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Contemporary Auschwitz/Oświęcim An Interactional, Synchronic Approach to Collective Memory
Author(s): Van de Putte, Thomas
Date: 2021
Topics: Ethnography, Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration, Jewish - Christian Relations, Jewish - Non - Jewish Relations, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory
Abstract: This book presents an innovative theoretical and empirical approach to the present attributions of meaning to the past. Based on the author’s fieldwork in the contemporary Polish town of Oświęcim – Auschwitz, in German – it observes the manner in which residents remember and narrate the past of their town, drawing on theoretical perspectives from the work of figures such as George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman. With attention to narratives concerning pre-war Catholic–Jewish coexistence, wartime Nazi occupation, the Holocaust and post-war Communist Poland, the author explores the complementary, fluid and contradictory nature of meaning-making processes in various contemporary interactional contexts, both online and offline. As such, it will appeal to social scientists with interests in memory studies, the Holocaust and interactional sociology.
Remembering Jews in Poland: the encounter between Warsaw’ s POLIN Museum and rural memories of Jewish absence – divergent aims and needs
Author(s): Kubica, Aleksandra; Van de Putte, Thomas
Date: 2019
Topics: Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Holocaust Memorials, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Museums, Rural and Small Town
Abstract: The POLIN Museum runs a traveling exhibition (Museum on Wheels) which has visited places in rural Poland since 2014. The exhibition’s aim is to teach about ‘the centuries of coexistence of Jewish and Polish culture.’ The Holocaust is one of the elements presented but is not central. Our content and lexicometric analysis of interviews with visitors from five towns visited by MoW in 2015 and 2016 indicates that the needs articulated by visitors differed from POLIN’s agenda. We show that the Holocaust and Jewish absence in the rural Poland of the present were the most prominent topics appearing, not the continuity of Jewish life and culture. Although it was not its central aim, the three days visit of MoW has created opportunities for local communities to address the void left after the Holocaust. For our analysis, we traced the museum’s discourse on the one hand and the ‘discourse of absence’ of the visitors on the other hand on the basis of keywords. From these two sets of keywords, we quantitatively mapped the prominence of both discourse and combined it with a more qualitative content analysis of specific segments of the interviews of which our corpus is composed.