Abstract
As an author central to postwar literature on the concentration and death camp experience, Tadeusz Borowski chose to depict the relatively taboo subject of excremental violence. Borowski’s ...documentary fiction depicted an aspect of history that was, especially in 1946 after his own incarceration and survival, both raw and controversial. Writing in Polish as part of a collective work, Borowski was intent on speaking in his native language to a shattered Polish nation. This article analyzes how Borowski drew attention to human rights violations by writing about excremental violence. It further examines how Borowski eschewed oversimplified postwar categories of perpetrators, victims, and resisters. Instead, drawing upon his own experiences in Auschwitz, Dautmergen, and Dachau, his works articulate the powerlessness of those in the camps and the dehumanizing conditions they faced, thus challenging any misleading narratives regarding heroic agency.
In Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, former Nazi perpetrator Hanna Schmitz commits suicide, and scholars have not yet answered the question why. When Michael visits Hanna's cell after her death, he ...notices books on her shelf by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Améry, Rudolf Höss, and Hannah Arendt. By citing works from these authors, I argue that Hanna kills herself because she discovers that Michael has become what she once was. I also demonstrate that through her suicide, Hanna fulfills a major demand found in the works of Améry, and by fulfilling that demand, Améry and Hanna are united.
In this article Jeremy Hawthorn argues that fictional accounts of the Holocaust that include historical characters and events face special ethical challenges. In particular, the presentation of the ...inner lives of characters representing real people (such as their private thoughts and emotions, their inner speech) is seen to be especially problematic, especially in the case of victims. The article focuses on three fictional accounts of an actual event that took place in the Auschwitz death camp: the shooting of an SS officer named Josef Schillinger by a female prisoner awaiting gassing. These accounts are “The Death of Schillinger” by Tadeusz Borowski (first published in Polish 1959 and in English translation in 1967, but written shortly after Borowski’s release from Auschwitz in 1945 and before his suicide in 1951), “Revenge of a Dancer” by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk (which came out in English translation from the unpublished Polish manuscript in 1985, but was written before 1967 when publication in Poland was denied), and A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova by Arnošt Lustig (published in Czech in 1964 and in English translation in 1973). While Lustig’s novel presents the reader with the female victim’s thoughts and feelings, the two shorter works do not, and the article explores the ethical ramifications of this difference.
This article reexamines the ethical dilemmas inherent to the aesthetics of Holocaust literature. Through close analysis of several of the Auschwitz stories of the Polish author Tadeusz Borowski, I ...show that the key to understanding the literature of witness lies in grasping the complicated way such fiction juxtaposes notions of beauty and routine. In its dramatization of the way forms of beauty resist the horrors of the concentration camp context, Borowski's stories rewrite dominant conceptions of beauty by, paradoxically, relying on age-old conceptions.
This is a meditation on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. It is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction ...and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination. Beginning with W. G. Sebald, for whom memory and the Holocaust were the roots of a special fascination, Bigsby moves on to consider those writers Sebald himself valued, including Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Peter Weiss, and those whose lives crossed in the bleak world of the camps, in fact or fiction. The book offers a chain of memories. It sets witness against fiction, truth against wilful deceit. It asks the question who owns the Holocaust - those who died, those who survived to bear witness, those who appropriated its victims to shape their own necessities.
From the colony to modernity it seems that domination is predicated on transforming a human into a subject in order to 'civilize' he or she into a type of identity that validates the process by which ...they were subjugated. The civilizing mechanism implements a hierarchical ideology that ranks humanity on the basis of particular social, cultural, and political values. Certain values are associated with humanity in order achieve particular goals, and when the human being is classified so as to lose value the result is the dispossession of sovereignty. Alternatively, the process could turn a human into an animal in order to exterminate it. In either case there is a civilizing process behind this that implements concepts of humanity to dehumanize a subject. Culture, with the aid of race, links society and civility to civilization, while constructing hierarchies of bodies and minds. From the colony to the lagers, race was designed to remove the basic principles of humanity and civility from its victims in order to both justify their extinction and to project them as bestial, further validating their demise. Camps produced inmates deserving of death to fulfill a larger project; however, a new type of identity emerged from the shame and guilt of the loss of humanity to critique this act.
Tadeusz Borowski’s poetry is virtually unknown in Britain and America, despite the fact that the Polish writer was a poet long before he wrote his controversial stories about his experiences in ...Auschwitz–Birkenau and Dachau. These stories, a selection of which appear in Penguin’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, ensured his canonical status in twentieth-century European literature. Yet only three Borowski poems are readily available in English translations: ‘Night over Birkenau’, ‘The Sun of Auschwitz’ and ‘Farewell to Maria’ are printed in Hilda Schiff’s anthology Holocaust Poetry. A few more appear in the English translation of Adam Zych’s anthology The Auschwitz Poems,3 but this edition is currently out of print.
Historically Poles have been unable to resist writing about Jews. "Judeophilic" writing in Polish literature was impressive—illustrative of the often affectionate attitude toward Jews. On the other ...hand, the writing was often remarkable for its palpable departure from real-life situations. From the years 1530-1990 a body of work was produced that was characterized by stereotypes, distortions, paternalism, and condescension toward Jews. In this essay several works from the nineteenth century are summarized as illustrating the efforts of Polish writers to bring the Jew into the mainstream of Polish life. The essay then turns to Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, which exemplifies the confrontation of one writer to the concentrationary experience, Andrzejewski's Holy Week, which concerns a failed attempt to save one Jewish woman during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and Milosz's poetry, which deals with the impact of history upon moral beings and the search for ways to survive spiritual ruin in today's world.
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