Authors

Discussion

“Multidirectional memory” in transnational Holocaust films made by Polish filmmakers

Polish communist cinema has presented the theme of the Holocaust as an integral part of the entirety of Nazi atrocities. The extermination of the Jews has been addressed as a Nazi war crime, and the Polish nation’s response to it has been constructed largely as that of a helpless and passive witness. In his book on the Holocaust in Polish cinema, Marek Haltof discusses “double memory” that equated Polish and Jewish suffering. The theme of the “conflated suffering” has dominated much of Polish cinema in the period of state socialism. 

In the planned paper, I will discuss the Holocaust films made by Polish filmmakers and produced by the German independent company CCC-Kunst Films run by Artur Brauner. I will argue that these films were instrumental in undermining the hegemonic discourse of “double memory” in Polish cinema.  I will propose to look at such films as Jerzy Hoffman’s After your Decrees (Wedle wyroków Twoich, 1984) Agnieszka Holland’s Angry Harvest (Bittere Ernte, 1985) and Europa, Europa (Hitlerjunge Salomon, 199), Janusz Kijowski’s Warsaw – Year 5703 (Der Daunenträger, 1992) as developing what Michael Rothberg calls “multidirectional memory.” As he claims, multidirectional memory is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (Rothberg 2009, 3). Due to their transnational production frameworks, the films inevitably involved various cultural transactions that contributed to the process of constructing transnational and multidirectional memory of the Holocaust.