ABSTRACT
The chapter deals with various models of universalization of Shoah event in social discourse and literature, mainly with such type of universalization which can be understood as parabolization or metaphorization. In this case, the catastrophe of Shoah is engraved into the image of mankind, in which there is no place for continuous moral progress. Researchers studying the events of the Shoah and its literary representations are divided into two main groups. The first presents a “pessimistic” way of thinking similar to Benjamin’s. The second group reject this interpretation, they are “afraid of Walter Benjamin,” so to speak. At any rate, the described way of universalization of Shoah manifests itself inter alia by thematization of the human desire of illusion (e.g. in Arnošt Lustig, Jiří Stein, and Zdeněk Eliáš), the revolt against the unwanted memory of catastrophe (e.g. in Arnošt Goldflam’s dramas), or by locating the Holocaust within the long history of human wickedness (e.g. in Jiří Kolář). The chapter also claims that the “postcatastrophic” approach could be observed even long before the catastrophe of the Shoah and it is often connected to a vulnerability of illusion of retrotopia. The loss of illusions about the possibility of moral improvement of humanity means at the same time that utopia is becoming excluded and the denial of utopia may result in nostalgia, the conviction that what is good has already been and has passed. In a retrotopian attitude the three main concepts of the chapter converge: universalization, postcatastrophe, and nostalgia.
