Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979. Jonathan Huener

      If Auschwitz history is not monolithic, neither should any collective Auschwitz memory be monolithic. Rather, that memory should reflect the complexity of the camp’s history. The memory exhibited at the Auschwitz memorial site has never been totally monolithic, as if hewn from a single stone and presented as a single narrative. Yet for more than forty years the State Museum at Auschwitz exhibited a museological, pedagogical, and commemorative orientation that, to varying degrees, simplified the camp’s history, valorized certain types of deportees and their experiences over those of others, and introduced culturally and ideologically bound memorial narratives grounded in postwar Polish society and politics. Although perhaps not surprising, such a reconfiguration of the past may strike the observer as somehow unjust, for at issue here is the relationship between history and public or collective memory.³⁶

      The relationship between history and the memory of events that have shaped our past appears obvious. Close observation reveals, however, that the anticipated nexus between the two is always weaker than might be assumed, for the way a culture or society remembers the past seldom reflects the actual course of historical events. This point may appear obvious, but it is worth further consideration in the context of this study. Thus far, the term “history” in general and the “history” of Auschwitz in particular have been used in a conventional sense, meaning both the actual course of events at Auschwitz and these events as they have been recorded by historians and others. The former represents an objective reality that cannot be reproduced or chronicled with total accuracy; it can be approached by the scholar or student, but nonetheless remains an ideal. “History” in the latter sense refers to the chronicling and codification—in effect, the institutionalization—of the past in ways that are familiar to all of us, such as the construction of narrative texts, the development of archives, or the establishment of historical museums. The work of institutionalizing the past in postwar Poland was highly complex and subject to the demands of Polish national culture and its attendant “martyrological” traditions, as well as the ideological imperatives of the communist state. Accordingly, the construction of an Auschwitz narrative, whether the work of the scholar or the State Museum, remained inseparable from the larger collective memory of the camp.

      Collective memory, far less reconstructive and organized than history, arises out of the recollections and desires of the community.³⁷ It is not rigid, but, as Pierre Nora writes, “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.”³⁸ History as task, because of its claims to objectivity and analytical rigor, is intended to endure and present a universally valid, if not universally appreciated representation of the past. This it achieves only to a limited extent, for, as suggested above, the work of history, whether that of the scholar or that of the museum, cannot remain isolated from the forces of collective memory. Likewise, historians—some more successfully than others—can contribute to the construction of memory in a variety of ways, whether by publicizing an accurate account of the past or by distorting the past in the service of the present. Nonetheless, the “work” of history is held to a higher standard, and is therefore assumed to reflect the course of events with greater accuracy than the evolving forces of memory.

      Because it constantly evolves, reflects the desires of the community, and is not subject to the strictures of the historical discipline, collective memory can also, as Jacques Le Goff has written, “overflow” or supersede history as a form of knowledge and as a public rite.³⁹ History is secular, whereas memory “lives on in a religious or sacred key,”⁴⁰ transcending in its formation and manifestations the structures and rules of the historian’s craft. The sacral nature of memory emerges in various ways, most visibly and prominently at those spaces that Nora describes as the lieux de mémoire, or memory sites.⁴¹ Such sites exist to redefine, illustrate, manifest, and embody individual and group recollections of the past. Monuments, museums, and the spaces of public ritual are all examples of common loci memoriae that function as fora of public commemoration, and it is at sites like these that memory most clearly reveals its collective, participatory, and ritualistic elements.

      The State Museum at Auschwitz is one such site, but unlike many other memory sites, it exists both as the location of historical events and, simultaneously, as the arena where public commemoration of those events takes place. It is significant that postliberation Auschwitz has always had a certain tangibility. The memorial site is, of course, a smaller⁴² and inevitably sanitized representation of the complex as it existed in 1945, and only the Stammlager and Birkenau remain accessible to visitors. But that they are accessible at all and have preserved many of their tangible remains (in contrast to Bełżec or Neuengamme, for example), makes them comparatively well suited to the physical objectification of memory, the synthesis and institutionalization of memorial symbols, and the use of their memorial spaces for repetitive commemorative ritual.

      Manifested in symbols, exhibitions, and public demonstrations, Polish collective memory at Auschwitz has both explained history and misrepresented it; it has honored the dead and, at times, has been selective about the those whom it chooses to honor; it has shown reverent silence and has also engaged in noisy demonstration; it has been an indicator of liberalizing transformations in the cultural policy of the Polish People’s Republic and has also communicated the ideological rigidity of that state. Such diversity and contradiction in the manifestations of collective memory at Auschwitz should come as no surprise. These contradictions are born of the multifaceted history of the camp complex, but they also reflect the fact that collective memory and its manifestations, as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs illustrated more than seventy years ago, arise from what he called the “social frameworks of memory.”⁴³ Memories do not originate only on a purely individual basis; rather, they are constructed and maintained with the help of others. Collective frameworks are, then, the means by which the collective memory forms its images of the past, and because these frameworks are the products of present social conditions, they help to construct images of the past that are in accordance with the current cultures, identities, ideologies, and desires of the larger community.⁴⁴ In short, the past is reshaped to suit the needs of the present, its images helping to legitimize the needs of the current social order.⁴⁵

      According to Halbwachs, this presentist imperative renders collective memory unreliable as a guide to events that actually transpired. Rather than accurately reflecting the events of the past, collective memory is a composite and mutating image that inevitably deviates from historical reality because of its reliance on society’s mnemonic frameworks.⁴⁶ As Halbwachs noted, “Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess.”⁴⁷ In short, social groups and their frameworks of memory alter or distort memory in the process of reconstructing it.⁴⁸

      The ease with which Halbwachs’ social frameworks can transform memory points to the disturbing ease with which collective memory can be manipulated, both consciously and unconsciously. State, family, church, associations, and a myriad of other social groups all have the ability to direct or censor collective memory. Collective memory can be socially mandated as an institution works to create a common mode of memory by selecting those aspects of the past that appear best suited to the exigencies of the present. It is, for example, not uncommon for groups to embellish the past artificially or to abbreviate it dishonestly for the purpose of encouraging social unity in the present.⁴⁹ “One might say,” Patrick Hutton has written, “that memory colonizes the past by obliging it to conform to present conceptions.”⁵⁰

      “Colonization” of the past, however, exists not only in the conquest of memory, for manipulated memory is also used as an instrument of social and political power.⁵¹ Its effectiveness as an instrument of power depends, of course, on the relative power of the social group that holds it. A state can, for example, influence the collective memory of a people’s past only to the extent that it retains political power. Religious authorities can continue to shape the ways in which people perceive the origins of their spirituality only as long as their authority