Shout, Sister, Shout!

edited by

Paweł Wątroba

Bytom, 2024

Shout, Sister, Shout!

artists

Maciej Cholewa, Barbara Gryka, Dorota Hadrian, Irena Klepfisz, Lidija Mirković, Ewa Noras, Anna Piotrowska, Marta Romankiv, Pragati Sethi, Małgorzata Szandała, Alla Zagaykevych

curators

Agata Cukierska, Katarzyna Kalina

coordination

Agata Gomolińska-Senczenko

set design

Agata Cukierska, Katarzyna Kalina

partnership

Bytomski Teatr Tańca i Ruchu Rozbark, Fundacja Rozwoju Tańca_eferte

workshops

Agnieszka Biela, Julian Czurko, Anna Dęboń, Barbara Gryka, Dorota Hadrian, Katarzyna Kalina, Dominika Malska, Lidija Mirković, Marta Romankiv, Małgorzata Szandała

sponsors

Proen Gliwice Sp. z o.o., Stara Piekarnia

patronage

Bytomski.pl, Gazeta Wyborcza, Magazyn Szum, Notes na 6 tygodni, Radio Katowice, Ślązag, Ultramaryna

cooperation

Robert Ćwieląg, Patrycja Klimek, Kobra, Jan Kukułka, Wojciech Major, Dominika Malska, Iwona Sobczyk, Anna Sokołowska, Dariusz Trzeja, Paweł Wątroba

patronage

Fundacja Wisławy Szymborskiej

educational program

Katarzyna Kalina, Dominika Malska

Kronika is financed by the municipality of Bytom and has been functioning a part of the Bytom Cultural Centre’s structure.

Co-financed by the Municipality of Bytom.

“Shout, Sister, Shout!” project was supported by the EVZ Foundation (Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft) as part of the “Local History” program.

Publication: Krzycz, Siostro, krzycz!

edited by

Paweł Wątroba

texts

Agata Cukierska, Julian Czurko, Anna Natalia Dzierzgowska, Joanna Ostrowska, Zuzanna Sokołowska, Paweł Wątroba

graphic design, typesetting, illustrations

Marcin Wysocki

proofreading

Iwona Sobczyk

zdjęcia

Iwona Sobczyk, Marcin Wysocki

publisher

Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art

printed by

Centrum Usług Drukarskich Henryk Miler, Ruda Śląska

ISBN

978-83-61853-53-4

CCA Kronika, Bytom 2024

“Shout, Sister, Shout!” project was supported by the EVZ Foundation (Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft) as part of the “Local History” program.

This publication does not represent the opinion of the EVZ Foundation. The publisher bears responsibility for any statements contained herein

table of contents

Introduction

Str. 9

Zuzanna Sokołowska

Un-forgetting biographies

P. 26

Anna Natalia Dzierzgowska

High time we got loud

P. 39

Joanna Ostrowska

Quiet, Sister. On the (non)telling of herstories

P. 58

Agata Cukierska

Please distribute. Claude Cahoon and Marcel Moore’s antifascist campaign

P. 77

Paweł Wątroba

Diane Torr. A journey across the performativity of gender

P. 96

Julian Czurko

Prejudice, dialogue and shouting. Scripts for anti-discrimination workshops

P. 119

Works

P. 136

Introduction

The title of the Shout, Sister, shout! project was taken from the song recorded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1942. Born in 1915, daughter of Arkansas cotton pickers, the American singer was excluded from society on multiple levels: as a Black person, as a bisexual person, and as a woman, in times when it was difficult to be any one of them. Shout, Sister, Shout!, sang in her powerful voice, is something more than merely a song. It is an anthem that constitutes a call to action and praises open speech, unrestricted self-expression and brave transgression of social barriers; a celebration of power and individuality. Tharpe encourages using the female voice as a tool for change.

Responding to this call, the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art realised the Shout, Sister, shout! project, consisting of artistic residencies, a group exhibition, and a broad educational programme for various age groups. The point of departure for all the activities undertaken was the feminist perspective, which enabled us to rework the local historical narrative from a female perspective. The juxtaposition of World War II herstories with contemporary ones, happening here and now in Bytom, revealed how often it is that divisions tend to overlap. These are not only divisions based on gender, but also those resulting from race, class, sexual orientation, and nationality. Examining such mechanism of intersectional exclusion, we want to inspire critical thinking and raise social awareness, as well as ask difficult questions about individual and collective responsibility and the significance of being an active citizen. We also continue to recall the trauma of Nazism at a moment when crimes against humanity are being committed, among others, in Ukraine and Palestine.

The project is summed up with the present publication, in which we continue to examine historical threads connecting the 20th century to the present day. The stories of our heroines: Kathe Cöhn, Friederike Marianne Guttman, Lila Dzierzgowska, Małgorzata, Greta, Maria Potrzeba, Claude Cahoon, and Marcel Moore, provide insight into the traumatic fates of women in the times of National Socialism. Every one of them is important to us, regardless of the length of their biographies. They were discriminated against and persecuted because of their Jewish ancestry, unemployment, sex work, hereditary disease, political involvement, sexual orientation, and subversive activity. They were stripped of dignity and humanity, while some of them were also deprived of the right to live. Not all of them could tell their own stories, which is why it is so important to us that we make their voices heard on these pages.

An additional heroine of this publication is Diane Torr, whose biography takes place against the background of the birth of the LGBTQ+ movement and the third wave of feminism in the United States, as well as the gender revolution and women’s empowerment. It is not by accident that the queer artist appears here. She was present at the Shout, Sister, shout! exhibition, albeit in an indirect manner, through Lidija Mirković’s memory of her workshops. This is a positive example which shows that empowering herstories are capable of intersecting and actualising one another within the field of visual arts.

In order to emphasise the educational dimension of our project, we crown our publication with scripts for anti-discrimination workshops. They can be easily delivered by any person who identifies a need for them to be organised. We would like to encourage everyone to use these, either individually or in group settings – in schools, organisations, or local communities. Let the sisters’ shouting be heard!

Agata Cukierska

Paweł Wątroba

Architecture of the exhibition

Shout, Sister, Shout!

Architecture of the exhibition

Agata Cukierska,

Katarzyna Kalina

neon signs at the exhibition

execution: Neon IRSA

design: Marcin Wysocki, Agata Cukierska, Katarzyna Kalina,

cooperation: Kamila Mróz

2024

The CCA Kronika has been located for more than 30 years in a tenement designed in 1910 by well-known German architects of Jewish origin, working mainly in Wrocław at the beginning of the century. The style in which the Erlich brothers worked at the time was a gradual transition from historicist forms to Art Nouveau. The spaces in which the curators, together with the artists, created the story of women at risk of exclusion were the living spaces of the protagonists of the project. The stripped house became a home returned to various forgotten herstories. Drawing on elements of historic architecture, lighting elements were created to emphasise the decorative divisions of the windows and doors, repeating them in places where life had once been vibrant. Through the use of neon signs, symbolic outlines of residential rooms that no longer exist were created. The illuminations blossomed like living plant elements.

Connecting past and present, the different parts of the scenography move from comfortable spaces to increasingly oppressive ones, suggesting leaving in a hurry. The change in mood is built by the temperature of the light, changing from warm to cold. We move from dark rooms into those filled with natural daylight. The moment of transition is reinforced by a sound collage in which Ukrainian composer Alla Zagaykevyvh leads us from darkness to light.

Un-forgetting biographies

Zuzanna Sokołowska

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison wrote that whenever something disappears, even irretrievably, there remains an image, a trace, or an after-image of that in the world: “Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.”1 Such a rememory has its specific texture. It has a distractive effect and disrupts one’s perception. At the same time, it also inspires curiosity – a desire to seek proof of a presence, to reconstruct a biography which has lost its original narrative and might be calling for specific identification, a clearly defined ending. The word “ending” speaks of something subtle, yet also final, simultaneously constituting a prelude to a new opening, a fresh look. It is, however, marked by doubts, understatements, and ambiguities that are not easily clarified.

Un-forgetting the biographies of Käthe Cohn and her daughter Marianne, two women of Jewish origin, 20th-century inhabitants of the Bytom townhouse that today is the seat of the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art, was a process haunted by constant uncertainty. Is such a task accomplishable at all? Can I reach any facts of their lives? Who were they, what were their interests, did they feel happy and fulfilled before the outbreak of World War II finally sealed their fates? What were their loved ones like? Such were the questions that appeared in my mind most often when I was thinking about Käthe i Marianne.

