Courses

The course explores modern Poland through personal narratives (diaries, letters, memoirs) and social documentation. The course serves as an introduction to key liminal experiences of the Poland's early and mid-twentieth century: emigration and forced dislocation, military occupation, ethnic and political violence, Holocaust, and the establishment of the communist rule. We will reflect critically on the main categories of "the era of the witness” (Annette Wieviorka) such as personal experience and literary responses to it, testimony, memory and eye-witnessing, and an unstable triad of victim-perpetrator-bystander. The course aims to broaden, both historically and conceptually, our understanding of the witness as an iconic figure of the twentieth-century atrocities by including the East Central European tradition of personal writing and social documentation of the interwar, wartime, and postwar periods. Methodologically, this seminar will focus on close reading of the personal accounts and their particularity vis-à-vis other primary sources.