [based on texts by Aeschylus, J. M. Coetzee, Eurypides, Hanna Krall, Jonathan Littell and others, and adapted by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Piotr Gruszczyński and Jacek Poniedziałek] (Warsaw: Nowy Teatr, 2009), p. 69. 36 Warlikowski, (A)pollonia, p. 68.

286

NOTES

37 Warlikowski, (A)pollonia, p. 83. 38 Warlikowski, (A)pollonia, p. 70. 39 Warlikowski, (A)pollonia, p. 78. 40 Małgorzata Dziewulska, ‘Teatr potrzebuje upiorów’, [interview with] Paweł Soszyński, dwutygodnik.com 6 (2009). 41 Claire Nouvet, ‘The Inarticulate Affect: Lyotard and Psychoanalytic Testimony’, in Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, edited by Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak and Kent Still (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 106–22. 42 Siegfried Kracauer, The Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, with an introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 303. 43 In the sense of a crime that cannot be legally forgiven. Arendt writes about this with reference to the Gospel of Luke, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, introduction by Margaret Canovan, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 241. 44 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Tooth, the Palm’, translated by Anne Knapp and Michel Benamon, SubStance 5, no. 15 (1976), pp. 105–10. 45 Lyotard, ‘The Tooth, the Palm’, p. 109. 46 Warlikowski, (A)pollonia, p. 16. 47 Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, ‘Świat bez sędziego i bez sądu’, dwutygodnik.com 5 (2009). 48 Hanna Krall and Krzysztof Warlikowski, ‘Rzecz, która nie lubi być zabijana’ [interview with] Roman Pawłowski, Gazeta Wyborcza, 14 May 2009 (supplement Duży Format no. 112).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliographical note Various excerpts from this book appeared as separate fragments in Polish journals and collective volumes, which are listed below. All excerpts have been corrected, supplemented or considerably expanded for the current publication. ‘Wawel–Auschwitz–Akropolis. Niewczesny montaż’. Didaskalia 16, no. 91 (2009): 26–31. ‘Publiczność zgnieciona. Tadeusz Kantor i kres dramatu społecznego’. Dialog 54, no. 4 (2009): 16–27. ‘Zakaz. Fragment o Tadeuszu Kantorze’. In Antreprener. Księga ofiarowana profesorowi Janowi Michalikowi w 70. rocznicę urodzin, edited by Jacek Popiel, pp. 633–42. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2009. ‘Scena pierwotna’. Dialog 55, no. 1 (2010): 5–31. ‘Kantor i “żydzi”’. Didaskalia 17, no. 96 (2010): 119–24. ‘Resentyment i charyzma: figura papieża w polskim teatrze lat pięćdziesiątych i sześćdziesiątych’. Dialog 56, no. 2 (2011): 146–61; also in Trans-Polonia. Z Gdyni w świat. Jubileuszowa Sesja Naukowa w Teatrze Miejskim im. Witolda Gombrowicza w Gdyni, edited by Agnieszka Osiwalska, pp. 33–53. Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2011. ‘Kot-astrofa, czyli punkt bez dalszego ciągu’. Didaskalia 18, no. 102 (2011): 77–81. ‘Efekt kiczu. Dziedzictwo Grotowskiego i Swinarskiego w polskim teatrze’. Didaskalia 18, no. 105 (2011): 9–13; also in Zła pamięć. Przeciwhistoria w polskim teatrze i dramacie, edited by Monika Kwaśniewska and Grzegorz Niziołek, pp. 421–32. Wrocław: Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego, 2012. ‘Demontaż widzenia’. Performer, no. 2 (2011): http://www.grotowski.net/ performer/performer-2/demontaz-widzenia. ‘Przedstawienie teatralne jako świadectwo. Polski teatr wobec Zagłady’. In Pamięć Shoah. Kulturowe reprezentacje i praktyki upamiętnienia, edited by Tomasz Majewski and Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska, 2nd expanded edition, pp. 943–60. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Oficyna, 2011. ‘Hamlet Grotowskiego, czyli co jest w Polsce nie do pomyślenia’. In Poetyka kulturowa polskiego Szekspira, edited by Agata Adamiecka-Sitek and Dorota Buchwald, pp. 55–80. Warsaw: Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, 2011.

288

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The book is an expanded version of lectures delivered by the author in the cycle Nowy Teatr w Nowym Wspaniałym Świecie (The New Theatre in a Brave New World) organized by the Nowy Teatr during the 2009–2010 season.

Bibliography Adamczyk-Garbowska, Monika and Henryk Duda. ‘Terminy Holokaust, Zagłada i Szoa oraz ich konotacje leksykalnokulturowe w polszczyźnie potocznej i dyskursie naukowym.’ In Żydzi i judaizm we współczesnych badaniach polskich, vol. 3, edited by Krzysztof Pilarczyk. Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, Polskie Towarzystwo Studiów Żydowskich, 2003. Adorno, Theodor W. Can One Live after Auschwitz? edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Rodney Livingstone and others. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Adorno, Theodor W. In Search of Wagner, translated by Rodney Livingstone. London and New York, NY: Verso, 2005. Adorno, Theodor W. Minima moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books, 1974. After Representation? The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture, edited by R. Clifton Spargo and Robert M. Ehrenreich. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, translated by Daniel Roazen. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2000. Aleksiun, Natalia. Dokąd dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce (1944–1950). Warsaw: Wydawnictwo TRIO, 2002. Alphen, Ernst van. ‘Affective Reading: Loss of Self in Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood”’. In The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, edited by Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, pp. 151–70. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Alphen, Ernst van. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and its Realities, translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980. Ankersmit, Frank. Historical Representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Ankersmit, Frank. Narracja, reprezentacja, doświadczenie. Studia z teorii historiografii, edited by Ewa Domańska. Kraków: Universitas, 2004. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Arendt, Hannah. ‘“Eichmann Was Outrageously Stupid”: Interview with Joachim Fest (9 November 1964)’, translated by Andrew Brown. In Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2013. Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment, edited with an introduction by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. Arendt, Hannah and W.H. Auden. Drut kolczasty, selected, translated and introduced by Piotr Nowak. Warsaw: Biblioteka kwartalnika Kronos, 2011: http://kronos.org.pl/ksiazki/hannah-arendt-w-h-auden-drut-kolczasty/.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

