The Jedwabne Village Green?: The Memory and Counter-Memory of the Crime

This article is a critical response to the views presented in Ewa Wolentarska-Ochman's article, "Collective Remembrance in Jedwabne: Unsettled Memory of World War II in Postcommunist Poland." In particular, it argues that mythological narratives are very far from being a genuine remembrance of what happened in Jedwabne and that it is an oversimplification to oppose the allegedly genuine remembrance of the "insiders" to the manipulation of memory by the "external world." Instead, the article outlines a model of memory inspired by Richard Sennet, in which a genuine memory of a traumatic event is possible only in a de-centered memory space, in which no standpoints are privileged a priori and remembrance becomes possible through the interaction of various perspectives.