Transforming the past into a phantasm:
„Achtung Zelig“ by Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz und Krystian Rosenberg

by Magdalena Marszalek

Looking at Polish literature and the visual arts of the last decade, it emerges that the traumatic experiences of the European history in the 20th century (totalitarianism, WWII, Holocaust) are still (and anew) strongly present. These topics appear in literature and art of the so-called third generation often as a dealing with the past that goes beyond a factual representation and a memory exploration, and leads towards an exploration of the imagination. Of course, this observation is to be stated not only for Polish literature and art. In the Polish case, however, the imagination of the traumatic past is deeply connected to current revisions of the past that have been a part of political and cultural transformations since 1989.

In my presentation, I will focus on representations of the Holocaust that radically cross the border of dealing with the past in terms of memory (even as a fiction of memory) and explore fields of imagination and the phantasmatic. Taking the graphic novel „Achtung Zelig“ by Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz und Krystian Rosenberg (2004) as an example of a grotesque-fantastical dealing with the past, I will look into the question of how the transformation of the past into a phantasm is achieved through the specific media structure of the genre combining the narrative and the visual.Furthermore I will ask about the relation between current literary and visual representations of the Holocaust (also in works of single authors, e.g. Ewa Kuryluk) and how pictures contribute to the transformation of historical memory into phantasmatic.