289

Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Augé, Marc. Oblivion, translated by Marjolijn de Jager. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (eds). Acts of Memory; Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover, NH and London: Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, 1999. Barba, Eugenio. Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland. Followed by 26 Letters from Jerzy Grotowski. Aberystwyth: Black Mountain Press, 1999. Barnett, Victoria J. Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1999. Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, translated by James Benedict. London and New York, NY: Verso, 1993. Bauman, Zygmunt. Ciało i przemoc w obliczu ponowoczesności. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 1995. Bennington, Geoffrey. Lyotard: Writing the Event. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Bentley, Eric (ed.). Storm over ‘The Deputy’. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1964. Bettelheim, Bruno. Surviving and Other Essays. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1980. Bigsby, Christopher. Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Block, Gay and Malka Drucker. Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, with a prologue by Cynthia Ozick. New York: TV Books, 1992. Błoński, Jan. Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008. Błoński, Jan. ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’. Polin 2 (1987): 321–36. Bloom, Harold (ed.). Literature of the Holocaust. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004. Borowski, Wiesław. Tadeusz Kantor. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1982. Brodzka, Alina, Dorota Krawczyńska and Jacek Leociak (eds). Literatura polska wobec Zagłady. Warsaw: IBL PAN, 2000. Brook, Peter. Teatr jest tylko formą. O Jerzym Grotowskim, selected by Georges Banu and Grzegorz Ziółkowski, edited by Grzegorz Ziółkowski. Wrocław: Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego, 2007. Bułhak, Ewa (ed.). Palę Paryż i wyjeżdżam. Wywiady z Jerzym Grzegorzewskim. Izabelin: Świat Literacki, 2005. Buryła, Sławomir and Paweł Rodak (eds). Wojna. Doświadczenie i zapis. Kraków: Universitas, 2006. Buryła, Sławomir. ‘Zagłada Żydów w prozie socrealistycznej’. Midrasz 11 (2008): 26–30. Buryła, Sławomir and Alina Molisak (eds). Ślady obecności. Kraków: Universitas, 2010. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2010. Cała, Alina. Wizerunek Żyda w polskiej kulturze ludowej. Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2005.

290

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cała, Alina. Żyd – wróg odwieczny? Antysemityzm w Polsce i jego źródła. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nisza, 2012. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor, MN: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. Cheyette, Bryan and Laura Marcus (eds). Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Chrobak, Józef, Ewa Kulka and Tomasz Tomaszewski (eds). ‘Powrót Odysa’ i Podziemny Teatr Niezależny Tadeusza Kantora w latach 1942–1944. Kraków: Ośrodek Dokumentacji Sztuki Tadeusza Kantora Cricoteka, 2004. Chrobak, Józef et al. (eds). Kunstgewerbeschule 1939–1943 i Podziemny Teatr Niezależny Tadeusza Kantora w latach 1942–1944. Kraków: Muzeum Regionalne w Dębicy, 2007. Chrobak, Józef and Andrzej Wilk (eds). Teatr Pamięci Tadeusza Kantora. Wypisy z pamięci. Kraków: Muzeum Regionalne w Dębicy, 2008. Crary, Jonathan. Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999. Crome, Keith and James Williams (eds). The Lyotard Reader and Guide. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006. Czanerle, Maria. Szajna. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1974. Czapliński, Przemysław and Ewa Domańska (eds). Zagłada. Współczesne problemy rozumienia i przedstawiania. Poznań: Wydawnictwo ‘Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne’, 2009. Czerni, Krystyna. ‘Emballage “Hołdu Pruskiego” Tadeusza Kantora jako portret metaforyczny artysty.’ In Sztuka polska po 1945 roku. Materiały Sesji Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki, Warszawa, listopad 1984. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1987. Dąbrowska, Maria. Dzienniki powojenne 1945–1965, edited and introduced by Tadeusz Drewnowski. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1997. Dąbrowska, Maria and Jerzy Stempowski. Listy, edited and introduced by Andrzej Stanisław Kowalczyk. Biblioteka ‘Więzi’. Warsaw: Instytut Dokumentacji i Studiów nad Literaturą Polską; Oddział Muzeum Literatury im. Adama Mickiewicza, 2010. Degler, Janusz and Grzegorz Ziółkowski (eds). Misterium zgrozy i urzeczenia. Przedstawienia Jerzego Grotowskiego i Teatru Laboratorium. Wrocław: Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul R. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Shibboleth: For Paul Celan’, translated by Joshua Wilner. In Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, edited by Aris Fioretis, pp. 3–72. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Didi-Huberman, Georges. ‘Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the Symptom Paradigm’. Art History 24, no. 5 (2001): 621–45. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Images of Auschwitz, translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 2008.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

291

Didi-Huberman, Georges. ‘Uśmiech Gorgony’, translated by Piotr Olkusz. Dialog, no. 1 (2010): 80–89. Domańska, Ewa (ed.). Pamięć, etyka i historia. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2002. Domańska, Ewa. Historie niekonwencjonalne. Refleksja o przeszłości w nowej humanistyce. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2006. Domańska, Ewa (ed.). Teoria wiedzy o przeszłości na tle współczesnej humanistyki. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2010. Duniec, Krystyna and Joanna Krakowska. ‘Nie opłakali ich’. Didaskalia 18, no. 105 (2011): 2–9. Dworakowska, Maria. ‘Aleksander Bardini. Kronika życia i działalności (1913– 1995)’. Pamiętnik Teatralny 59, no. 3–4 (2010): 235–36. Dybel, Paweł. Urwane ścieżki. Przybyszewski – Freud – Lacan. Kraków: Universitas, 2000. Dzieduszycka, Małgorzata. Apocalypsis cum figuris. Opis spektaklu. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1974. Eaglestone, Robert. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004. Engelking, Barbara. Zagłada i pamięć. Doświadczenie Holocaustu i jego konsekwencje opisane na podstawie relacji autobiograficznych. Warsaw: IFiS PAN, 1994. Engelking, Barbara and Dariusz Libionk. Żydzi w powstańczej Warszawie. Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2009. Fazan, Jarosław. Od metafory do urojenia. Próba patografii Tadeusza Peipera. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2010. Fazan, Katarzyna. Projekty intymnego teatru śmierci. Wyspiański, Leśmian, Kantor. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2009. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1992. Figielski, Łukasz and Bartosz Michalak. Prywatna historia kina polskiego. Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2005. Fik, Marta. Kultura polska po Jałcie. Kronika lat 1944–1981. London: Polonia, 1989. Flaszen, Ludwik. Grotowski & Company, translated by Andrzej Wojtasik with Paul Allain, edited with an introduction by Paul Allain. London et al.: Routledge, 2010. Flaszen, Ludwik. ‘Hamlet w laboratorium teatralnym’. Notatnik Teatralny, no. 4 (1992): 167–71. Flaszen, Ludwik. Teatr skazany na magię. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1983. Forecki, Piotr. Od ‘Shoah’ do ‘Strachu’. Spory o polsko-żydowską przeszłość i pamięć w debatach publicznych. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy’. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (1909), translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, pp. 3–152. London: Hogarth Press, 1955; reprinted London: Vintage Books, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, translated by Alix Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1949.

