Conquering the Space: Symbolic Topography of the Former Warsaw Ghetto

Tuition: $300 | YIVO members: $225**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Elżbieta Janicka

Burnt down and razed to the ground by the German Nazis, non-exhumed after the war, the former Warsaw Ghetto site is at once a symbol and the real thing itself. It symbolizes and incarnates Jewish presence, identity, history, Jewish life and death. It symbolizes and incarnates the ultimate consequences of antisemitism. Its central location—in the heart of Warsaw that is the heart of Poland—symbolizes and incarnates the central position of the Holocaust in the country’s social fabric.

What do Poles who exert the control over this space make of this content? What were the stages of its symbolic rendering? How does the former Warsaw Ghetto site look today and what does its present shape mean? Since—as with any cultural landscape—it can be apprehended in terms of cultural text, what narrative patterns emerge from its urban design, memorials, commemorative plaques, murals, names of buildings, streets and squares? Whose and what perspective do they convey?

While drawing on a lavish iconography we will:
— outline the prewar, wartime and postwar history of the site;
— examine four basic narrative patterns imprinted in the former Warsaw Ghetto ground;
— ask the question about the reasons of their persistence and intensifying repetitiveness between the 2000 revelation of Polish participation in the Holocaust and the 2015 authoritarian turn in Polish politics.

Our reading of the former Warsaw Ghetto space will be informed by the observation that the space is at once a product and a means of production of social relations. We will try to figure out whether the discussed phenomena belong to the realm of the memory of the past or rather constitute the continuation of the past: namely of antisemitic domination, exclusion and violence. Our question will be whether the observed spatial transformation may be perceived as representative of a broader process that led to the collapse of liberal democracy in this center of Europe.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Elżbieta Janicka – historian of literature, cultural anthropologist, visual artist. M.A. at the Université Paris VII Denis Diderot; Ph.D. at Warsaw University. Author of the following books: Sztuka czy Naród? [Art or the Nation?] (Kraków: Universitas, 2006); Festung Warschau [Forteress Warsaw] (Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna, 2011); Philosemitic Violence. Poland’s Jewish past in New Polish Narratives (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021; co-authored with Tomasz Żukowski). Her individual exhibitions are: Ja, fotografia (1998); Miejsce nieparzyste [The Odd Place] (2006); Inne Miasto [Other City] (2013, co-authored with Wojciech Wilczyk). Her research field encompasses socio-cultural legitimacy of violence and exclusion (axiologic universe, collective imaginary, cultural patterns). Her areas of study are: categories of Holocaust description, narratives about Poland’s Jewish past, symbolic topography of the former Warsaw Ghetto area. Currently working at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

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