I am not going to hide the fact that the research aimed at recovering their stories was extraordinarily difficult and usually led into dead ends. At a certain point, I began groping around in the dark, trying to find any lead whatsoever, as their biographies, despite my efforts, were not going to reveal themselves. I began to wonder whether those were actually traces of their presence that I was investigating or I stumbled upon stories of entirely different persons bearing the same names and surnames. Another difficulty came from my awareness of the fact that persons of Jewish descent, while attempting to avoid the deadly danger they were facing in Nazi Germany, often changed their identity.
Many women had carried names identical to those I was looking for. One of them is Käthe Cohn born in Germany in 1907 whose memoirs (written under the pseudonym Catherine Klein) were published as Escape from Berlin. Confined to Berlin and stripped of any civil rights whatsoever in the outcome of the Kristalnacht in 1938, she is forced to work at the Siemens factory.2 Thanks to her doctor husband’s help, she obtains documents necessary to leave the country. Terrified, she only takes Luminal pills with her, in order to survive the difficult and perilous journey. On an Italian passport, she reaches the Swiss city of Basel, and later England in 1942.3 She dies in Britain in 1981, surrounded by her loved ones and friends.4

While establishing the fates of Käthe Cohn and her daughter Marianne, I constantly came up against confusing information. I tried to disentangle all the threads at the archives in Katowice and Gliwice. I often received support from experienced researchers, including the invaluable Karolina Jakoweńko, manager of the Upper-Silesian Jewish Memorial in Gliwice, Jocelyn McDaniel and Kenton Jaehnig from the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, as well as Bogusław Małusecki – manager of the Gliwice department of the Polish State Archives. I combed through numerous online databases, including the MyHeritage family trees, as well as data available on the websites of: the Bundesarchiv, the Arolsen Archives, the Science History Institute, and the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. Eventually, the biographies of Käthe Cohn and her daughter Marianne began to take shape. Beginning with only very sparse information about their lives, I managed to reach facts that shed a new light on their biographies, heavily burdened with suffering, loneliness and piercing fear. Their difficult fates could be partially recreated thanks to the preserved and digitalised correspondence of Georg Bredig, Käthe Cohn’s brother, an outstanding scientist and pioneer of catalytic chemistry. He was the inventor of the Bredig Arc method, which became one of the most popular methods of obtaining colloidal dispersions of metals.5

Käthe Cohn, whose maiden name was Bredig, was born in 1870 in the town of Głogów, in a Jewish merchant family of German descent. Her parents were Ernestine Bredig (née Troplowitz, 1847–1930) and Max Bredig (1842–1899). Käthe grew up with her three siblings: Georg (1.10.1868–24.04.1944), Valeska (born between 1860 and 1870) and Franziska (7.04.1874–21.04.1944).6 We know nothing about Georg’s three sisters’ education or interests. As for Ernestine and Max’s only son, he exhibited an interest in science as early as in his childhood. In 1886, he passed his final exams at the catholic high school in Głogów, going on to study chemistry at the universities in Freiburg and in Berlin over the following years. Due to his rapidly developing academic career, contacts with his sisters became increasingly limited. That did not mean, however, that Bredig lost interest in his family’s fates, quite the contrary – they were extremely important for him. In the letters to his son, Max, he would often express his concern about his sisters, asking that he care for them. And they did require support: Käthe was suffering from diabetes and a heart disease, while Valeska complained of frequently recurring sciatica.7 Significantly, Bredig highly valued the opinion of the women close to him – his sisters, wife, and daughter-in-law. He gladly asked them for advice and remarks that he then shared with his son as well. One might have the impression that women constituted the foundations of his reality, which began falling apart with the outbreak of World War II.

The circumstances in which Käthe met her husband, Josef Cohn, with whom she settled in Bytom, remain unknown. In his work Wilhelm Heller and his Art Nouveau designs for Bytom, Marek Wójcik writes that Josef Cohn (1857–1922) was a merchant and banker, “trader in the Russian and Austrian currencies, securities and colonial goods, as well as spirits distiller.”8 His parents were Friedericke Rechnitz (1834–1888) and the successful investor Gustav Cohn (1827–1895).9 One of his investments was the purchase of property from Abraham Kretschmer,10 the subject of which was the house and parcel at Rynek 35 (now Rynek 26).11 Wójcik emphasises that “the property stretched along Schneiderstrasse (now Krawiecka street) to Kaczyniec – a square used for such activities as poultry trade. What remains of the square today is a slightly broader section of Józefczaka street.”12 After his father’s death, Josef inherited the house, in which he lived with his wife Käthe. The couple had a daughter, Marianne (17.03.1893–4.05.1942).

Josef died on 12th February 1922 and the property was inherited by Käthe and her daughter. It remained in their possession until 1938, when they were stripped of its ownership pursuant to the Nuremberg Laws.13 By then, both the mother and the daughter had already moved out of Bytom. Käthe had remained there almost until the end of 1930, later moving to Wrocław,14 and eventually to Berlin. Her daughter Marianne got married to the lawyer Max Guttmann, originally from Berlin-Charlottenburg, with whom she resided in Gliwice for some time. Marianne’s husband was a representative of the town’s Jewish community. The judge’s name can be found on the list of the persons elected for the community’s authority in the 1930 ballot which took place in the assembly hall of the school in Ebertstrasse (now Strzody street)15. Later, however, the couple moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg. This is where the fates of the Cohn, Bredig and Guttmann families begin to intertwine.

While there is plenty of significant information to be found in Georg Bredig’s surviving correspondence, one must admit that information on his sisters is scarce. At the same time, it shows how difficult the relationships within the Bredig, Cohn and Guttmann families were. On the one hand, their members cared about one another, but on the other hand, the spectre of the impending peril, acute loneliness, mutual frictions, and the isolation that became permanent, were negatively influencing their relations. In a letter to his son Max, Georg Bredig writes about the tensions between Käthe and her nephew: “There are reasons for both of you not to isolate yourselves from relatives, as when I am gone, you will both be alone in the world! This worries me substantially.”16 Nonetheless, the scientist’s preserved correspondence clearly shows that, despite all that, they were very close to one another.

Fot. 1 George Bredig with family, ca. 1915 r. Käthe Cohn fourth from right.

Courtesy of the Science History Institute w Filadelfii.

While living in Berlin, Käthe changed her places of residence. In the letter he sent to his son Max on 9th May 1936, Georg Bredig asks: “Have you at least visited aunt Käthe at the Weinstein boarding house in Charlottenburg or spoken to her? Please give her as much attention as you can (...)!”17 Several months later, on 8th September 1936, on a postcard sent to his son, Georg Bredig wrote the following: “Please look after Aunt Kathe. She has returned from Charlottenburg in an unwell state and is apparently all alone. Her daughter won’t return until September 12th. Marianne, whose absence she knew of, is still visiting me. Aunt Kathe is staying at the Pension Schwalbe at 55 Mommsentr.”18 This note clearly shows that Käthe was residing in the bourgeois part of Charlottenburg, where one could find not only boarding houses, but also apartments where Jews were forced to stay at the time.19 The aforementioned boarding house belonged to Alfred and Nelly Cornellia Schwalbe, who were running it until 1939.20 The married couple received a deportation order in 1943. The same year, they committed suicide at the Jewish Hospital.21 The number of rooms at the boarding house is nowhere to be found, as is the final number of Jews staying there. It is known however, that as late as 1939-1943, over twenty persons of Jewish descent were living there.22

In his letters to his son, Bredig emphasised his great love for Käthe, as well as her independence and fierceness, writing “[s]he is the most well-meaning of my sisters.”23 He also asked his son to watch over “the incorrigible aunt.”24 Although life did not spare her dramatic experiences, she tenderly shared moments of joy with her relatives – for instance, enamoured with the Upper-Silesian cuisine, she would often present her nephew with recipes.25 First of all, however, it was trauma that defined her identity: the loss of her husband, antisemitism, and a constant sense of threat. In many of his letters, Georg Bredig described Käthe’s sadness and despondency,26 primarily arising from the erasure of Jewish presence in Germany’s public life – which was also affecting her brother, whose name was disappearing from scientific papers27 – and from the difficult relations and tensions between herself and her son-in-law Max Guttmann, whom she was trusting gradually less.28 Ailing and deeply unhappy, she died in Berlin-Charlottenburg on 3rd May 1937. In a letter to his son, Bredig wrote: “I hope she didn’t suffer too much when she passed away. Moreover, death was probably [relief from] (...) many things. She was an unusually selfless and tirelessly active woman. Fate had been hard on her over the past 25 years.”29