292

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, translated and edited by James Strachey. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954. Freud, Sigmund. Leonardo da Vinci and Memory of His Childhood, translated by Alan Tyson with an introduction by Brian Farrell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’. http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/ freud%20fleiss%20letters/200711781-013.pdf. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Psychopathic Characters on Stage’, translated by Henry Aldon Bunker. First published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11 (1952): 459–64. https://vtblogwatch.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/1124852.pdf. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-analysis II)’. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume 12, pp. 147–56. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Repression (1915)’. In Sigmund Freud, Complete Works, pp. 2975–88. http://freudians.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FreudRepression-19151.pdf. Friedländer, Saul. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2007. Friedländer, Saul. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1984. Friedländer, Saul (ed.). Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Frisse, Ulrich. ‘The “Bystanders’ Perspective”. The Toronto Daily Star and Its Coverage of the Persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust in Canada, 1933– 1945’. Yad Vashem Studies 39, no. 1 (2011): 213–43. Glendinning, Simon and Robert Eaglestone (eds). Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. Głowiński, Michał. Kręgi obcości. Opowieść autobiograficzna. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010. Głowiński, Michał. Magdalenka z razowego chleba. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001. Głowiński, Michał. ‘Wielkie zderzenie’. Teksty Drugie, no. 2 (2002): 199–211. Głowiński, Michał (ed.). Stosowność i forma. Jak opowiadać o Zagładzie. Kraków: Universitas, 2005. Głowiński, Michał. Realia, dyskursy, portrety. Studia i szkice. Kraków: Universitas, 2011. Graver, Lawrence. An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1995. Greenblatt, Stephen. ‘Towards a Poetics of Culture’. In The New Historicism, edited by H. Aram Veeser, pp. 1–14. London: Routledge, 1988. Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989. Gross, Andrew S. and Susanne Rohr. Comedy, Avantgarde, Scandal: Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010. Gross, Jan Tomasz. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Gross, Jan Tomasz. Upiorna dekada. Eseje o stereotypach na temat Żydów, Polaków, Niemców, komunistów i kolaboracji 1939–1948. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2007.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

293

Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre, edited by Eugenio Barba, preface by Peter Brook. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. Grynberg, Henryk. Prawda nieartystyczna. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2002. Grynberg, Henryk. Życie osobiste. Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza ‘Pokolenie’, 1989. Hartman, Geoffrey H. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Heidelberger-Leonard, Irène. ‘Auschwitz jako lekcja do odrobienia dla pisarzy’, translated by Sława Lisiecka. Literatura na Świecie, no. 9–10 (2005): 329–42. Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933– 1945. New York, NY: Aaron Asher Books; London: HarperCollins, 1992. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hirsch, Marianne. ‘The Generation of Postmemory’. Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–28. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Horsman, Yasco. Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Huener, Jonathan. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003. Isser, Edward R. Stages of Annihilation: Theatrical Representations of the Holocaust. London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997. Iwanczewska, Łucja. ‘Bity na śmierć. Etyka niezłomności Grotowskiego i Lacana’. Didaskalia 17, no. 100 (2010): 63–65. Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław. Dzienniki 1956–1963. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2010. Janicki, Jerzy. Aleksander Ford. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1967. Janion, Maria. Hero, Conspiracy, and Death: The Jewish Lectures, translated by Alex Shannon. Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang, 2014. Jedlicki, Jerzy. ‘Dzieje doświadczone i dzieje zaświadczone’. In Dzieło literackie jako źródło historyczne, edited by Zofia Stefanowska and Janusz Sławiński, pp. 344–71. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1978. Judt, Tony. ‘From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’. In Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, pp. 803–31. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Jurkiewicz, Małgorzata, Joanna Mytkowska and Andrzej Przywara (eds). Tadeusz Kantor. Z archiwum Galerii Foksal. Warsaw: Galeria Foksal, 1998. Kantor, Tadeusz. Pisma, edited by Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz, 3 vols. Wrocław: Ossolineum; Kraków: Cricoteka, 2005. Kersten, Krystyna. Polacy – Żydzi – Komunizm. Anatomia półprawd 1939–1968. Warsaw: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1992. Kertész, Imre. Język na wygnaniu, translated by Elżbieta Sobolewska. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2004. Kępiński, Antoni. Refleksje oświęcimskie, selected and introduced by Zdzisław Jan Ryn. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005. Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945, with an introduction by R.E. Money-Kyrle. The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 1. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1975.

294

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Korzeniewski, Bohdan. O wolność dla pioruna … w teatrze. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1973. Kosiewski, Piotr (ed.). Sztuka jako rozmowa o przeszłości. Warsaw: Fundacja Batorego, 2009. Kott, Jan. Kamienny potok. Eseje. London: Aneks, 1986. Krasiński, Edward. ‘Z archiwum: Powrót Bardiniego’. Dialog 33, no. 5 (1988): 147–49. Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993. Kristeva, Julia. Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative, translated by Frank Collins. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Objection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982. Krupa, Bartłomiej. ‘O nieobecności Zagłady, czyli czytanie Rozmów z katem Kazimierza Moczarskiego’. Zagłada Żydów, no. 7 (2011): 279–302. Kucia, Marek. Auschwitz jako fakt społeczny. Historia, współczesność i świadomość społeczna KL Auschwitz w Polsce. Kraków: Universitas, 2005. Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, Anna. ‘Między Zagładą a pogromem. Wielkanoc Stefana Otwinowskiego w reżyserii Leona Schillera’. Kwartalnik Historii Żydów, no. 1 (2005): 51–68. Kuraś, Marzena. ‘Zniewalanie teatru. Polityka teatralna 1944–49’. Pamiętnik Teatralny, no. 3–4 (2008): 103–38. Kwaśniewska, Monika and Grzegorz Niziołek (eds). Zła pamięć. Przeciw-historia w polskim teatrze i dramacie. Wrocław: Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego, 2012. Kwiatkowska, Paulina. ‘Od słowa do obrazu, czyli o powstaniu filmu Pasażerka Andrzeja Munka. Muzykalia III. Materiały konferencyjne 3 [no date]. http://www.demusica.pl/cmsimple/images/file/kwiatkowska1_ muzykalia_3.pdf Lacan, Jacques. The Psychoses 1955–1956, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russel Grigg. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1993. LaCapra, Dominick. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Laks, Szymon. Gry oświęcimskie. Oświęcim: Państwowe Muzeum OświęcimBrzezinka, 1998. Lang, Berel. Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Lang, Berel. ‘The Representation of Evil: Ethical Content as Literary Form’. In Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, pp. 117–61. Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 1990. Langer, Lawrence L. Admitting the Holocaust. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995. Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991. Langer, Lawrence L. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1975.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

