The Intelligentsia and the Holocaust: Dispersing the Image

In: Studia litteraria et historica, Issue 7

Abstract

This paper in the field of cultural memory studies addresses the workings of memory, or more precisely – a politics of memory whereby the image of the intelligentsia and its role in the Holocaust vanishes from the collective consciousness. The relative visibility of peasants denouncing Jews, murdering them and plundering their property is accompanied by an invisibility of the intelligentsia and its essential role in reinforcing the exclusion and antisemitic patterns of behavior before the Holocaust which facilitated direct involvement in these events, as well as an invisibility of the intelligentsia's own participation in the events of the Holocaust.