ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors comment on the contemporary state of communal memory of the Holocaust in Poland. They argue that it is founded mostly on fragmentary images conveyed in popular literature and therefore often susceptible to biased (e.g. negationist) interpretations. By employing the notion of topos, they aim to offer a tool making it possible to cope with the inevitable state of the discourse devoid of first-hand narratives. “Holocaust topoi” are presented as a concept able to convey the experience intertwined with the political, historical, etc. reactions to it, i.e. the postcatastrophic discourse. The authors consider the phenomenon of the Holocaust as an inherent—“natural”—part of public discourse in Poland. After addressing chosen seminal approaches to the theory of topoi as well as archetypes, such as Ernst Robert Curtius’s seminal contribution to the rebirth of the notion of topos, Reinhart Koselleck’s Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (co-authored with Werner Conze and Otto Brunner), Mieke Bal’s “travelling concepts,” and Michał Głowiński’s glossary of state propaganda, they propose an approach for reading Holocaust pop-literature (using various narratives tackling the event of murder in Jedwabne) as a means to excavate the multi-layered meaning of the “Holocaust topoi.”