295

Langer, Lawrence L. Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982. Lanzmann, Claude. The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir, translated by Frank Wynne. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Laub, Dori. ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival’. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, pp. 75–92. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. Lejeune, Philippe. ‘Comment Anne Frank a réécrit le Journal d’Anne Frank’. In Philippe Lejeune, Les Bouillons de soi, pp. 331–65. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Lem, Stanisław. ‘Horst Aspernicus, Der Völkermord. I. Die Endlösung als Erlösung. II. Fremdkörper Tod (Getynga, 1980)’. In Stanisław Lem, Biblioteka XXI wieku. Golem XIV, pp. 87–120. Warsaw: Biblioteka Gazety Wyborczej, 2009. Leociak, Jacek. Tekst wobec Zagłady. O relacjach z getta warszawskiego. Monografie Fundacji na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Leopoldinum Fundacji dla Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1997. Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, translated by Stuart Woolf. New York, NY: Touchstone, 1996. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York, NY: Summit Books, 1998. Leys, Ruth. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Liebman, Stuart. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lyotard, Jean-François. Heidegger and ‘the jews’, translated by Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts, foreword by David Carroll. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘Jewish Oedipus’. Genre 10, no. 3 (1977): 395–411. Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘The Tooth, the Palm.’ SubStance 5, no. 15 (1976): 105–10. Łapiński, Zdzisław. Jak współżyć z socrealizmem. Szkice nie na temat. London: Polonia, 1988. Łebkowska, Anna. Empatia. O literackich narracjach przełomu XX i XXI wieku. Kraków: Universitas, 2008. Madej, Alina. Kino, władza, publiczność. Kinematografia polska w latach 1944– 1949. Bielsko-Biała: Prasa Beskidzka, 2002. Magnone, Lena and Anna Mach (eds). Wokół Freuda i Lacana. Interpretacje psychoanalityczne. Warsaw: Difin, 2009. Majewski, Tomasz and Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska (eds). Pamięć Shoah. Kulturowe reprezentacje i praktyki upamiętnienia. Łódź: Officyna, 2011. Maidenbaum, Aryeh (ed.). Jung and the Shadow of Antisemitism: Collected Essays. York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hayes, 2003. Majchrowski, Zbigniew. Cela Konrada. Powracając do Mickiewicza. Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 1998. Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History. Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1987. Mazur, Mariusz. O człowieku tendencyjnym … Obraz nowego człowieka w propagandzie komunistycznej w okresie Polski Ludowej i PRL 1944–1956. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2009.

296

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McBroom, William H. Explaining the Holocaust: The Behavior of Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders. Washington, DC: Academica Press, 2002. Melchior, Małgorzata. Zagłada a tożsamość. Polscy Żydzi ocaleni na ‘aryjskich’ papierach. Warsaw: IFiS PAN, 2004. Michnik, Adam (ed.). Przeciw antysemityzmowi 1936–2009. 3 vols. Kraków: Universitas, 2010. Miklaszewski, Krzysztof. Spotkania z Tadeuszem Kantorem. Kraków: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1989. Milchman, Alan and Alan Rosenberg. Eksperymenty w myśleniu o Holocauście. Auschwitz, nowoczesność i filozofia, translated by Leszek Krowicki and Jakub Szacki. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2003. Miłosz, Czesław. Zaraz po wojnie. Korespondencja z pisarzami 1945–1950. Kraków: Znak, 1998. Morawiec, Elżbieta and Jerzy Madeyski. Józef Szajna (plastyka, teatr). Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1974. Morawski, Stefan. ‘Główny topos Andrzeja Wajdy’. Dialog, no. 9 (1975): 135–39. Możejko, Edward. Realizm socjalistyczny. Teoria. Rozwój. Upadek. Kraków: Universitas, 2001. Mrozińska, Stanisława. Trzy sezony teatralne Leona Schillera. Łódź 1946–1949. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1971. Nosowski, Zbigniew (ed.). Dzieci soboru zadają pytania. Biblioteka ‘Więzi’ vol. 89. Warsaw: Więź, 1996. Nouvet, Claire, Zrinka Stahuljak and Kent Still (eds). Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Nurczyńska-Fidelska, Ewelina and Piotr Sitarski (eds). Filmowy świat Andrzeja Wajdy. Kraków: Universitas, 2003. Oliner, Samuel P. and Pearl M. Oliner. Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1988. Opalski, Józef. Rozmowy o Konradzie Swinarskim i ‘Hamlecie’. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1988. Osiński, Zbigniew. Grotowski and his Laboratory, translated and abridged by Lillian Vallee and Robert Findlay. New York, NY: PAJ Publications, 1986. Osiński, Zbigniew. Teatr Dionizosa. Romantyzm w polskim teatrze współczesnym. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1972. Osiński, Zbigniew. ‘Zapiski ze spotkań 1962–1963’. Notatnik Teatralny, no. 20–21 (2000): 110–25. Osterloff, Barbara. ‘Aleksander Bardini w teatrze dramatycznym. Sylwetka reżysera’. Pamiętnik Teatralny 59, no. 3–4 (2010): 235–36. Ozick, Cynthia. Quarrel and Quandary: Essays. New York, NY: Vintage International, 2000. Panas, Władysław. Pismo i rana. Szkice o problematyce żydowskiej w literaturze polskiej. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Dabar, 1996. Patraka, Vivian M. Spectacular Suffering. Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. Phayer, Michael. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. Pietrzykowska, Marta. ‘Ciało pod powierzchnią i na powierzchni. O ukrywaniu się Żydów po aryjskiej stronie’. In Ucieleśnienia. Ciało w zwierciadle współczesnej

BIBLIOGRAPHY

297

humanistyki, edited by Anna Wieczorkiewicz and Joanna Bator. Warsaw: IFiS PAN, 2007. Piotrowski, Piotr. Sztuka według polityki. Od ‘Melancholii’ do ‘Pasji’. Kraków: Universitas, 2007. Piotrowski, Piotr. Znaczenia modernizmu. W stronę historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku. Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2011. Pleśniarowicz, Krzysztof. Kantor. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1997. Pleśniarowicz, Krzysztof. Teatr Śmierci Tadeusza Kantora. Chotomów: Verba, 1990. Plunka, Gene A. Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Polacy i Żydzi w upiórnej dekadzie. Dyskusja [Discussion of Jan Tomasz Gross’s `Upiórna dekada’ with Włodzimierz Borodziej et al.], Więź no. 7 (1999): 4–22. Preizner, Joanna. Kamienie na macewie. Holokaust w polskim kinie. Kraków and Budapest: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2012. Quignard, Pascal. The Hatred of Music, translated by Matthew Amos and Frederick Rönnbäck. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Raszewski, Zbigniew. Spacerek w labiryncie. Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Errata, 2007. Rokem, Freddie. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980. Rosińska, Zofia (ed.). Pamięć w filozofii XX wieku. Warsaw: Uniwersytet Warszawski, Wydział Filozofii i Socjologii, 2006. Sandauer, Artur. O sytuacji pisarza polskiego pochodzenia żydowskiego w XX wieku. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1982. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Reflections on the Jewish Question, translated by George J. Becker. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1948. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Rozważania o kwestii żydowskiej, translated by Jerzy Lisowski. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1957. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schiller, Leon. Teatr Ogromny, edited by Zbigniew Raszewski. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1961. Schorlemer, Uta (ed.). Sztuka jest przestępstwem. Tadeusz Kantor a Niemcy i Szwajcaria. Kraków: Cricoteka; Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2007. Schumacher, Claude (ed.). Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance. Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Segal, Raz. ‘Becoming Bystanders: Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, and the Politics of Narcissism in Subcarpathian Rus’. Holocaust Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 129–56. Shallcross, Bożena. The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011. Skloot, Robert. The Darkness We Carry: The Drama of the Holocaust. Madison, WN and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