The story of Marianne – Käthe’s daughter – is also far from a happy one. Bredig’s correspondence reveals that she probably had two sons, with whom she travelled to Palestine and London, together with her husband.30 Unfortunately, their names are unknown. Her husband died in 1940. On 21st October 1941, Marianne was deported from Berlin to the Litzmannstadt ghetto (located in the present city of Łódź). She died at the Kulmhof extermination camp, in the present-day town of Chełmno, on 4th May 1942, having been transported there a day earlier.31

Georg Bredig, who believed that science has the potential to solve the most complex problems, survived the Holocaust, and so did his wife Rosa and son Max. Käthe’s brother believed in the heritage he was creating with his scientific discoveries. He was learning from the best: the 1909 Nobel Prize laureate Wilhelm Ostwald, Jacob Henricus van’t Hoff and Svante Arrhenius. It was with Ostwald that he earned his doctorate in 1894.32 Since 1911, he was giving lectures at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe.33 In 1933, he was deprived of the function of academic teacher. It was at that time that the German National Socialist Party banned Jews from serving at university posts.34 In 1940, Bredig finally left Germany, leaving for Holland, eventually settling in New York.35 Today, his legacy is overseen by the Science History Institute in Philadelphia and the researcher Jocelyn McDaniel, author of a project devoted to the outstanding scientist. “In 1934, Weizmann founded the Daniel Sieff Research Institute in Reḥovot to both further the work of Jewish scientists and rescue German Jewish property, including parts of Georg Bredig’s library. This act of intellectual salvation ensured that the contributions of Bredig and many other intellectuals were not wiped away entirely. The reclamation of these lives continues,”36 writes McDaniel in her article on Bredig’s achievements.

It is worth emphasising here that it is largely thanks to Georg’s accomplishment that the story of Käthe Cohn and her daughter Marianne Guttmann can be discovered. Had it not been for his strenuous efforts and the care he exercised about preserving his correspondence, we might never have been able to learn more about their fates and they would remain nothing but numbers and names. Bredig helped to preserve the memory of women who were immensely close to him – his sisters, wife, and daughter-in-law. Their biographies are separate stories, which are not founded on Bredig’s achievements exclusively, but also on a type of memory which is calling for every life to be documented. This is a memory that does not divide stories into her-stories and his-stories. While looking for traces of Käthe Cohn’s and her daughter’s existence, I had the quiet hope that their lives developed completely differently. I did not accept the thought that any of them could have died in an extermination camp. I wanted to believe that they were only affected by the cruelty of war to the smallest extent possible. This is why un-forgetting stories is so significant – it is a testimony of the past, an answer to the mute screaming of the survivors and of those who died in the Holocaust. It is also a process, in which superficially invisible rememories – to use Toni Morrison’s terminology – begin materialising in words, images, meanings and contexts. Thus, they become a visual manifestation of a presence, which can be read in many ways. Therefore, they are worth constantly remaining on the lookout for them.

1
T. Morrison, Beloved, [online], https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/selena.anderson/engl2342/readings/beloved-by-toni-morrison/view, p. 21 [21.04.2024].

2 Ch. Rubens, Kaethe’s Cohn Escape from Berlin to London in 1942, [in:] Jewish Historical Studies, vol. 35, (1996-1998), pp. 277–285 [online], https://www.jstor.org/stable/i29779971 [12.02.2024].

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 See: R. E. Oesper, Georg Bredig (1868-) [online], https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/tyeplmz [12.02.2024].

6 The information comes from Georg Bredig’s surviving correspondence, digitalised by the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, https://digital.sciencehistory.org.

7 See: Letter from Georg Bredig to Max Bredig, April 19, 1937 [online], https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/ekbjsvr [12.02.2024]. Zob też: Letter from Georg Bredig to Max Bredig, May 13, 1936 [online]:
https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/u9ml3p0 [09.03.2024].

8 M. Wójcik, Wilhelm Heller i jego secesyjne projekty dla Bytomia, Tarnowskie Góry 2017, p. 26.

9 The married couple’s tombstones can be found at the Jewish Cemetery in Bytom (plots 1010 and 1011). Source: M. Wójcik, Wilhelm Heller i jego secesyjne projekty dla Bytomia, Tarnowskie Góry 2017, p. 26.

10 Ibid, p. 26.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 See: Architektura intymna, architektura porzucona, eds. S. Cichocki, I. Jasińska, S. Beglarian, Bytom 2007, p. 121.

14 Ibid.

15 Żydzi gliwiccy, eds. B. Kubit, A. Turek, Gliwice 2006, p. 89–90.

16 Letter from Geor Bredig to Max Bredig, May 8, 1936 [online],
https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/q5jej4r#tab=translation [10.02.2024].

17 Ibid.

18 Postcard from Georg Bredig to Max Bredig, September 8, 1936 [online], https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/s5q4o8l#tab=translation [10.02.2024].

19 J. A. Kühne, Mommsenstr. 55 [online], https://zwangsraeume.berlin/de/houses/mommsenstrasse-55 [10.02.2024].

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Letter from Georg Bredig to Max Bredig, May 13, 1936 [online],

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/u9ml3p0#tab=translation [9.03.2024].

24 Letter from Georg Bredig to Max Bredig, September17, 1936 [online],

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/yogzpa7 [9.03.2024].

25 Georg Bredig’s letter to Max Bredig of 20th December 1936 presents the following information: „Aunt Kaethe will probably be able to tell you ‘how the upper Silesians cook.’ As far as I know, they used to cook very lavishly, with a lot of fat and spices. It was hardly rational.”.
Letter from Georg Bredig to Max Bredig, November 20, 1936 [online],
https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/qmv4vmx#tab=translation [9.03.2024].

26 Letter from Georg Bredig to Max Bredig, February 5, 1935 [online], https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/eejrie4#tab=transcription [12.02.2024].

27 In a letter to his son, Max, Georg Bredig wrote: “You and Aunt Kaethe should not be annoyed that I wasn’t mentioned in the article by District Court Councilor G. Leser regarding the Heidelberg Anniversary in C.V.Z (June 25th supplement). In response to my complaint about other chemists’ names being mentioned, the author responded that he had only included the Heidelberg ‘tenured professors’ in the field of chemistry at that time, i.e., lawyers - and a narrow view of things. I don’t care. I feel bad for you all because you would have liked the name recognition.”; See: Letter form Georg Bredif to Max Bredig, July 5, 1936 [online],
https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/xo2q3y2#tab=translation [9.03.2024].

28 Letter from Georg Bredig to Max Bredig, April 19, 1937 [online], https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/ekbjsvr [12.02.2024].

29 Letter from Georg Bredig to Max Bredig, May 15, 1937 [online], https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/z9hmm83 [13.02.2024]. Translator’s note: We propose a translation of the German word “Erlösung” alternative to “redemption” proposed by the Science History Institute, being deeply convinced it might bring us closer to Bredig’s intention.

30 Letter from Max Bredig to Georg Bredig and Marianne Homburger, February 1, 1936 [online], https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/x78peme [13.02.2024]. One of the most interesting leads was that leading to the information about one of Marianne’s sons being born in Gliwice in 1922. The surname Guttmann, however, has not been found in the 1922 birth register kept at the Gliwice Archives.

31 This information comes from correspondence between the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art in Bytom with Kamil Janicki of the Museum of the Former German Kulmhof Death Camp in Chełmno on Ner [14.09.2022].

32 See: Die im Dritten Reich entrechteten und vertreibienen Mitgleider der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Heidelberg 2009, pp. 3–11.

33 R. E. Oesper, Georg Bredig (1868- ), op. cit.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 J. McDaniel, Georg Bredig: Scientist, Humanist and Holocaust Survivor [online], https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/georg-bredig-scientist-humanist-and-holocaust-survivor/ [13.02.2024].

High time we got loud

Anna Natalia Dzierzgowska

I was fourteen years old when I first heard that grandpa Grzegorz and auntie Pola had a sister. Grandpa had died before I was born, in the 60s. He became a family legend, consisting only of catchwords and no tales whatsoever. A pre-war communist, fought against fascists in the Spanish civil war as a member of the Dąbrowski battalion. After the war – as he knew foreign languages – employed in foreign trade and diplomacy. I browse through the personal questionnaires that can be found in archives. As late as 1944, answering a question about the languages he knows, he enumerates: “Well: French, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Jewish. Poorly: German.” Several years later, the Jewish language will disappear from his questionnaires.

