Session 9: Poland and WWII
8th Global Conference
Monday 4th May – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
The Ethics of Violence: the Katyn Massacre & the Question of Justice
Vanessa Fredericks
Critical & Cultural Studies Department, Macquarie University, Australia
This paper focuses on a particular event in Polish history, namely the Katyn massacre of WWII. The word ‘Katyn’ has come to represent the massacre of somewhere between 14,000 to 22,000 Polish prisoners of war, taken by the Red Army or the NKVD in the spring of 1939. The prisoners were executed and buried in various undisclosed locations in the Soviet Union and the Ukraine as part of Stalin’s attempt to implement ‘class cleansing’ in Poland. The first of the mass graves was discovered by German soldiers in 1943 however, the Soviet government denied responsibility for the massacres and accused the German government of being guilty for the crime. During the 68years since the event no-one has been prosecuted for the crime or its cover up. Successive Soviet governments have continued to deny responsibility for the crime until Mikhail Gorbachev’s admittance of Soviet guilt in 1990. Drawing on a deconstructive ethics, this paper analyses the ways in which the Katyn massacres are an injustice of our responsibility to the other. Violence threatens our sense of human vulnerability and murder or massacre is the ultimate threat to the vulnerability of the other. War however, is an institution which justifies killing. The detainment and execution of the Polish prisoners of war was justified through the institution of war. It was an organised crime made possible through the legal and conceptual framework of war. This paper situates Katyn and the lingering question of justice within Jacques Derrida’s notion of justice. I explore the ways in which justice was denied at the time of the massacres as a result of the context of war and the manipulation of laws. I suggest that justice has still not been done, even with the admittance of guilt in 1990, due to the inherited cultural memory of Katyn.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
‘We may have no choice in having the events and traumas experienced by our ancestors visited upon us in our own lifetime’: Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation
Gustav Arnold
Teaching University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Ann Ancelyne Schutzenberger, a leading figure in transgenerational psychoanalysis, has elegantly summarized her research findings by audaciously proclaiming that “as mere links in a chain of generations we may have no choice in having the events and traumas experienced by our ancestors visited upon us in our own lifetime” (202). She claims that traumatic events of the past that have been left unprocessed tend to resurface again in the present. A distant family member may re-enact the trauma, mostly in different guises and modes, around the same time as the traumatic event. She adds that “the syndrome could also manifest itself through a link in dates or periods, so that particular symptoms such as nightmares or panic attacks will occur or begin in the same month as the original trauma sustained by an ancestor” (“Health and Death” 284).
In 1998 leading figures in the field of transgenerational studies gathered in Montreux, Switzerland: Jean Cournut, Daniel N. Stern, Alain de Mijolla, Serge Tisseron, Francisco Palacio-Espasa, Betrand Cramer, Jean Guyotat, Serge Lebovici, Blaise Pierrehumbert, Inge Bretherton and others. Tackling the issue of transgenerationality from various, but chiefly psychoanalytical, perspectives, they sought to generate a comprehensive theory accounting for the transmission of unfinished past occurrences. In their line of thought a subject is not only constituted by forces intrinsic to the subject, as psychoanalysis would have it. On the contrary, a subject can succumb to twists and pulls stemming from the generational environment in which he or she is placed.
Eva Hoffmann’s autobiography Lost in Translation documents the protagonist’s journey to America where she and her family hope to begin a life shielded against the vicissitudes of post-war Poland. While the garrulous and outgoing protagonist soon finds herself marooned in an environment inimical to her needs and expectations, she gradually redefines her sense of belonging and, for this matter, her identity. This identity, then, entails a radical reconfiguration of her linguistic mastery. Not only does she manage to hone her English skills to perfection, but, more importantly, she also loses touch with her native language and certain cultural features associated with it. While this kind of linguistic reorganization finds echoes in other autobiographies such as Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Speak, or Richard Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire,” here, unlike the narratives just mentioned, the issue of linguistic mastery encompasses a transgenerational perspective. Since Hoffman is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and since her Jewish background adds a historical component that goes beyond the chronological trajectory of her narrative, one soon realizes that “translocation” has become the chief mechanism by which her genealogy is organized. The trauma of relocation and the reality of ethnic persecution have been reconfigured in Hoffman’s own life in form of linguistic repositioning. It goes without saying that Hoffman’s command of English—like her relationship with her ethnic and national past—is not a smooth process, because the trauma that engendered this move is not a singular event but resurfaces in many different modes in her family past.
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