Blockchain Papers

Isabel Schöps geb. Thiel, Isabel Schöps geb. Thiel

No abstract is available for this record.

Tomasz Żukowski

The motif of Righteousness acts as a vaccine (in the sense of Roland Barthes). Its function is to preemptively dismiss the allegation of continuity between prewar and wartime antisemitism in Poland (in fact, ethnic cleansing plans formulated before the war were implemented during and after the war). The theme turns out to be very persistent in postwar Poland in the motif of an antisemite who becomes Righteous. The chapter analyzes the narrative structure of the Righteous-antisemite figure based on the text “Polak-katolik i katolik-Polak” (A Pole Catholic and a Catholic Pole) by recognized Polish intellectual Jan Boski. What is at stake in Boski’s considerations is the release of the Polish community from the accusation of complicity in the Holocaust. Boski proves that Polish antisemitism related to Christianity did not assume extermination forms and stopped wherever violence began. His proof is a text by a prewar diarist, a witness to the 1930s pogroms. Boski’s argument contains glaring logical errors, which create the mechanism of acquittal yet remain invisible to both the author and the Polish culture. The diarist distances himself from violence that takes the form of racial riots. His distance is treated as an objection, and moreover, it is generalized. The isolated attitude becomes proof of the attitude of the entire community. The aggressive crowd about which the memoirist writes disappears and is removed from the image of the nation.