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In her paper, the author examines images of Central Europe created in various popular genres (campus novels, quasi-guidebooks, films, essays) as well as interpretations of the Central European myth from countries of the region. The aim is to reflect on two main Central European narratives. One is a vision of retrospective utopia of lost harmonious coexistence of cultures, religions and nations. The...
Until the End of the World by Wim Wenders was a large project. This essay discusses the slow process of the film’s creation, its distribution, its content and critical response, in order to point at failure as the question key to each of those topics. Purpose, success, resolution, ending, the end of the world – those notions appear either irrelevant or impossible in the context of this film. The research...
The article focuses on the question of national, gender, and religious identity in the poetry and other writings of Wojciech Stamm, also known as Lopez Mausere and Gertruda Jarząbek. Mausere’s affiliation with the Polish Failures Club (Club der Polnischen Versager) in Berlin and the relationships between his biography and literature are examined as well. The author contends that Mausere’s concept...
This article problematizes the Polish cinema of the 1990s by analyzing it in terms of the aesthetic of failure. Of crucial importance for that interpretation is the postcolonial perspective. Seen from this perspective, Poland of the political transformation period appears a land of unfulfilled dreams of being-like-the-West. One of the spheres where this is visible is the Polish cinematography of that...
The article focuses on the material culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as portrayed in selected German films made after 1990 and set in the GDR. The objects that are used in the films serve as a special kind of artefacts, symbolizing the reality of the GDR and defining it as imperfect, below expectations, and inefficient in meeting consumer demand. An important point of reference in the...
The research on workers’ culture carried out in Poland from the 1960s to the late 1980s has been recognised in this article as a failure. The author discusses the numerous attempts to conceptualise research programmes and their actual implementation in the fields of sociology, anthropology and the emerging cultural studies. She looks for the sources of their failure, reflecting on its nature and possible...
The essay takes the 2014 book Kontaminierte Landschaften [Contaminated Landscapes] by the Austrian journalist and writer Martin Pollack as an opportunity to explore relationships between landscapes, (marked) places, and memory. In considering the relationship between the metaphorical (literary) image of contaminated landscapes and the actual crime scenes, I focus on the mass shootings of Jews by the...
The paper discusses images of failure in Polish photography created in 1970–2000, drawing on three particular projects: Archeology of Photography by Jerzy Lewczyński and the exhibitions The New Documentalists (2006) and Postdocument: Missing Documents: Documents of the Polish Transformation After 1989 (2012). As such, it concentrates on documentary, or post-documentary, photography which suffers no...
The article is the author’s response to Dr. Ryszard Śmietanka-Kruszelnicki’s review of Pod klątwą: Społeczny portret pogrom kieleckiego [Under Curse: A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom] (2018), which appeared in the journal Polish-Jewish Studies in January 2021.
Nie da się pisać o twórczości Piera Paola Pasoliniego, nie artykułując przy tym subiektywnego i politycznego stanowiska. Punktem wyjścia autora jest obecność poety i filmowca we Włoszech, gdzie nazwisko Pasolini znaczy o wiele więcej niż nazwisko jakiegokolwiek innego autora. Pasolini reprezentuje ducha buntu w schyłkowym okresie włoskiego cudu gospodarczego, w którym nastąpiła wielka contaminazione...
Prezentowana rozmowa dotyczy spuścizny Leo Lowenthala (1900–1993), który przyszedł na świat w żydowskiej rodzinie we Frankfurcie nad Menem. Lowenthal należał do pierwszego pokolenia teoretyków krytycznych działających w Instytucie Badań Społecznych Uniwersytetu Frankfurckiego pod kierownictwem Maxa Horkheimera. Przyjmując za punkt wyjścia wypracowaną przez Lowenthala koncepcję teorii krytycznej, Katrin...
W artykule analizuję niektóre niedawne próby delegitymizacji antyfaszyzmu zarówno jako zjawiska politycznego, jak i przedmiotu badań historycznych. W niemieckich środowiskach akademickich i poza nimi ten „anty-antyfaszyzm” operuje pojęciami komunistycznego skażenia. Aby przeciwstawić się takim narracjom, proponuję szerszą perspektywę historyczną. Bierze ona pod uwagę wielość antyfaszyzmu, jego różne...
Are there fascizizing ways to look at public space and aesthetics? If so, how do they manifest themselves? What characterizes the fascization of space? How and where can you recognize it? How do architecture and symbols in public space contribute to fascization of daily life? One of them is a policy of cleansing and rhetoric about recovering after an imaginary foreign domination or invasion. The aim...
Omawiając koncepcje i definicje faszyzmu, autorka oferuje nowe i szersze spojrzenie na to zjawisko, wprowadzając pojęcie faszyzacji jako narzędzie analityczne. Biorąc pod uwagę fakt, że warunki, które wyprodukowały faszyzm, nie zostały zniszczone, jego elementy nadal nie zostały zdelegitymizowane, a wyobraźnia faszystowska wciąż istnieje w europejskich i pozaeuropejskich społeczeństwach, autorka argumentuje,...
This letter is a response by Dominika Macocha to the discussion between Elżbieta Janicka, Konrad Matyjaszek, Xawery Stańczyk, Katrin Stoll and Anna Zawadzka about her video-sculptural installation work “50°31’29.7”N 22°46’39.1”E, 50°30’56.2”N 22°46’01.0”E, 50°30’41.0”N 22°45’49.5”E” published in Studia Litteraria et Historica 9 (2020). The discussion has enabled the artist to look at her work from...
This article – which is based on the records of Nachman Blumental that I discovered as part of my work on his archive material and that I brought to light, as well as on the documentation of two official investigations – deals with the complicity of Poles – uniformed (the policja granatowa, or Blue Police) and civilians – in the Nazi project to kill every Jew without exception in Dębica County during...
The following work is a case study. Its purpose is to reconstruct a particular situation involving the recognition and understanding of fascism. This situation is determined by both history and the social dynamics of the present day. The time and place is Italy of the 1960s and 70s, the observer – Pier Paolo Pasolini. But not because he offers us an original, complex and versatile theory of fascism...
W ostatnich latach w poglądach europejskiej skrajnej prawicy można było zaobserwować trend w kierunku „cywilizacjonizmu”. Pojęcie cywilizacji wydaje się stanowić całościowy i zbiorowy termin (umbrella term) międzynarodowy, odnoszący się do różnych kwestii, takich jak postawy rasistowskie, antymuzułmańskie i antyimigracyjne, jak również jest tożsamy z obroną heteronormatywno-patriarchalnego systemu...
In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman argued that the Holocaust had been by no means a negation of the civilising process, but was, on the contrary, its consequence. He claimed that the constitutive features of solid modernity, such as bureaucratic culture, the rise of instrumental rationality and the domination of blueprint utopia, were reflected in the genesis and course of the Holocaust...
The article describes two approaches to the Holocaust, identified with the names of Zygmunt Bauman and Timothy Snyder. In this dyad, Bauman stands for the culturalist, sociological approach focused on identifying the social conditions in which otherness is produced and tracing the significance of modernity and bureaucracy for the Shoah. In contrast, Snyder dismisses the notion that anti-Semitism and...
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