Language:
German
Year of publication:
2010
Titel der Quelle:
Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts
Angaben zur Quelle:
9 (2010) 207-229
Keywords:
Antisemitism History 1945-
Abstract:
Reactions to the student protest in Poland in 1968 and the accompanying antisemitic campaign first appeared in Polish-language exile magazines in the early 1970s. They mainly thematized the campaign as a political tool of the government and viewed it as indicating the continuous degeneration of the Communist Party. "Social self-organization" was proposed as the only viable form of oppositional activity. In the 1980s reactions to "March 1968" multiplied, inspired by the growing independence and vitality of cultural and political life in Poland from 1978. The antisemitic campaign was brought into the discussion, mainly by Jan Jósef Lipski and Jan Blonski. Blonski's analysis of the effects of traditional antisemitism in Polish society, and his way of linking the persecution of the Jews during World War II and the early postwar period with the antisemitic campaign of 1968, aroused strong, broad reactions. The reactions focused more on the events of World War II than on more recent antisemitism. In the late 1980s the significance of March 1968 diminished and there was little understanding of it as a turning point for the 13,000 Jews who left Poland. After the fall of communism in 1989, Polish President Aleksander Kwasnieski, commemorating the 1968 protest, used the commemoration to promote national unity, but did not mention the Jews or the antisemitic campaign. The emigrants' narrative began to come to the fore in Poland around the same time, while those related to the oppositon firmly rejected the antisemitism that had emerged in 1968. Nevertheless, the memories and needs of the Jewish emigrants were mostly ignored. It was not until the late 1990s that the emigrants formulated their own stories and demanded that the Polish state apologize to them.
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