Grandpa’s sister, auntie Pola, was, in turn, a living legend. “A true lady,” was how we talked about her in our, rather plebeian, family. She spent the war in Belgium and in France, in the communist resistance movement.37 She never talked about that, as it was a rule in the family for everyone never to talk either about the war or about communism. One of the reasons was probably the conviction that it is better not to reopen some wounds. Another one was the desire to maintain peace, in a situation where the generation of my grandparents had been communists since before the war (and after the war as well, profiting from that, for instance in the form of being granted better houses or flats), while the generation of my parents became active in the opposition. There were too few of them left and too few of us were born after the war for the family to afford divisions stemming from politics and history. On the side of the Dzierzgowski family (who had already been using the surname before the war, even though grandpa Grzegorz’s first name was Hersz back then), only Grzegorz and Pola survived the war. On the other side, while grandpa had had thirteen siblings, only him, one sister, and one brother survived. From grandma’s family – her sister and her brother only. Scattered around the world, from Argentina to Israel.

Grandparents and auntie Pola survived the Shoah thanks to being communists. Lilka Dzierzgowska died because of communism.

So, I was fourteen and my brother was five. Auntie Pola was already over eighty years old and my mum sent us to visit her on the pretext of celebrating her name day which, having little to do with Christian saints, she never celebrated. In reality, we were supposed to check on her and see if she was alright.

That was the first and only time when I just simply dropped in on my auntie-granny as myself, not as a child being part of a family lunch. We had no readymade script for such a visit. And it was for that reason that Pola did something she would never do: she took out old photos and began telling stories.

– This is my sister Lilka – she said at one point. – The Germans hanged her.

And then, she started crying. There was nothing else, however, than the tears for anyone to tell. This is how I remember her: my eighty-year-old auntie-granny, always elegant, self-reliant, composed and sprightly, sitting bolt upright at the table, tears running down her face.

That was how I learnt about the existence of my other grandaunt – a term that sounds absurd if we apply it to a girl, murdered younger than twenty years old.

Two weeks later, Pola was already dead. Those were the mid-90s, with Warsaw plagued by muggings aimed at elderly ladies. Some lads assaulted Pola on her way to visit a friend. They took her purse and a ring. One of them hit her in the stomach, and probably it was no hard blow. It is just that it does not take much to kill an octogenarian, even one who had been a fighting communist, a resistance movement runner and an experienced police stations escapee in her youth.

– I bought myself a grave at the Jewish cemetery – Pola told my mum a few weeks prior to her death. – That is where most of my friends are.

It was after that conversation that my mum decided my brother and I should visit our auntie more often.

After Polas’s death, among her papers, we found a small bulging envelope with the note “To the grave” on it. By touch, it had to contain photographs. Nobody opened it. Days passed. The body of a mugging victim had to lie in the morgue for a certain period, regardless of there being no apparent point to it and of the fact that Jewish tradtion, which no one in the family had actually been brought up in or observed, says that funerals should be organised as fast as possible. When we were finally allowed to hold a funeral, one of the women – my mum or my dad’s sister – put the envelope inside the coffin. Maybe it contained a photograph of Lilka, maybe a snapshot of one of Lilka’s fiances – one fallen at the Ebro, another one in a wartime police round-up in Belgium or France. Maybe both?

⁕⁕⁕

A dictionary definition of postmemory says that: “Postmemory gathers together content that is remembered and stuck in our consciousness, coming not from our own experiences, but from those of our loved ones’ who relived them while telling us about them. Matters of fundamental importance to this type of memory are empathy and a subject’s narrative of their own experience interweaving with their loved ones’ narratives of their experiences. Postmemory is a material that a subject uses to construct their identity, largely adopting elements of the identities of individuals emotionally and intellectually close to them.”38 If this is postmemory, then how am I to call building my identity in a family where the loved ones almost never told stories about anything? Post-oblivion?

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One day, I will find the courage to travel to Łomża and Białystok in order to browse through state archives. So far, I only have two documents proving that Lilka Dzierzgowska really existed. The first one is a French-language Yad Vashem card, filled in by Pola Dzierzgowska in Warsaw in April 1990. A mediocre-quality copy of a photograph reveals an indistinct bright stain, being the face of someone who was more of a little girl than an adolescent, wearing a white blouse with something darker thrown on top. In the background, there is another blurry figure, partly cropped. Did the original photograph show the girl with her mother – my great-grandmother Bella, who had already died before the war started? With an older sister? Never have I held the photo in my hands, nor could I find it in any family documents. Basic information: Lila Dzierzgowska, daughter of Bella and Abram, date and place of birth (I have checked, this part of the Łomża archives has not been digitalised yet), occupation: student, date and circumstances of death: a barely legible verb, which I surmise to be the French pendre: pendre sur le marché de la ville – “hanging in the town square.”39

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Written in a script that was elegant and therefore slightly opaque, the word pendre looks a little similar to perdu – the latter meaning lost, in virtually all the meanings of the word in English. Such was the young woman executed there, having fought for communism – a lost cause. A woman who – according to the narratives of Jewish women and communism dominant in Polish discourse – could be, at best, described as one who lost her way and went astray, one who did not understand, who was too young, not perceptive enough, let herself be deceived and beguiled… Wasted, just like the opportunity I still had to learn anything while my relatives and their friends of the wartime generation were still alive.

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Some researchers claim that the spectre of Judeo-Communism has been haunting poland40 even since there was not an ounce of a communist on the polish soil.41

Several years ago, maybe more than ten years ago, I watched the documentary Żydokomuna, made by Anna Zawadzka.42 It consisted of interviews with persons who either identified as Jewish and leftists themselves or were such persons’ children. I am now recalling what is left of the film in my memory. I implore its author to forgive me: I rely on my memory, an unreliable tool, which means – of which I am well aware – that it is myself, and not her film, that I will be talking about. In my memory, the persons appearing in the film continuously repeat: one needs to comprehend this, Jews were persecuted, while leftism offered a vision of a world with no racism and no antisemitism… Several voices remain separate from the chorus. Marek Edelman storms at communists (Huh! We keep arguing on the left, we have been arguing since its inception, and we will still be arguing for long: if a socialist nearing his end is angry at the commies, this means that, even after all the years, he still has not “grown out of’’ socialism), simultaneously enumerating the achievements of the socialist and trade-union movement: free Saturdays, paid holidays and so on. Another interviewee recalls brawls with nationalists. When a sparkle appears in his eyes, for a moment, instead of the dignified elderly gentleman, I can see a young hooligan who might have liked a fight every now and then.

Let us return to the chorus. It is the same chorus that I heard from my parents those few times they even commented on their own parents’ leftism at all. One must understand what choice Jews actually had before the war… This is a very neat explanation, with only two flaws. It is so general that it fails to actually explain anything. Besides, it is based on the fundamental assumption that being a communist is something one must present excuses for. It is, at best, a form of error of one’s ways, or of losing one’s way. Well, in poland – it might very well be so. In the eyes of the right everywhere around the world – yes indeed (beware, leftist sister: in the eyes of the right you will be a communist as soon as you say anything that is to the left of Reagan). There is, however, a subtle yet meaningful difference between such parts of the world in which communism, even if it is left on the margins and fought against, remains a living idea and a living movement, and poland. In poland, the borders of leftist imagination, including the leftwing-feminist-queer imagination, are marked by anarchism. And glory to the anarchist sisters – especially those representing community-based, feminist and queer anarchism – without you, the borders would be very tight indeed.

Well, we do argue on the left, and our arguments could be classified with several types of criteria. A major one is the division, dating as far back in time as the 19th century, into reformist and revolutionary left. No matter how great the mutual dislike between Marx and Bakunin was and regardless of the historical resentment (as well as the quite contemporary hatred) due to which anarchists and communists could be hostile to each other (ok, this is a euphemism), regardless of how they have differed on pragmatics and strategy, anarchism and communism (as well as some fractions of the socialist movement – such as those represented in polish lands for instance by the Bund) have at least one thing in common. That is an overall dissent against the world as it is: the injustice, oppression, violence, power relations and the systemic nature of economic oppression in the world. It is in this sense, regardless of what they mean to the world and to one another, that both currents communicate three fundamental messages. Firstly, as Madonna put it in one of the most Marxist songs of the late 20th century, we are living in a material world and we are material girls. Secondly – this pertains, obviously, to collectivist anarchism – our material bodies live in community, in interdependence and mutual interweaves. To live means to share, to receive, to sustain and be sustained, while true community and interdependence require us to recognise the equality and equal worth of all its constituent entities. Thirdly, radical and revolutionary leftist movements broaden the scope of our imagination beyond the borders of what seems possible and rational here and now. If we take our time to think about that, almost everything that seems obvious today only came to be because some of our predecessors were incapable of remaining realistic and demanded the impossible.