298

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Steele, Michael R. Christianity, Tragedy, and Holocaust Literature. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1995. Steinlauf, Michael C. Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Stępnik, Krzysztof and Magdalena Piechota (eds). Socrealizm. Fabuły – komunikaty – ikony. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii CurieSkłodowskiej, 2006. Suchan, Jarosław (ed.). Tadeusz Kantor. Niemożliwe/Impossible. Kraków: Bunkier Sztuki, 2000. Sugiera, Małgorzata. Między tradycją a awangardą. Teatr Jerzego Grzegorzewskiego. Kraków: Universitas, 1993. Swinarski, Konrad. Wierność wobec zmienności, edited by Marta Fik and Jacek Sieradzki. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1988. Szarota, Tomasz. Karuzela na placu Krasińskich. Studia i szkice z lat wojny i okupacji. Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm, 2007. Śpiewak, Paweł. Żydokomuna. Warsaw: Czerwone i Czarne, 2012. Taranienko, Zbigniew. Przestrzenie Szajny. Rzeszów Podkarpacki Instytut Książki i Marketingu, 2009. Temkine, Raymonde. Grotowski. Lausanne: La Cité, 1968. Tilmans, Karin, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (eds). Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Timoszewicz, Jerzy (ed.). Rozmowy z Leonem Schillerem. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1996. Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna. Legendy krwi. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2008. Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna. Rzeczy mgliste. Sejny: Fundacja Pogranicze, 2004. Tomasik, Wojciech. Inżynieria dusz. Literatura realizmu socjalistycznego w planie ‘propagandy monumentalnej’. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Leopoldinum, 1999. Trachtenberg, Joshua. The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983. Tych, Feliks. Długi cień Zagłady. Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 1999. Tych, Feliks and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska (eds). Następstwa Zagłady Żydów. Polska 1944–2010. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej; Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2011. Ubertowska, Aleksandra. Świadectwo – trauma – głos. Literackie reprezentacje Holokaustu. Kraków: Universitas, 2007. Wajda. Filmy, introduced by Adam Michnik. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1996. Walaszek, Joanna. Konrad Swinarski i jego krakowskie inscenizacje. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1991. Wat, Aleksander. Świat na haku i pod kluczem, edited by Krzysztof Rutkowski. London: Polonia, 1985. Weinrich, Harald. Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, translated by Steven Rendall. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

299

White, Hayden. Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Witt, Mary Ann Frese. The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Wójtowicz, Agnieszka. Od ‘Orfeusza’ do ‘Studium o Hamlecie’. Teatr 13 Rzędów w Opolu (1959–1964). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2004. Wolska, Magdalena Saryusz (ed.). Pamięć zbiorowa i kulturowa. Współczesna perspektywa niemiecka. Kraków: Universitas, 2009. Wróbel, Józef. Tematy Żydowskie w prozie polskiej 1939–1987. Kraków: Universitas, 1991. Wróbel, Marta. ‘Ostatni etap Wandy Jakubowskiej jako pierwszy etap polskiego kina ideologicznego’. Kwartalnik Filmowy, no. 43 (2003): 6–21. Wyka, Kazimierz. Życie na niby. Pamiętnik po klęsce. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1984. Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Young, James E. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988. Zeidler-Janiszewska, Anna. Między melancholią a żałobą. Estetyka wobec przemian w kulturze współczesnej. Warsaw: Instytut Kultury, 1996. Ziębińska, Anna. ‘Metafora w funkcji poznawczej - doświadczenie Holokaustu’. Studia Judaica 3, no. 1 (5) (2000): 43–62. Zimand, Roman. Piołun i popiół (Czy Polacy i Żydzi wzajem się nienawidzą?). Warsaw: Biblioteka Kultury Niezależnej, 1987. Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Camp Comedy’. Sight and Sound 10, no. 4 (2000): 26–29. Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Melancholy and the Act’. Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 657–81.

INDEX OF NAMES

Adorno, Theodor 147, 181, 225–32, 239, 241, 245 Aeschylus 43 Albrecht, Stanisław 222 Anders, Władysław 148 Andersen, Hans Christian 176–7 Andrzejewski, Jerzy 26–7, 111, 124–5, 133, 137–8, 199, 201–3, 213–14 An-sky, Semyon (Rapoport, Shloyme Zaynvl) 101–2 Appelfeld, Aharon 53 Arendt, Hannah 39, 46, 99, 208, 230–2, 238, 242, 244, 253 Aristotle 51 Assmann, Jan 232 Auerbach, Rachela 67, 133–7 Axer, Erwin 31 Bakhtin, Mikhail 155 Balzac, Honoré de 74 Baranowska, Agnieszka 33 Barba, Eugenio 146, 151–2, 157 Barber, John 194 Bauman, Zygmunt 1–2, 6, 243 Ben Gurion, David 231 Benjamin, Walter 66 Bergman, Ingmar 48 Bergson, Henri 166 Bettelheim, Bruno 178 Bikont, Anna 234, 237 Błoński, Jan 28–9, 36–9, 116, 120, 124, 138, 237 Bomba, Abraham 155 Borowski, Tadeusz 26, 198, 208 Borowski, Wiesław 89, 163 Borwicz, Michał M. 115, 131, 214 Boy-Żeleński, Tadeusz 214 Brandys, Kazimierz 2, 17, 22–3, 72, 81, 99, 124, 198

Brecht, Bertolt 22 Breza, Tadeusz 124–6 Brzozowski, Tadeusz 90, 92 Bukowiecki, Leon 127 Bunsch, Franciszek 90–1 Butler, Judith 99–102, 104, 220 Bychowski, Gustaw 158 Cała, Alina 147–8 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 72, 141 Camus, Albert 58 Carlson, Marvin 3 Cezanne, Paul 203 Charcot, Jean-Martin 85 Chekhov, Anton 83, 223 Chopin, Fryderyk 128, 246 Chrobak, Józef 169 Chyra, Andrzej 245–6 Cieślak, Ryszard 157 Conan Doyle, Arthur 135 Conrad, Joseph 104 Csató, Edward 127, 130, 132, 134 Cybulski, Zbigniew 224 Czanerle, Maria 93 Czapliński, Przemysław 120 Czeszko, Bohdan 198, 216–17, 221–3 Dąbrowska, Maria 118–19, 121–2 da Vinci, Leonardo 97–8 Dejmek, Kazimierz 93, 132 Delbo, Charlotte 60 Deleuze, Gilles 52, 56, 73 de Man, Paul 58 Demirski, Paweł 46–8 Derkaczew, Joanna 238 Derrida, Jacques 68, 195 Diamant, Szymon 29 Didi-Huberman, Georges 53, 85–6, 96, 123–4

