ABSTRACT
A synchronic, interactional approach to collective memory does not imply conceiving of individuals in a vacuum. Macro-societal developments certainly impact the way these people re-tell memory narratives. This is especially the case in Poland, where the struggle over Holocaust memory has found its culmination in the current conservative PiS government’s different battles over censorship of subversive Holocaust memory narratives and Holocaust historiography. In the fifth chapter of this book, I discuss these recent political developments with a specific focus on the context of Auschwitz/Osświęcim. I outline how ‘Auschwitz’ has become a ‘mnemonic battleground’ (Zubrzycki 2015) for Polish memory politics, and how the local community of Auschwitz/Oświęcim has been largely forgotten by academic research of these memory politics. I describe a few challenges to the dominant understanding of the sacred and profane in the realm of Auschwitz/Oświęcim that have made some scholars turn to researching everyday life in this realm.