Returning to the age-old chorus (that from the self-justifying narrative, not from Madonna’s song) – such were the times, times were hard, they just did not know, did not understand, let themselves be deceived, got lost, erred in their ways – the thought experiment I am making here is very simple. What if they did think it over, did not get lost at any point, did choose consciously, did become communists with the deep and honest conviction that Marx’s ideas provide an answer to the question of what had gone wrong and how to change that, and that the communist party can be a vehicle for that change?

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A few years ago, the Bali village of Batuagung was haunted by communists.43 And no, this is not about any type of guerrillas or militias. Neither is this about a spectre being a metaphor. Quite literally, the village community decided that its problems – a high suicide rate and cases of demonic possession – are due to ghosts of the victims of a 1965-66 massacre. Nine bodies of persons murdered during the anti-communist cleansing were exhumed from the mass grave and buried in a proper ceremony.

Similarly to many other decolonising countries, shortly after decolonisation, Indonesia took a left turn. Suharto taking over meant, among other things, a gigantic cleansing done in 1965-66, the victims of which were real and suspected members of the Communist Party of Indonesia. Five hundred thousand to a million people are estimated to have died then. To this day, the murder remains an open secret in Indonesia. And the ghosts continue to haunt the country.

It was less than a hundred years ago that shtetls were still haunted by dybbuks. Then, they turned into ash and smoke together with the people who believed in them. The spectre of communism is haunting both the polish right and the polish left. Every now and then, the latter must ritually separate itself from communism every now and then (just a sort of an exorcism we do). The murdered polish communists have nobody to haunt, all the more now that the generation which could still remember them is dying.

We are living in a material world and we are material girls (cis, trans, queer...). In a material world, death is a final word, more or less. More or less, since the laws of conservation of mass and energy guarantee a specific type of immortality, no matter whether we are decaying and being devoured by worms, turning into dust or evaporating in an atomic bomb explosion. It is just that the peculiar immortality of matter and energy does not, unfortunately, relieve the living bodies of suffering. Half a century after her sister’s death, my grandaunt Pola was still crying. Half a century from now, the wounds of those who live through the massacre of Gaza (which, as I am writing this, has already been continuing for over 120 days) will still be unhealed.

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Why was it that no one of my immediate family decided to leave for Israel? Finally, I can write this sentence: there is no doubt as to the fact that Grzegorz and Pola must have been very hopeful about the PRL [abbreviation for Polish People’s Republic]. Nevertheless, this is only one part of the answer. Another gaping hole in my post-oblivion is that pertaining to their attitude to the state of Israel itself. Theoretically, it should be simple, communism = internationalism. Yet another stereotypical defense line, applied when there is a need to distance oneself from Judeo-Communism and proclaim its nonexistence: communism was international, ergo the Jews who became communists renounced their jewishness. It might very well have been so, Your Honour, oh High Tribunal of History, very well. Even if my grandpa was a communist in Belgium before the war, active in such organisations as the International League Against Anti-Semitism, and my grandaunt wished to be interred at the Jewish cemetery.44 In practice, my childhood taught me that the fact of having “a state of our own” (even one where no one of our immediate family wanted to live), is a value in itself, an emergency exit, a triumph of the Jewish will to survive. It took the Israeli attacks on Gaza in 2014 and my beloved friend, together with his friends from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, to successfully prevent me from turning a blind eye once again and pull me away from that automatic Zionism of mine.

As long as the automatic Zionism lived inside me, and I remained immersed within it, it would never even cross my mind to ask Pola about her attitude to Israel and Palestine. The pre-war and post-war communism carried with itself an immense load of anti-colonialism. This also worked the other way round. The heart of the matter is that in the case of white people – and even those not entirely white, as the Aszkenazy – what was to be found on the level of ideas would not always match the practice.45 How did the things that my communist aunts believed in translate into their spontaneous assessment of reality? Was their internationalism strong enough to make them care about Palestinians? When Grzegorz was imprisoned in the French camp in Algeria, and later, when he was a trade attaché in Vietnam in the 1960s, were the causes of the Algerian and the Vietnamese people as real to him as the cause of the Spanish republic had once been? What did Spain mean to the teenage Lilka and what was Zionism for her?

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Zerwana genealogia [A genealogy discontinued] – such is the telltale title of Magdalena Grabowska’s book about the lack of continuity between Polish feminism and the activists of the PRL-period women’s movement.46 In the case of the pre-war Jewish communists it is difficult even to talk about breaking away from them. There are too many discontinuities, erasures, and dis-integrations. Despite the gigantic effort made by some in the post-war Polish humanities, attempts at integrating the history of Polish Jews with the history of poland have remained unsuccessful. Communism serves as a figure of otherness, a negative point of reference. Judeo-Communism is an antisemitic phantasm, one so strong that Anna Zawadzka finds it to be the model fundamental for Polish antisemitism as a whole.47 Furthermore, “Communism” serves another important function in Polish discourse: that of delegitimisation. Just say, “I am a communist” out loud – at best, they will ridicule you, at worst you will be prosecuted for breaching article 256 of the penal code. Up to three years of deprivation of liberty for those who publicly promote “nazi, communist or fascist ideology or another ideology calling for a use of force aimed at influencing political or social life.”48 My family history is full of gaps and seems even more shredded than the threads in this text of mine. There is no room for female Jewish communists in any genealogy in this country. Certainly not today, and maybe – never at all.

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I used to think that the method of comparing systems by counting the corpses they generate is not only immoral but also pointless. However, when one lives in a country where communism = stalinism and Pol Pot, one begins to observe, over time, that, for years, certain victims have been counted more meticulously than others. Maybe, then, for a change, one ought to say that not all communists were busy building forced labour camps, reinforcing a reign of terror and spreading newspeak. Some communists were seriously devoted to building a better world. And some of those – quite a lot, actually, both in terms of numbers and percentage – were murdered for that.

In other words: different deaths are counted differently, and memory is distributed unequally. In poland, deaths of Poles are counted differently from the deaths of those who happened to die here but did not happen to be Polish. On a global scale, which we have already seen even in memes, the thing is – roughly – that the weight of your death depends on the colour of your skin. In this sense, by building the border wall, my country realised the postulate of entering Europe, our 1990s dream. Maybe we thought that the essence of our dream is a tad different, but maybe we were just naive. Abortion, housing, reasonable earnings, social benefits, and cis and trans girls kissing in the streets are for those over in the West, for you we have a border wall and a job in a young dynamic team while remaining self-employed.

In other words still: without acknowledging the fact that communism was and, in many parts of the worlds, still is a real political option, a dream dreamt by many people, women and men alike, but also their conscious and rational choice; without understanding that in the interwar period and during the war it was one of the few forces actively opposing fascism, it is impossible to understand much of 20th and 21st century history.