INDEX OF NAMES

Dostoevsky, Fyodor 183, 197 Draenger, Gusta 115 Dreyer, Regina 218–19 Dybel, Paweł 139, 158 Dygat, Stanisław 124–5, 133 Dziewulska, Małgorzata 250 Eaglestone, Robert 60, 177, 195 Eichmann, Adolf 40, 135, 230–1, 242, 244 Eliot, T.S. 83 Evans, Dylan 52 Eyre, Richard 168 Fazan, Jarosław 70–1 Fejgin, Anatol 205 Felman, Shoshana 57–9 Fik, Marta 200–1, 203 Flaszen, Ludwik 150–2, 155–7, 161 Ford, Aleksander 26, 29, 117–18, 121, 125, 127, 136, 138–40, 175, 222 Frank, Anne 54, 227–9 Freud, Sigmund 4–5, 31, 33, 51, 78–9, 83, 85, 92, 97–8, 157–9, 165–6, 174, 194, 227–8, 230–1 Friedlander, Saul 99 Gawkowski, Henryk 36 Gawroński, Włodzimierz 187 Gebirtig, Mordechaj 115, 175 Géricault, Théodore 166–7 Głowiński, Michał 27, 39–40 Godard, Jean-Luc 112 Goodrich, Frances 31, 54 Got, Jerzy 152 Goya, Francisco 135 Greenblatt, Stephen 76–9, 89, 159–60 Greń, Zygmunt 96 Gross, Jan Tomasz 45–6, 234–5, 240–1, 243 Grotowski, Jerzy 4–5, 7, 35, 44, 56, 73–4, 86, 101, 141–3, 146–60, 196–7, 221 Grot-Rowecki, Stefan 213 Grynberg, Henryk 29–30, 63, 69, 121, 139, 237 Grzegorzewski, Jerzy 83

301

Haase, Marlis 192, 194 Hackett, Albert 31, 54 Hartman, Geoffrey H. 40, 42–4, 47, 99 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 100 Herling-Grudziński, Gustaw 208 Hertz, Aleksander 29 Hilberg, Raul 3, 22–3, 26–7, 29, 39, 41, 47, 63–4, 69, 72, 199 Himmler, Heinrich 153 Hirsch, Marianne 47–9 Hitler, Adolf 109–10, 117 Hochhuth, Rolf 31, 231 Horsman, Yasco 230–1 Hübner, Zygmunt 197–8, 202–4, 207–9, 211, 213–14 Jabłonkówna, Leonia 7, 30, 96 Jabłoński, Marian 155 Janicki, Stanisław 118 Jarocki, Jerzy 32–3 Jastrun, Mieczysław 96, 124 Jedlicki, Jerzy 2, 34, 36, 78, 99, 120, 122 Judt, Tony 44 Kajzar, Helmut 158 Kąkolewski, Krzysztof 203, 210 Kamińska, Ida 29 Kant, Immanuel 39, 231 Kantor, Tadeusz 4–5, 30, 44, 56–7, 72– 4, 82, 86–93, 102–3, 112, 117–18, 132, 137, 161–75, 177–84, 187–8, 192–5, 197, 203–5, 232, 242 Karpowski 223 Karski, Jan 125 Kelera, Józef 151 Kępiński, Antoni 122 Kertész, Imre 7, 121–2, 244, 245 Klein, Melanie 100 Kłossowicz, Jan 33, 203 Klukowski, Zygmunt 125, 153 Konwicki, Tadeusz 223 Korczak, Janusz 126 Kościuszko, Tadeusz 128 Kossak-Szczucka, Zofia 116, 121, 127 Kott, Jan 30, 159 Kracauer, Siegfried 216, 251 Krall, Hanna 199, 253 Krasowski, Jerzy 93

302

INDEX OF NAMES

Krauss, Rosalind 97–8 Kristeva, Julia 146 Król, Marcin 239 Krońska, Irena 111 Kroński, Tadeusz 111–12, 115 Kruczkowski, Leon 29 Kubacki, Wacław 96 Kubikowski, Zbigniew 197 Kunina, Ewa 132 Kutz, Kazimierz 224 Kwaśniewski, Aleksander 241 Kwiatkowski, Tadeusz 87–8, 90–1 Kydryński, Juliusz 90 Lacan, Jacques 45, 53, 92, 97, 165–6 LaCapra, Dominick 42, 60, 126–7 Lang, Berel 53, 55 Langer, Lawrence L. 25–6, 74, 168 Lanzmann, Claude 36–7, 42, 53, 123, 154–5, 243 Laub, Dori 57–8, 170, 176–7 Laudański, Zygmunt 234 Ledger, Heath 245 Lem, Stanisław 4, 6, 28, 64–6 Levi, Primo 68 Lipecka, Zofia 48 Lipszyc, Adam 66 Littell, Jonathan 252 Łomnicki, Tadeusz 224 Louis Philippe I 74 Luther, Martin 130 Lyotard, Jean-François 5, 79–82, 87, 97–8, 100–1, 179–81, 209, 251–2 Machczyńska, Apolonia 245–6, 248, 253 Majchrowski, Zbigniew 96 Mamoń, Bronisław 96 Marlowe, Christopher 141 Marrus, Michael R. 24 Marx, Karl 79 Megged, Aharon 31 Melchior, Małgorzata 63–4 Michalski, Cezary 234–6 Michnik, Adam 214–16 Mickiewicz, Adam 33, 55, 93–4, 96, 102 Miklaszewski, Krzysztof 187 Miłosz, Czesław 26, 37, 110–12, 114–15, 117, 125, 220, 239

Moczarski, Kazimierz 196–9, 201–5, 207–15, 224 Morawiec, Elżbieta 96, 150 Morawski, Stefan 215–16 Mussolini, Benito 110 Mykietyn, Paweł 246 Nałkowska, Zofia 26 Napoleon 74 Nietzsche, Friedrich 48 Nolan, Christopher 245 Orski, Mieczysław 197 Osiński, Zbigniew 151, 158 Ossowski, Stanisław 124 Osterwa, Juliusz 112–14 Otwinowski, Stefan 5, 26, 32, 109–10, 115–17, 124–8, 130–5, 137–8, 140 Ozick, Cynthia 23, 68, 252 Panas, Władysław 29, 122 Patraka, Vivian M. 52, 54 Peiper, Tadeusz 63, 69–73, 131, 140 Pfister, Oskar 98 Piekarz, Adam 238 Piotrowski, Piotr 90 Pius XII (Pope) 232 Plato 50 Pleśniarowicz, Krzysztof 187, 204 Poe, Edgar Allan 135, 211 Porębski, Mieczysław 89–91 Przybyszewska, Stanisława 196 Ptaszkowska, Hanna 171 Raszewski, Zbigniew 152–3, 155–6 Reder, Rudolf 115 Ringelblum, Emanuel 125, 135, 154 Rolke, Tadeusz 94 Rorty, Richard 140 Rosenfeld, Alvin 68 Rossellini, Roberto 112 Różański, Józef 205 Różewicz, Tadeusz 27, 103–5 Runia, Eelco 74 Sandauer, Artur 137, 192 Sapija, Andrzej 164 Sartre, Jean-Paul 119, 138, 225, 229

