‘A Picnic Underpinned with Unease’: Spring in Warsaw and New Genre Polish-Jewish Memory Work

Abstract

Poland, whose pre-war Jewish population of 3.5 million was decimated during World War II and further reduced by anti-Semitic incidents in the post-war Polish republic, has only a small Jewish presence today, but over the last two decades has come to recognize and work through the painful Jewish past with an increasing intensity. After Communism fell and this past was released from state censorship, there was a flood of publicly suppressed information — accompanied by public expressions of collective memory — regarding the 1000-year history and violent destruction of Poland’s Jews. Spurred by new scholarly and journalistic writings, as well as the visits of foreign Jews (many with Polish roots), the 1990s and early 2000s saw public spaces reassigned some of their former Jewish meanings through official memorial forms like ceremonies, signage, renovation of historic sites and monuments (Kapralski, 2001; Meng, 2011; Murzyn-Kupisz and Purchla, 2009). A flagship project representing such official memorial efforts is the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in Warsaw in 2014. Other, more grassroots forms of remembering were also growing up in response to and alongside these, in the realms of tourism and heritage brokering (Gruber, 2002; Lehrer, 2013; Waligórska, 2013). But in parallel fashion — and picking up speed in the mid-2000s — another kind of memory work was beginning to claim public attention. Social and cultural ‘interventions’ undertaken by artists, academics, youth groups and other culture brokers, began to create provocative spaces of dialogue and self-reflection, in staged installations or happenings in which individuals were asked to participate in active, social, critical forms of remembering.

This chapter is excerpted from a longer article comparing recent memory projects by Public Movement, Rafał Betlejewski and Yael Bartana (Lehrer and Waligórska, 2013). ‘A picnic underpinned with unease’ was the characterization of the event by the Polish visual culture scholar Iwona Kurz.