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“There’s nothing more pathetic than a middle-class commie” – claims one of the shadier characters in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka49. As for the social class the Dzierzgowski siblings, i.e. Grzegorz (Hersz), Pola and Lila, belonged to, information is scarce, but the picture it shows is quite coherent. Almost everything I know about my grandpa comes from the second card Pola filled in for the Yad Vashem. It is difficult to establish Abraham Mendel Dzierzgowski’s occupation. Until recently, I did not even know his first name, as the post-war questionnaires and resumes filled in by Grzegorz and Pola, as well as official documents, showed its different variants. Hersz’s birth certificate, found in digitalised archives, written in legible Cyrillic script, leaves no doubt – “Father’s name: Abram Mendel’’ says both the certificate itself and the elegant signature below, also in Cyrillic script. While the “Adam” to be found in some post-war documents can be explained as a creative polonisation of “Abraham’’ (it would be interesting to establish whether it was in a similar way that grandpa Hersz became Grisza during the war in Spain, only to finally become Grzegorz after the war), I have still been unable to establish the origin of the phrase: “Father’s name: Stanisław” to be found in a few places.50 Nonetheless, in those innumerable questionnaires the post-war party expected its members to fill in, Pola and Grzegorz would bravely come clean about their petit bourgeois background. At some point, after the war already, Pola wrote her short resume. The undated document must have been written in or shortly after the year 1945: such is the latest date it mentions, while it was also written before Grzegorz returned from Moscow. “My brother, the only family member alive, is currently in Moscow.” (So, she already knew about Lilka’s death then. How did she learn about that? When? Who told her? When did Grzegorz learn about that, having been stripped of his polish citizenship by the Second Polish Republic for his participation in the Spanish war, spent several years at a French camp, and then in the USSR?) In that resume, her father was a civil servant in the town of Łomża. Several dozen years later, filling in her Yad Vashem testimony, she eventually wrote commerçant – merchant – in the “occupation” field.51

Before leaving for Spain, Grzegorz studied medicine in Belgium. It seems he never completed his studies or worked in that field. Also in Belgium, Pola studied pharmacology. After the war, she worked at the Ministry of Internal Affairs Hospital pharmacy in Warsaw. Studying abroad was probably no coincidence there: those were the 1930s, Polish universities were refusing to accept Jewish students, medicine and pharmacology being two of the least accessible programmes. Anyway, we have those three kids, undoubtedly from the small town middle class (we do not know where they actually lived; documents mention the towns of Maków Mazowiecki and Łomża,) who had been planning their careers in the professions (on Lilka’s Yad Vashem card, Pola wrote “student”, without specifying either a university or a programme). And all three of them kept communising persistently – each until the end of their own life, although one of the lives lasted for twenty years and another one for eighty.

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In her wonderful article, which nearly cost her losing the Hannah Arendt Award, Masha Gessen52 writes about the dangers of recognising the Shoah as unique event. To shorten and simplify the main thought: if we decide that the Shoah was a unique event, one of a kind, an unprecedented gap in history, history’s black hole – if we claim so, what is the use of the words “Never again”? This, probably the most important ethical challenge for our times, the one hidden in the words “Never again – nowhere and to no one”, may only be met when we face the awareness of the fact that the Shoah was and still is a real possibility, not only in our history, but also in our here and now. Another sine qua non is the rejection of speculations about the irremovable darkness allegedly inherent in human nature followed by asking ourselves the question – this is more Marx than Gessen already – about the conditions that must be fulfilled for human beings of all genders to be able to live their material lives without exploitation, hunger and war (and climate catastrophe, if it is not too late still). Or simpler still – this time paraphrasing Mother Jones – weep for the dead and fight for the living, biting and clawing the enemy like hell.

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The second document in which I found a trace of Lila Dzierzgowska’s existence is the Księga pamięci gminy żydowskiej w Łomży [The Memory Book of the Jewish Commune in Łomża]. Lila appears there twice:

“The round-up of Jews was organised with the help of the young National Democrats, who were seeking revenge on the Jews for their collaboration with the Russians. A son of the aforementioned dentist Galicka, was taking his revenge on Lilka Dzierzgowska, as she was active in the ranks of the Komsomol.”53

“Groups of Poles collaborated with the Gestapo. They became famous for squeezing money out of Jews, and then giving the hiding ones away to the murderers [anyway]. Thus died: Friszman, Beniamin Ołtarz, Nomberg (owner of the mill), Lilka Dzierzgowska, Panicz (owner of the furniture shop) and others.”54

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Goodnight, aunties. The struggle continues.

37 A. Wievorka, Ils étaient juifs, résistants, communistes, 2018, p. 155-156, 202, 224, 228.

38 K. Kaniowska, Postpamięć [online], https://cbh.pan.pl/pl/postpami%C4%99%C4%87 [02.03.2024].

39 Lila Dzierzgowska [in:] The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names [online], https://yvng.yadvashem.org/nameDetails.html?language=en&itemId=1858542&ind=1 [02.03.2024]; Photograph of Dzierzgowska, -, Lila [in:] Hall of Names photos [online], https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/photos/14165244 [02.03.2024].

40 This spelling is not coincidental. Following Audre Lorde, I use the lowercase letter “p”, in order to mark how I distance myself from the project that is the state as such (I am not a fan). Another purpose is to remind myself that, as a co-user of language, I can also be its co-changer (co-spoiler). I take the risk of making someone angry. In the end, however, considering the position I am speaking from, I might make someone angry with the very fact of opening my mouth. 

41 Dyskusja Ośrodka Studiów Kulturowych i Literackich nad Komunizmem IBL PAN: Komunizm i PRL dzisiaj, “Teksty Drugie” 2013, 3, s. 227-244 [online], https://rcin.org.pl/dlibra/publication/79158/edition/62117 [access: 02.03.2024].

42 See also: A. Zawadzka, Więcej niż stereotyp. “Żydokomuna” jako wzór kultury polskiej, Warszawa 2023 [online], https://ispan.waw.pl/ireteslaw/handle/20.500.12528/1968 [02.03.2024].

43 A. Rosa, J. Topsfield, Communist victims exhumed in Bali to stop their spirits disturbing villagers [online], https://www.smh.com.au/world/communist-victims-exhumed-in-bali-to-stop-their-spirits-disturbing-villagers-20151031-gknm72.html [02.03.2024].

44 J. Nalewajko-Kulikov, Obywatel Jidyszlandu. Rzecz o żydowskich komunistach w Polsce, Warsaw 2009 [online], https://rcin.org.pl/publication/83656 [02.03.2024].

45 cf. an article on women of the Spanish left retrieving their memories (a retrieval which is, in a sense, a mirror image of the loss about which I am writing here) and on the discrepancies between the promise of emancipation and the reality of patriarchal structures.; A. C. Puerta, T. Żukowski, Bohaterki, bojowniczki, przegrane? Hiszpańskie narracje o kobietach zaangażowanych w ruchy lewicowe pierwszej połowy XX wieku, SLH 2, 2013 [online], https://journals.ispan.edu.pl/index.php/slh/article/view/slh.2013.011/185 [02.03.2024].

46 M. Grabowska, Zerwana genealogia. Działalność społeczna i polityczna kobiet po 1945 roku a współczesny polski ruch kobiecy, Warsaw 2018.

47 See e.g. A. Zawadzka [in:] Dyskusja Ośrodka Studiów Kulturowych i Literackich nad Komunizmem, op. cit.

48 The present author wishes hereby to emphasise that she is not promoting anything and the discussion she presents is of purely theoretical nature. The above notwithstanding, she admits that, at the theoretical level, she perceives several quite essential differences between communist ideology and nazi and fascist ideologies, furthermore admitting that – in theory – she would even be inclined to find an ideology based on the assumption of people being equal somewhat superior to ideologies which are, by definition, racist. She does not, however, intend to call for anything.

49 S. Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, London 2022, p. 175.

50 See e.g.: Grzegorz Dzierzgowski [in:] Wikipedia.pl.

51 Abram Dzierzgowski [in:] The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names [online], https://yvng.yadvashem.org/nameDetails.html?language=en&itemId=1845441&ind=1 [02.03.2024].

52 M. Gessen, In the Shadow of the Holocaust. How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today, “The New Yorker”, 2.12.2023 [online], https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust [02.03.2024].

53 W Łomżyńskim getcie i obozie zambrowskim. Relacja Sary Blumowicz-Knot [in:] Księga pamięci gminy żydowskiej w Łomży, ed. Jom-Tow Lewiński., translated into Polish by A. Bielecki, E. Wroczyńska, Łomża 2019, p. 102 [online], https://name.lomza.pl/2022/08/28/ksiega-pamieci-gminy-zydowskiej-w-lomzy-2/ [02.03.2024].

54 Miasto i koszmary. Z dziennika Ch. Podróżnika, ibid. p. 108.

Quiet, Sister. On the (non)telling of herstories

Joanna Ostrowska

For Noah

The Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art is located in a secession town house in Bytom55 at the address of 26 Main Square. Since 1922, the property was owned by a mother and her daughter: Käthe Cohn and Friederike Marianne Guttman. The Jewish citizens of the Reich lived in the German city then called Beuthen until the 1930s. Forced to leave due to increasing anti-Semitic sentiment, they ended up in Berlin. In 1938, Marianne was stripped of her title to the house. She was already alone then, her mother having died a year prior. Four years later, Marianne was gassed at the Kulmhof death camp (Chełmno nad Nerem).