INDEX OF NAMES

Scarry, Elaine 26, 59, 79 Schiller, Leon 5, 31, 116–17, 122, 125–8, 131–4, 137–8 Schumacher, Claude 50–1, 61 Sergio, Leone 246 Seweryn, Andrzej 48 Shakespeare, William 43, 83, 142–3, 159 Sito, Jerzy S. 32 Skuszanka, Krystyna 93 Słobodzianek, Tadeusz 5, 232–8, 242, 245, 250, 251 Słowacki, Juliusz 72, 112, 115, 141, 158 Sontag, Susan 99, 231 Sophocles 101 Spielberg, Steven 43 Spišák, Ondrej 5 Stangret, Maria 177 Starski, Allan 198, 203, 213, 223 Starski, Ludwik 222 Stolarska, Bronisława 219 Stravinsky, Igor 181 Stroop, Jürgen 197–8, 200–5, 207, 209–15 Stryjkowski, Julian 28 Strzembosz, Tomasz 235, 237, 241 Strzępka, Monika 46–8 Świda-Ziemba, Hanna 243 Swinarski, Konrad 32–3, 86, 93 Szajna, Józef 44, 57, 86, 93–6, 112 Szarota, Tomasz 125 Szczepański, Jan Józef 92 Szlengel, Władysław 126 Szmaglewska, Seweryna 26 Szpakowska, Małgorzata 210–11 Szpilman, Władysław 111–12 Szydłowski, Roman 30, 201 Szyfman, Arnold 113 Tchaikowsky, André (Czajkowski, Andrzej) 250 Teoplitz, Jerzy 222 Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna 147, 236, 242, 252–3 Turner, Victor 5, 182–3, 192, 194, 240 Tych, Feliks 24–5, 42, 100

303

Ubertowska, Aleksandra 57 Valles, Alissa 234 van Alphen, Ernst 59–61, 78 van Gennep, Arnold 182 Wagner, Richard 147 Wajda, Andrzej 5, 27, 101–2, 196–205, 207–17, 219–24 Warlikowski, Krzysztof 5, 42, 86, 102, 245–6, 248, 250–3 Warpechowski, Zbigniew 161 Wasersztajn, Samuel (Szmul) 48, 237 Ważyk, Adam 28, 221–2 Weber, Samuel 51 Weiss, Peter 31, 208–9 Weliczker, Leon 66–7, 135 White, Hayden 68 Wiechecki, Stefan (pseud. Wiech) 214 Więckiewicz, Robert 234 Wilkomirski, Binjamin 42 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy 30, 161, 164–5, 168, 170, 172, 175, 177, 180, 193 Wodziński, Paweł 238 Wojdowski, Bogdan 30, 198 Wróblewski, Andrzej 30 Wyka, Kazimierz 123–4 Wyrzykowska Antonina 237 Wyspiański, Stanisław 86, 91, 102, 110, 128, 130, 141–3, 151, 196–7, 242, 250 Young, James E. 64, 208–9 Zachwatowicz, Krystyna 102 Zaczyk, Stanisław 204 Zahorska, Stefania 134–5 Zimand, Roman 38, 200 Zimerer, Ludwik 196 Žižek, Slavoj 6, 63, 193 Żmijewski, Artur 27, 187 Żuławski, Andrzej 213–14

GENERAL INDEX

Acropolis (Akropolis, dir. Grotowski, 1962) 44, 56, 73, 75, 141, 263 Annihilation Machine 164–6 antisemitism 27, 30, 41, 44, 54, 116, 118–20, 124–5, 130–1, 133, 149, 175, 198, 200, 214–15, 227, 239–40, 242–5, 257, 281 Apocalypsis cum figuris (dir. Grotowski, 1969) 7, 141, 149, 196–7, 256, 273 (A)pollonia (dir. Warlikowski, 2009) 245–53 Auschwitz concentration camp 25, 31, 45, 50–1, 60, 68, 93–7, 140, 154, 187, 209, 218, 244, 262–4, 278 Border Street (Ulica Graniczna, film, dir. Ford, 1948) 117–19, 121, 125, 127, 131, 136, 138–40, 175 bystanders 3–5, 22–6, 35, 41–8, 63, 82, 99, 198, 245, 252 catharsis 5, 37, 103, 134, 137, 197, 204, 230–1, 238–9, 242, 244, 252 Catholicism 26, 35, 77, 114, 116, 122, 126, 128, 130, 133, 141, 158, 200, 213, 268 censorship 44, 75, 162, 198–9, 207, 214 Cloakroom (Szatnia Tadeusza Kantora, film, dir. Miklaszewski and Gawroński, 1973) 187–8, 191 communism (in Poland) 35, 43, 122, 137, 149, 158, 200, 213–15, 237 Constant Prince, The (Książę Niezłomny, dir. Grotowski, 1965) 141, 146, 151, 157–8 Conversations with an Executioner (Rozmowy z katem, dir. Wajda, 1977) 196–211, 214–16, 224

Country House (W małym dworku, dir. Kantor, 1961) 161, 170, 276 Cricot 2 Theatre (Kraków) 30, 168–9, 173, 176, 178, 180, 186, 191, 277 Częstochowa 155 Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes (Nadobnisie i koczkodany, also translated as Lovelies and Dowdies, dir. Kantor, 1973) 181–95, 277 Dead Class, The (Umarła klasa, dir. Kantor, 1975) 44, 56, 73, 75, 82, 102, 112, 117–18, 132, 162, 187, 197, 203–5, 232, 262 defensive mechanisms 1, 4, 31, 35, 56–7, 80–2, 86, 99, 117, 122, 143, 148, 153, 159, 222, 225–8, 230, 238, 241–3, 245, 252 denial 3–5, 25, 27, 30–1, 34–8, 42–3, 48, 51, 57, 73, 77, 79, 86, 91, 96–7, 123, 143, 147, 149–51, 156, 163, 168, 180, 187, 194–5, 205, 209, 224, 226, 229–30, 242–3, 258, 279 disavowal. See denial Dybbuk, The (dir. Wajda, 1988) 101–2 Easter (Wielkanoc, dir. Schiller, 1946) 5, 26, 32, 109, 115–17, 122, 125–7, 130–8, 140, 269 Easter (Wielkanoc, dir. Woźnik, 1946) 124, 270 Edinburgh Festival 168, 181, 186 Eichmann trial (1961) 40, 135, 208, 230–1, 242, 244 Enlightenment 1, 127, 147, 227 Foksal Gallery (Warsaw) 167 Forefathers’ Eve (various productions) 32–3, 47, 93, 95, 97, 102, 149

