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Remembering as unknowing: Limitations of the category of collective memory in studies of Jewish spaces in contemporary Poland

Author(s): Matyjaszek, Konrad

Editor(s): Łupienko, Aleksander

Date: 2024

Topics: Holocaust Memorials, Jewish - Non - Jewish Relations, Jewish Space, Memory, Memorial, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial

Abstract: The category of collective memory holds significant position in global academic and popular discourses about the past since late twentieth century. Employed as the key part of the analytical toolbox of memory studies, it signifies a large variety of processes and actions that individuals, groups, institutions and the state perform in regard to representations and conceptualisations of the past. Yet this category as well as the methodological toolbox offered by the field of memory studies carries a significant analytical weakness, visible particularly in the problematic positioning of the subject of collective memory. Such weakness becomes evident in regard to histories of minority groups, such as Polish-Jewish communities, and especially where collective memory discourses focus on spaces, places, and topographies. This chapter offers an analysis of these limitations that become evident since the turn towards the collective memory that emerged globally in the 1980s and 1990s. It examines the history of uses of this category in relation to Poland’s contemporary Jewish spaces. As a case study, this chapter focuses on the possibilities of articulation and the presence of a minority’s testimony in the site of the evacuation of Warsaw ghetto fighters at 51 Prosta street in Warsaw.