역사의 금기(禁忌)와 기억의 진정성 －21세기 폴란드 역사학과 ‘희생자의식’－

Abstract

Focused on the Jedwabne controversy, this paper aims at reconfiguration of the post-communist historiography in Poland since the ‘fall’ of 1989. By revealing arguably a certain continuity of the historical narrative between before and after 1989, the paper throws a critical gaze at the cliché dichotomy of the communist and postcommunist historiography: the both shared historical episteme of the victimhood despite the political opposition in specific descriptions of historical events. Be leftist or rightist, the Polish historiography has been nurtured by the Romanticist conception of ‘crucified nation’ of the 19th century. The self-perception of collective victims has provided Poles with a morally comfortable position and justified the ethno-centric victimhood nationalism in Poland for more than a century. Jan Gross’s book of Sąsiedzi shattered the Polish victimhood deeply rooted in the historical culture in large by proving that Polish neighbors were perpetrators in the massacre of the Jews in Jedwabne in 1941. The book tremendously triggered sharp debates among professional historians, general intellectuals and media people. In fact it brought a climate change to the historiographical landscape in Poland by complicating the victimhood as a naive default for the historical culture and thus opening a door to the self-reflection of one’s own past.