GENERAL INDEX

forgetfulness 5, 23, 30, 48–9, 51–2, 57–8, 73, 101, 103, 162, 168, 187, 193, 202 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–1965) 31, 208 Generation (Pokolenie, film, dir. Wajda, 1955) 198, 216–24 Hamlet Study (Studium o Hamlecie, dir. Grotowski, 1964), 44, 141, 145–58 Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC) 47–8, 52, 94 Home Army (Armia Krajowa) 44, 152, 197–8, 203–4, 210, 213 Impossible Theatre (Kantor) 82, 162, 167–8, 276 Janowska concentration camp 66, 115, 262 Jedwabne pogrom (1941) 46, 48, 56, 232–5, 238–45, 251, 253 Kielce pogrom (1946) 45, 124, 126 Kraków 32, 70, 87, 89–90, 93, 101, 109, 111, 115, 124, 155, 170–3, 196, 204 Kraków ghetto 169, 173, 175 Kraków pogrom (1945) 124 Krzysztofory Gallery (Kraków) 87, 164, 187, 277 Laundry, The (Pralnia, happening, Kantor, 1971) 181, 187, 277 libido 5–6, 23, 34–5, 42, 46, 51, 54, 61, 71, 77–83, 85–6, 89, 97–8, 100–1, 103, 143, 146, 149–53, 155–6, 197, 199, 207, 212, 215, 221, 224, 252, 264 Lilla Veneda (Lilla Weneda, dir. Osterwa, 1946) 112–15 liminality 182–3, 192–3 Łódź 29, 32, 116, 124, 126, 130, 133, 269 Lovelies and Dowdies. See Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes L’viv. See Lwów Lwów 66, 115

305

Madman and the Nun, The (Wariat i Zakonnica, dir. Kantor, 1963) 164–6 Majdanek concentration camp 119, 274 memory, collective 22, 30, 36, 38, 43–4, 46, 57, 83, 103, 109, 125, 180, 233 memory, public 43–4, 47 mourning 5, 34, 47, 50, 53, 74, 77, 80, 99–105, 122, 132–3, 229, 238, 250, 252 Multipart (Kantor, exhibition, 1970) 167–8 nationalism, Polish 29, 35, 111, 131, 149, 152–4, 200, 212–14, 240 Nowa Huta 93, 95–6 Nowy Teatr (New Theatre, Warsaw) 249, 288 Nuremberg 163, 263 Nuremberg race laws (1935) 114 obscenity 37, 47, 63, 65, 70, 91, 192, 194, 222, 242 Opole 141, 145–6, 151–2, 157, 263 Our Class (Nasza klasa, dir. Spišák, 2010) 5, 232–9, 242, 245, 250 Play for a Child, A (Sztuka dla dziecka, dir. Strzępka and Demirski, 2009) 46–8 Polish–Jewish relations 125–6, 128, 135, 138, 211–14, 222, 236 Poor Theatre (Grotowski) 73–4, 160 postmemory 42, 44–5, 47–9 Przytyk pogrom (1936) 175 psychoanalysis 52–3, 139, 157–8, 162, 165, 187 Radom 175 Raft of the ‘Medusa’, The (Tratwa ‘Meduzy’, happening, Kantor, 1967) 166–7, 181 Reformation 127, 130 repetition 3–5, 22, 31, 51–7, 60–4, 69–70, 73, 75–81, 87, 105, 166, 171, 192, 228–30, 238, 259–62 repression 50, 68, 90, 174, 179–80, 279

306

GENERAL INDEX

ressentiment 4, 30, 33, 35, 37, 150, 153–4, 205, 226, 237 Return of Odysseus, The (Powrót Odysa, dir. Kantor, 1944) 86–92, 97, 161, 181, 194 ritual 5, 33–4, 38, 47–8, 52, 55, 77–8, 102–3, 105, 111, 132–3, 142, 147–8, 154, 173–4, 182–3, 193, 235, 246–8, 250–2, 256 Romanticism 1, 33–5, 43, 55–6, 72, 94, 96, 102–3, 109–16, 123, 158, 166, 239, 242 Rzeszów pogrom (1945) 124 Scena Prapremier InVitro (Lublin) 45 Shoah (film, dir. Lanzmann, 1985) 154–5 socialist realism 34–5 spectators 38, 43, 45, 50–1, 56, 62–4, 66, 69, 72–8, 81–3, 85–93, 102–3, 113–14, 117–18, 127, 132, 134, 139–40, 146–7, 150–2, 157–60, 163, 165, 168, 170–1, 173–4, 177, 180–1, 183, 187–8, 192–4, 200–1, 203–4, 210–12, 220, 222–3, 225–53 Stary Teatr (Old Theatre, Kraków) 32, 33, 101–2, 196, 270 Street Scene (Brecht) 22, 88 stupidity (in Kant and Arendt) 4–5, 39, 46–7, 99–100, 143, 242–3, 263 Tarnow ghetto 169 Teatr 13 Rzędów (Theatre of 13 Rows, Opole) 141 Teatr Dramatyczny (Warsaw) 54 Teatr im. Cypriana Kamila Norwida (Cyprian Norwid Theatre, Jelena Góra) 46 Teatr Ludowy (People’s Theatre, Nowa Huta) 93, 95 Teatr na Woli (Wola District Theatre, Warsaw) 232 Teatr Polski (Polish Theatre, Warsaw) 113 Teatr Powszechny (Universal Theatre, Łódź) 29 Teatr Powszechny (Universal Theatre, Warsaw) 196–7, 206, 209–10

Teatr Studio w Warszawie (Warsaw Studio Theatre) 83 Teatr Wojska Polskiego (Polish Army Theatre, Łódź) 32, 116, 126, 130 Teatr Współczesny (Contemporary Theatre, Warsaw) 31 Teatr Żydowski (Jewish Theatre, Warsaw) 29–30 Tehran 193 Theatre of Death (Kantor) 73–4, 137, 162 Town Counts Dog’s Noses, The (Miasto liczy psie nosy, dir. Grzegorzewski, 1991) 83 trauma 4–5, 23–5, 30–1, 33, 38–9, 42, 45–8, 51–2, 54–6, 58, 60, 63, 68–9, 71–2, 85, 91, 98–9, 101, 103–4, 123, 126, 139, 141, 150, 152, 154, 158, 161–8, 170, 174, 176, 178, 181, 187, 192–3, 230, 232, 242, 256, 259, 263 Treblinka extermination camp 36, 135–6, 139, 155, 250 unconscious, the 51, 56, 97–8, 105, 142, 157, 165, 168, 179, 181, 228, 230, 276, 279 Warsaw 2, 17, 29, 31–2, 45, 54, 83, 109, 111–13, 115, 118, 122, 124, 131, 136, 154, 196, 218, 232, 241, 248 Warsaw ghetto 26, 32–3, 36–7, 54, 56, 83, 124, 126, 133–9, 153, 197–203, 281 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) 8–9, 102, 109–11, 115, 124–8, 134, 137, 148, 198, 207, 210–20 Warsaw Uprising (1944) 111, 127–8, 136, 152–3, 200, 204, 258, 263 Water Hen, The (Kurka Wodna, dir. Kantor, 1967 and 1972) 30, 168–80 Wielopole Skrzyńskie 169 working through 5, 46, 52, 54, 56, 98, 100, 126, 209, 225–33, 236, 238–42, 245, 250–2 Wrocław 157 Zero Theatre (Kantor) 82, 277

307

308