"Why Do We Look Back? On Memories of Jewish Warsaw since 1945." -- With Professor Michael Meng

Tracing memories of the area of Muranów, Warsaw¿s most concentrated area of Jewish life before the Holocaust, this talk uncovers some of the ways in which mostly non-Jewish Poles have remembered the violent destruction of Polish Jewry during the Second World War. It identifies two different meanings and purposes of memory since 1945 ¿¿ a memory à la Benjamin that salvages the past from the oblivion of forgetting and a memory à la Habermas that recalls the past as form of political enlightenment. Lingering on the second type of memory, the talk will conclude by attempting to think through some of the possibilities and dilemmas of memory as a pedagogical project in contemporary Poland.