The owners of No. 26 were educated women from a wealthy Jewish family inhabiting the borderlands of the province of Oberschlesien. They had all these things in common with the 1878-Beuthen-born Jew Else Croner. The Berlin-based feminist, writer and university lecturer was a member of the German capital’s intellectual elite. In 1942, she committed suicide, terrified by impending deportation to a concentration camp. Thus, Käthe, Marianne and Else are Bytom’s heroines, whose fates connect the city’s contemporary citizens with the erased local Polish-German history of the 20th century.

The title of the exhibition which gave rise to this text, Shout, Sister, shout!, references the motifs of sisterhood and shouting, the latter both as a form of protest and a mechanism for bringing back memories. Years of deliberate silence and erasing herstories in the local context have provoked loud resistance and public action aimed at restoring the unique tissue to the corpus of the town’s and the region’s history. Simultaneously, the above biographies, just like many others still waiting for researchers to explore them, are intended to form a new and inclusive community of “heroic persons.”56 My understanding of shouting in this context is that of an invitation to listen to such hidden stories which, for years, we have been unable or unwilling to hear.57 Why is it, then, that I have titled my text – against the current of the exhibition – Quiet, Sister?

The erasure from historical narratives experienced by my heroines took place on several levels. Regardless of the flow of time, political and historical changes are still being treated as “ballast for memory”58 – still unworthy of being remembered. Similarly to Käthe, Marianne and Else, their experiences of World War II are stories of pain, loss and suffering. Most of them were incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps. Others were transported into forced labour, and further to penitentiaries, including psychiatric hospitals. Some lived through the war, but they were generally not in a position to share their experiences. They were either unable or not allowed to give a testimony, which is a crucial stage in the process of leaving the war trauma behind.

Indeed, it was quite the contrary. They would hide their past, as “such a résumé” was still dangerous in the post-war period. On a certain level, those were also other survivors – particularly political prisoners – who blocked their voices, deeming that they were weakening the narrative of „true heroines”. This specific hierarchy of survivors59 generated a pattern for remembering women persecuted during World War II that has been followed until now. Those Sisters who were deemed “asocial”60, be it before, during or after the war, if they lived, were expected to remain silent. In Poland, their story is still a tale of non-telling.

Stigma

Thus, behind intellectuals, women of wealthy Jewish families, political prisoners and fighters, still entirely different heroines of the war and post-war persecution remain hidden. They have no names or surnames – still often treated as nothing but a penitentiary cohort; branded with the cliches and categories used by the perpetrators. Their position in the hierarchy of post-war Polish memory also depends on pre-war class circumstances, wealth, and family history. They rarely owned property which their biography could be tied to. Some of them would very frequently change their place of residence and occupation – they applied various strategies of survival in the pre-war reality. Obviously, then, memories of them or their reconstructed biographies are more liquid, frequently filled with gaps and doubt, nonetheless still possible to be told.

Käthe, Marianne i Else did not live through the war, but there is no more doubt as to the point in the process of bringing their stories to light today. As for the heroines of this text, the situation is quite different. “Asocial element”, “margins” or “accomplices” are but a few of the descriptions to be found both in testimonies from other surviving women and in Polish historiography. The term “asocial” was used in the Nazi language to indicate groups undesirable in the Aryan society. The concentration camps marked them, as a special category of incarcerated persons, with a black triangle on their clothes. In the pre-war period, a term closest to “asociality” was the category of “unnecessary people”. All the stigmatising terms mentioned here refer to a highly heterogeneous group of persons found to oppose the social norms of the time and place in question: persons in the crisis of homelessness and with no permanent residence (punishable vagrancy), sex workers, alcoholics, persons avoiding work, women considered immoral for transgressing the sexual norm of the time (including non-heteronormative women) and Romani women. Up to 1939, the category encompassed persons of German origin. During the war, such a categorisation also applied to men and women of Polish (or more broadly – other than German) origin, marked with the black Winkel [German for “triangle”] in concentration camps. Their stories have been erased from all Polish memory sites. The category of “asociality” was supposed to pertain only to persons of German origin, even considered to be accomplices employed by the SS men in their atrocities. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka wrote: “The black and green German winkels had one more ugly characteristic, namely – a propensity for erotic deviations. […] In this field, the German women reigned supreme. They seemed commonly encumbered with aberration.”61

After the war, the “black winkels” could not be sisters for whose shouting and stories anyone would fight. Thus, if we are to write about sisters’ shouting and silence, referencing the biographies of Käthe, Marianne and Else of Beuthen, it is worth trying at least to mention those, whose stories were, for years, forbidden or considered unworthy of telling.

Pseudonyms

Women considered “asocial” born, living in or related to Beuthen/Bytom can be traced down in the so-called perpetrators’ files at the Courts and Prosecutors’ Offices in Bytom, as well as penitentiaries in Katowice and Tarnowskie Góry. So far, no one has attempted to note their names or identify the reasons for their detention. This comes as little surprise as, from a broader perspective, the heterogeneous category of “female enemies of the Nazi society” encompassed thousands of women, whose lives cannot be told with a single, generalising voice. Let us, then, choose three heroines who, as opposed to Käthe, Marianne and Else, lived through the war, but their war and post-war experiences were blurred in the accusatory narratives of other surviving former prisoners. None of them was originally from Beuthen, but the location is not a factor of major significance here. Before, however, we move on to Małgorzata, Greta and Maria, there is one more remark on identity and the process of telling/outlining the heroines’ biographies.

Until now, even when women considered “asocial” were discussed in writing, it was with the use of pseudonyms, concealing their personal data. In many cases, the researcher’s decision was limited to an initial replacing a surname. In such a case, Else Croner resident in Beuthen would be Elsa C. – still stripped of a significant aspect of her identity. For years, I rebelled against such practice, as it is indeed one resembling those leading to secondary deviance. By concealing the surname, we are sending an unambiguous message that we are dealing with a person accused of committing a crime. On the other hand, however, the ethics of a researcher who investigates stories of the excluded requires us to protect our heroes’ biographies. Without a given person’s testimonies and reports, we are unable to answer whether they would like their life’s story – often extraordinarily brutal and traumatising – to be made public. Our heroines have a right to posthumous privacy.

Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that in the case of other groups of victims and survivors, such doubt appears very rarely. Simply put – the problem of discovering identities of World War II victims is nonexistent if we are talking about heteronormative and cisgender persons; political prisoners, Jews, or Jehovah Witnesses. Complications arise when researchers assess biographies by the standards of their own era and try to evaluate them using the category of morality, setting up hierarchies of victims and survivors. Is there a third way, which would protect the heroines, simultaneously circumnavigating secondary criminalisation?

In this story, Małgorzata and Greta will not have surnames, but their places of birth and residence, together with other personal data and file signatures, constitute a trace they could be found with. I also find the use of the first name only to be a way of subjectifying the heroines, as well as a signal for myself, as a researcher, marking the two biographies as remarkably significant and personally relevant. In the end, it was them that I decided to write this text about – these are their biographies that are intended to give rise to further research.

I report the narrative of the third heroine – Maria – with her surname, guided by the witness’s own decision. Despite her fear, pain and post-war persecution, she told her war story, working together with local historians and a documentary director. Simply put – she took over the narrative, making her stand opposing the stereotypical tale passed down from generation to generation, that about the immoral “Poles’ lover” (Polenliebchen). She appeared as Maria Potrzeba née Kösters, and this is how her story ought to be told.

Now, what is the personal closeness between the researcher and the witnesses mentioned before? Contrary to declarations made by those who study history, it is difficult to remain indifferent in relation to the microhistories one studies. The heroines I chose fit into a bigger picture of erased biographies of “unnecessary people” in Polish collective memory of World War II. This heterogenous and extraordinarily complex community of heroes and heroines has been a point of departure for my research for years now. Non-normative biographies intertwine in my head, forming a mosaic of narratives filled with pain resulting from lack of post-war recognition. The choice of Małgorzata, Greta and Maria is entirely personal, dictated by a need to tell those stories which, at a certain point, stuck in my mind stronger than others. This hierarchy cannot, unfortunately, be avoided.

Them

I found Małgorzata’s story during one of my first searches into women described as “asocial” in the Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz camp complex. There are several surviving photographs of Polish female prisoners of this category. Number 7478 was assigned to Małgorzata, brought to KL Auschwitz I in the transport of 22.05.1942.62 The preserved mugshot shows, in three characteristic poses, a young person of a girlish face.63 A blonde with longish hair, probably growing back after having been cut at a different penitentiary unit, looking into the lens. Małgorzata is wearing a striped prison uniform, and in one of the shots a white head scarf is hiding her hair. Blue eyes, a rounded face, thin lips. The criminal placard shows the prisoner number, camp name and the note “Aso P.” (Polish).

