From: lbs@tkmhp4.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de (Lech Borkowski)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.polish,soc.culture.jewish
Subject: Re: Gutman and Krakowski's "Unequal Victims"
Date: 4 Oct 92 02:28:51 GMT
Reply-To: lbs@tkm.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, Germany

In article <1992Oct1.181631.26684@Princeton.EDU> roger@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>In article <1992Oct1.051434.15995@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> lbs@tkm.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de writes:
>>In article <1992Sep30.033317.6339@cbnewsj.cb.att.com> avr@cbnewsj.cb.att.com (adam.v.reed) writes:
>
>>>On the evidence of their actions, the NSZ, as well as some units
>>>of the AK, were Polish Nazis, differing from German Nazis only
>>>in their opinion on the specific identity of the Master Race
>>>that, according to their ideology, was entitled to exterminate
>>>all others as it wished. A government-in-exile that bestowed on
>>						     ^^^^^^^^
>>>these Polish Nazis the legitimacy of affiliation with its
>>>Delegatura, and later concluded with them a formal alliance and
>>>integrated them into its ranks can't quite be called anti-Nazi.
>>>Anti-German, certainly. But with respect to its reaction to the
>>>murder of Jews by the NSZ and some other components of its own
>>>Home Army, "supposedly anti-Nazi" seems entirely appropriate.
>
>> Just as appropriate as "Polish death camps". 
>>I would like to see who among historians and where uses the terms
>>"Polish Nazis" and "supposedly anti-Nazi" in reference
>>to the Polish government-in-exile.
>
>Read it again, Lech.  Nobody's calling the govt-in-exile Nazis.  Adam's

 I didn't make myself clear enough. I asked about "Polish Nazis"
in reference to NSZ and "supposedly anti-Nazi" in reference
to the govt-in-exile. 
 
>saying that the anti-Semitic groups were *affiliated* with them.  
>
>And, wrt the Nazi Judenpolitik, "supposedly anti-Nazi" describes the
>NSZ just fine, as it occasionally did the job of the Einsatzgruppen
>for them.        

 Some time ago I wrote that it would probably be useful to read
the essay "The Life of Death" by Timothy Garton Ash, it appeared
in his collection of essays on East-Central Europe "The Uses
of Adversity", Random House, NY, 1989.

 In that essay T.G.A. presents his comments on two films,
"Shoah" and "... Edgar Reitz's even longer rendering of German
experience in the twentieth century, 'Heimat'."

 Let me quote the last part of that essay:

" 'Shoah' is so obviously a larger film than 'Heimat' - more
complex, difficult, profound and important - that one wonders if,
after all, there is much point in reviewing them side by side. 
But on reflection, I think a real point emerges precisely from
the very difference in quality between them. Why is Reitz's
film about German memory so much "easier," lighter, more
superficial than Lanzmann's film about Jewish and Polish
memory? Not because Reitz is a lesser director but because
*the German memory of this period is itself 'easier'.* I do not,
of course, mean the memory of those historically sensitive 
and morally anguished Germans who have shaped the Federal
Republic's *public* attitude to the Nazi past and who currently
have a fine spokesman in the federal president, Richard
von Weizsaecker. I mean the popular and private memory of most
ordinary West Germans, which is Reitz's subject - the memory,
as it were, of Herr Kohl at home. And in comparing the two films,
we discover the last monstrous injustice: It is the victims,
not the executioners, who suffer most in remembering. It is
the victims who break down, while the executioners bask
in the happy memories of 'Heimat'.

 Both films together remind us: Memory is treachorous. Memory
is amoral. Memory is also forgetting. There are things that
memory cannot look in the face. If German, Jewish, and Polish
survivors try to remember exactly the same event, they simply
cannot remember it the same - almost physically cannot,
as a paralyzed man cannot cannot lift a pen. And both films
together say: Beware the tyranny of the director. For both
'Shoah' and 'Heimat' are ultimately shaped, and bent, by
the partiality of the directors' own attitudes and biographies.
Reitz's America, Lanzmann's Poland - these, too, are the products,
the inevitably distorted products, of one man's memory.

 The one conclusion to which they both lead me is: Thank God
for historians! Only the professional historians, with their
tested methods of research, their explicit principles of selection
and use of evidence, only they can give us the weapons with
which we may begin to look the thing in the face. Only the historians
give us the standards by which we can judge and "place"
'Heimat' or 'Shoah'. Not that any historian is necessarily more
impartial than any one film director. But (at least in a free
society) the terms of the historians' trade make them responsible
and open to mutual attack, like politicians in a democracy,
whereas the film director is always, by the very nature of his
medium, a great dictator. So the historians are our protectors.
They protect us against forgetting - that is a truism. But they
also protect us against memory."


>Roger

 Lech Borkowski
lbs@neptune.phys.ufl.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.polish