Polish Folk Art and the Holocaust: Perpetrator-Victim-Bystander Memory Transactions in the Polish-German Context

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The recent turn in Holocaust studies towards the "dispersed" Holocaust that took place outside of the death camps, in full view of local “bystander” populations, requires new sources of data. While oral history has brought important insights into the field, vernacular visual sources have yet to be considered. Holocaust-themed folk art from Poland constitutes an important and as-yet-unexamined source that offers a unique perspective on postwar memorial processes. Created throughout the postwar decades, carvings and paintings of Holocaust scenes by Polish vernacular artists, who remembered pre-war Jews and witnessed the atrocities against them, have been largely forgotten in the holdings of Polish ethnographic museums or reside in private (mostly German) collections, without ever having been systematically examined as a source of knowledge about post-traumatic memory processes.This project focuses on such vernacular representations of the Shoah, and their impacts and instrumentalizations in East, West, and reunited Germany from 1945 until today, examining their role in Polish and German memory cultures. The study seeks, further, to determine to what extent German collectors stimulated memory of the Holocaust among Polish artists, and whether Germany’s "Orientalist" gaze on Poland influenced the way this art was produced and received in the German states. Finally, the project will yield insights into the ways that Poles and Germans have negotiated their respective collective statuses as victim, witness, and perpetrator.While we anticipate contributing in significant ways to Holocaust history and memory studies (with new source materials, and bystander perspectives) and Folk Art studies (with new themes, e.g., traumatic historical memory and intergroup dialogue, and new approaches like affect theory) the project sheds light on a number of broader issues, including: Polish-German-Jewish relations; German Vergangenheitsbewältigung; and the role of material culture in memory processes.We will examine a wide range of sources including: art objects, exhibition documentation, visitor comments, private correspondence, and we will conduct interviews with collectors, artists, and curators. The sources we identify in Polish and German collections will be subjected to scrutiny based on multi-disciplinary interpretive approaches, including the most current methods in use for studies of visual culture, material culture, memory, trauma, affect, and inter-cultural relations, with attention to cultural frames, power relations, emotions, and self-reflexive consideration of our own subjectivities as Polish, German, and Jewish researchers.The phenomenon under study was constituted by Polish and German actors working in dialogue and the traces of its history are scattered across Poland and Germany, thus requiring a Polish-German team, bilateral frames of reference, bilingual expertise, and access to institutions, sources, and individuals in both countries.