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Erfahrung, Zeugnis, Wissen
(2019)
In the context of the “postcatastrophic” culture after the Shoah, the question of the ethics of seeing has developed its own specificity and incisiveness, one that resulted from the complex distribution of the visibility and invisibility of the criminal acts themselves.
On the one hand, the perpetrators’ efforts to conceal their crimes and erase their tracks stood in opposition to the desire of the same to meticulously document their crimes. On the other hand, local communities became direct eyewitnesses to the persecution and killing of Jews—in mass shootings as well as in the extermination camps, which were frequently set up close to populated areas.
It is precisely these two aspects—the photographic archives of the perpetrators as well as the bystanders’ eyewitnessing—around which heated debates unfold.
They are also of primary interest to postmemorial art, which grapples with the legacy of this visuality and visibility of the Shoah.
This chapter discusses the possibility of a critical analysis of the images from contaminated photographic material in the Nazi archives in postmemorial art and film as well as artistic projects focussing on the problem of visibility and seeing that deal with the question of the possibility of the witnessing of bystanders and of future generations who are faced with the legacy of the bystander experience.
These projects were developed during the time of intense examination—and not only artistic—of the role of direct eyewitnesses to the Shoah, examinations that were characteristic for the public discourse in Poland after the year 2000.