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.
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.
Conceptualizes the question of witness and responsibility, following the Holocaust, using continental philosophy, theology, and literary theory. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, James ...Hatley uses the prose of Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski, as well as the poetry of Paul Celan, to question why witnessing the Shoah is so pressing a responsibility for anyone living in its aftermath. He argues that the witnessing of irreparable loss leaves one in an irresoluble quandary but that the attentiveness of that witness resists the destructive legacy of annihilation.
“In this new and sensitive synthesis of scrupulous thinking about the Holocaust (beginning with scruples about the term Holocaust itself), James Hatley approaches all the major questions surrounding our overwhelming inadequacy in the aftermath of the irreparable. If there is anything unique (in a non-trivial sense) about the Holocaust, surely it is the imperious moral urgency that compels those who contemplate it to revise their view of what it means to be human, and to bear witness to such an event.
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.
Portraits
print on silver gelatin paper
Polish photography
Tyt. given by the cataloger.
Do not call. Car Name: Benedykt Jerzy Dorys.
The author’s copy of the photo from before 1952
Neg. Dorysa 8687.
...portrety
odbitka na papierze srebrowo-żelatynowym
fotografia polska
Tyt. nadany przez katalogującego.
Nie sygn. Nazwa aut.: Benedykt Jerzy Dorys.
Autorska kopia zdjęcia sprzed 1952 r.
Neg. Dorysa 8687.
Chekhov, Anton, "Gusev," "Sleepyhead," "Peasants," "Rothschild's Fiddle," in various editions; "Ward #6" and "My Life in Ward #6" in Ward Six and Other Short Stories DuBois, W.E.B., "Of Work and ...Wealth," "The Damnation of Women," "The Servant in the House," "Of Beauty and Death" in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil In addition, a number of films were shown; these included "Gervaise" (L'Assomoir), "Salt of the Earth," "Nothing But a Man," and "The Organizer."
PDF
