The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central and Eastern European Cultures

Anna Artwińska is a Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture Studies and Chair of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her main research interests are the memory of communism, postcatastrophic representation of the Shoah, the concept of generation, auto/biographical writing and gender, and postcolonial studies. Anja Tippner is a Full Professor of Slavic Literatures at Hamburg University. She works on concepts of documentation and life-writing as well as representations of the Shoah and extreme experiences in Russian, Polish, and Czech literature. Her current research focuses on documentary and (collaborative) life-writing after socialism.

Introduction: Living and Writing in Postcatastrophic Times; 1 Postcatastrophic Aesthetics - ANNA ARTWIŃSKA AND ANJA TIPPNER; 2 Grasping for the Past: Postcatastrophic Writing of Catastrophic Biographies - IRENA GRUDZIŃSKA-GROSS; PART I The Afterlife of Holocaust Objects and Spaces; 3 Small Acts of Repair: The Unclaimed Legacy of the Romanian Holocaust - MARIANNE HIRSCH AND LEO SPITZER; 4 The Post-Jewish Today. Tracing Material Culture in the Postcatastrophic Polish Poetry - ANNA ARTWIŃSKA; 5 Libeskind and History - MICHAEL MENG; 6 Globalization, Universalization, and Forensic Turn: Postcatastrophic Memorial Museums - LJILJANA RADONIĆ; 7 The Smellscape of Jewish Lublin—and its Afterlife - STEPHANIE WEISMANN; PART II Contested and Entangled Memories; 8 Addressing the Void: The Absence of Documents and the Difficulties of Representing the Shoah in Postcatastrophic Russian Jewish Literature - ANJA TIPPNER; 9 After the Catastrophe. Polish Reactions to the Holocaust in the 1940s and after 2010. Illustrated by the Examples of Kazimierz Wyka, Marcin Zaremba, and Andrzej Leder - KATARZYNA CHMIELEWSKA; 10 Commemorating the Shoah in the GDR’s (Post-)Perpetrator Society - ALEXANDER WALTHER; 11 Explaining German Expulsions through the Lens of Postcatastrophe: New Discussions Concerning the Shoah and the Expulsions - JOHN C. SWANSON; 12 The Silence Cartel. Representations of the Genocide of Roma in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literature - DAVOR BEGANOVIĆ; PART III Postcatastrophic Aesthetics and Re-Readings; 13 Lost and Saved in Translation: Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther. A Family Story - BARBARA BREYSACH; 14 "There’s No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye": Acts of Seeing and Ethical Aspects in Postmemorial Aesthetic - MAGDALENA MARSZAŁEK; 15 Who’s Afraid of Walter Benjamin? Dealing with the Problem of "Universalization" of Shoah Narration in Czech Literature - AGATA FIRLEJ; 16 Postcatastrophic Approaches to the Shoah in Contemporary Czech Poetry: Radek Malý’s Collection Little Darkness - REINHARD IBLER; PART IV Re-Mediating Catastrophes in Contemporary (Pop-)Culture; 17 Holocaust Topoi, or "How Long Can We Punish Ourselves for a Grandfather Holding a Match?": Jedwabne and the Pop-Cultural Afterlife of the Catastrophe - MARTA TOMCZOK AND PAWEŁ WOLSKI; 18 The Visuality of the Holocaust in the Digital Environment: Examining the Case of Pinterest - KAMIL ČINÁTL AND ČENĚK PÝCHA; 19 Art, Trauma, and the Shoah: Postcatastrophic Narration and Contemporary Art from Hungary - JAN ELANTKOWSKI; 20 The Image of People Jumping from Windows in the Warsaw Ghetto: Photographs of The Stroop Report in the Context of Polish Holocaust Remembrance - ARIKO KATO