Bestsellery z Auschwitz.
Bestsellers from Auschwitz

Guardians of Memory Versus the Auschwitz Gang

Summary/Abstract: The text scrutinizes the phenomenon of popular Holocaust novels, whose plot usually plays out on the scene of Auschwitz. The author interprets their meaning in the broader context of the activities of the modern emotional community, in which clash the nonidentical perspectives of victims their relatives, witnesses, bystanders, and beneficiaries of the Holocaust, along with memory politicians, guardians of memory, Holocaust scholars and educators, and those who treat it as an object of experimental practices. The author argues that all these social actors function in an inextricable intertwining of mutual dependency, which despite appearances and their goals, makes them jointly drive the effect of “citability” and “commerciality” of Auschwitz as a brand. The text distinguishes several dominant strategies of action in the field of Holocaust culture, which one could not consider in separation: symbolic-mnemonic, scholarly, (self-)therapeutic, identityoriented (and self-fashioning), commercial, parasitic, and commensalist.

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