Fot. 2 Małgorzata. Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, ref. 7478.

At the point of being brought to the camp, Małgorzata was precisely twenty years old. She was most probably born in Tczew, although some sources claim that to have been Poznań. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, she was transported into forced labour deeper into the Reich territory, where she was employed as an SS man’s housemaid. Nearly three years afterwards, she managed to escape, but was found out during a routine control on a train and subsequently transported to the Posen (Poznań) penitentiary. From there, she was moved to the Auschwitz camp in May 1942. In her case, the category of “asociality” is related to the “crime” of avoiding work (the so-called Arbeitsscheu).

We know very little about Małgorzata’s life at the concentration camp. She was certainly assigned to the first female penal company in the Budy-Bór subcamp. Then, already at the KL Birkenau, she fell ill with typhoid and was brought to the camp hospital unconscious.64 She worked in the internal commandos, both in Birkenau and the Rajsko subcamp. In a post-war survey conducted by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in the early 1970s, she practically did not mention her experiences at all.65 The text is rather laconic. It is only thanks to a conversation with one of the museum’s employees that we know Małgorzata returned to Poznań after the war. Her parents died and her siblings were unable to help her. Over time, she found work as an orderly at a hospital. Over a decade after the war, she got married and had two children. Her son and daughter were incurably ill, but Małgorzata did not develop on the topic. She thought that the reason for her children’s illness was her time at the concentration camp and the pseudo-medical experiments she was subjected to there. “She still seems terrorised, continuously living in the atmosphere of the camp.” – says a note by the Memorial’s employee.66 Małgorzata died in Poznań in 1992, at seventy years of age.

*

For several years already, I have been fruitlessly seeking any new information on Greta’s wartime experiences. Her Auschwitz camp mug shot left me permanently perplexed.67 A young brunette, dark eyes, small lips – a curl over her head held together with several hair slides. Her hair, similarly to Małgorzata’s, previously cut, is now growing back. On Greta’s head, we can see a colourful headscarf with a geometric pattern. Wearing a drill dress with a black collar decorated with a white floral pattern and a darker apron. Her clothes come from the Ravensbrück female camp. It was from there that she was moved to the KL Auschwitz I, in the first transport of women in the history of the camp complex, on 26th March 1942. She was assigned the number 253 and the “Aso’’ category. The photograph was probably taken some time after she was brought to the penitentiary unit.

Fot. 3 Greta. Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, ref. 253.

In identification documents, she had been assigned German nationality and evangelical religion.68 She came from Danzig (Gdańsk), where her parents remained. Her mother, Klara, had died in the early 1930s, while her father, Paul, was on disability benefits as a blind person. Greta had no siblings and, as the camp documents say, she had had nothing to live for as early as in her childhood. Since 1934, she might have been classified as a person “requiring sterilisation”, ”social margin”, “ballast” for the Nazi society. Pursuant to the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring of July1933, her father’s “innate blindness” was a “state of illness” qualifying his descendants for the procedure. Moreover, since 1937 Greta remained under police control as a sex worker. Unfortunately, little is known about that period of her life. It is still difficult to establish when she moved to Hamburg-Altona and took up residence at 26 Lohestrasse, property belonging to a certain Richter. Here, the trace disappears.

In January 1942, Greta was arrested by the Kripo Hamburg and transported to the Ravensbrück camp. Over a year later, she was transported to the KL Auschwitz. In July, she was already in the Budy-Bór female penal company, from which she escaped with a fellow prisoner – a sex worker by the name of Hildegard. Seven days afterwards, three further “Aso”-classified prisoners – Pauline, Erika and Alicja – escaped as well.

The surviving telegrams of the Nazi police, ordering all units to search for the fugitive women, contain the following description of Greta’s appearance as of July 1942: 1,51 m tall, slim, brown hair, oval face, blue eyes and a small nose. She had no distinguishing marks. It was remarked that she had been arrested for “asocial behavior (prostitution)”. At the time of her escape, she was wearing a blue camp dress and a white and blue apron.69

After two months, she was once more arrested in Hamburg. After a short investigation, she was transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In June 1944, she was certainly still alive, which is indicated by the gynecologist tests done at the camp hospital.70 Similarly to other female prisoners, she had been referred for cytological tests several times. Most probably, that was done with the intention of selecting new women for the brothels at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz III. At the beginning of August 1944, Greta was transported to Ravensbrück – weighing 54 kg back then. The last entry on her health card at the new camp is one from late August and indicates serious gastric problems. This is the last piece of information pertaining to Greta. I have still been unable to establish whether Greta died at the Ravensbrück camp or if she was transported to another camp. Maybe she managed to survive and return to Hamburg after the war. Or, maybe, she chose an entirely different place of residence and tried to begin everything anew. This fragment of her story still remains unspecified.

*

Maria Potrzeba passed away in 2017, at the age of 90.71 All her life, she lived near Münster. Her parents died while she was still a child, so she was brought up by her older siblings. In 1941 she was only fourteen years old. The family farm was ran by her older brother, but during the war there were also Polish forced labourers working there. One of them was Florian Spionczka, who became friends with Alois – Maria’s brother. Over time, they were joined by Józef Goryl and Maria’s other brother’s sister-in-law, Hedwig. Maria, being the youngest of the whole company, only rarely joined their meetings.

Fot. 4 Maria Potrzeba, 1941, photo by Lorenz Ingmann,

from the private archive of Barbara Pinto, Spelle.

https://zumfeindgemacht.de/fall/maria-potrzeba

In summer 1941 while controlling Florian’s files, the police found Hedwig’s photograph with a dedication, which led to a Gestapo investigation. Maria was arrested in early autumn, after neighbours denouncing her on grounds of her behaviour. The reason for her arrest was “suspicion of forbidden contacts with foreign forced labourers” and “racial shame” (Rassenschande).72 Maria was brutally beaten during the Gestapo interrogation. The terrified teenager had no concept of why she had been arrested. She was promised to be allowed to go back home quickly if she signed the interrogation papers. She did that without reading the text of the statement.

On 29th November, Maria and Hedwig were arrested again. The former was placed in a penitentiary unit in Dortmund, while the latter was serving seven months at the Münster prison. For Maria, the date of the arrest marks the beginning of a series of transports to consecutive correctional institutions, up to January 1943, when she was placed at the Uckermark camp for young girls (a Ravensbrück subcamp). Since then, she was the juvenile prisoner number 290.73

Maria lived through the war and returned home, but her home village would not let her forget about the past. The local community openly despised her, calling her “Poles’ lover”. In the 1950s, Maria was already living in Herne (seventy kilometres from her home village of Asbeck), got married and had three children. It was only as late as the mid-1990s that she began her fight for compensation for the time spent at the concentration camp. Today, her report on the conditions of survival and the history of suffering at Uckermark is a very important voice in survivors’ archives.74

2016 saw the premiere of a documentary based on Maria’s biography, titled: … dass das heute noch immer so ist – Kontinuitäten der Ausgrenzung (dir. Heike Rode, Tom Weller). The visual testimony tells not only of the wartime exclusion of a young and entirely innocent girl, but also of post-war continuation of the persecution. Maria died a year after the film was completed. Until the end, she fought for commemoration of Florian Spionczka and Józef Goryl. The locals could not accept that:

Maria Potrzeba: “Then the drive came again. On the phone. The last time, it was a proper threat. ‘Don’t you dare come here!’. But I’m not coming. I just want to set up the stone – a commemoration. (…) It all came back again. (…) I can see it clearly, after all. And those of my relatives who still live there. They can see the locals’ reactions coming up. It is still being said that it should all be slowly swept under the carpet. One must forget. I find it terrifying. It is easy for everyone to say: forget. Something like this must not be forgotten. I cannot forget it either. They ought to have given me a prescription for me to forget. This is simply impossible.”75

*

Małgorzata, Greta and Maria have finally got scripts for their stories, but the history of Bytom still hides untold wartime biographies: stories of those women who were deemed unworthy of remembering. And although in their cases a biographical investigation will, most probably, be doubly complicated, it is all the more worth trying to find any trace whatsoever. Maybe their stories will be limited only to mentioning their names and causes of arrest. There will be no addresses, buildings, or tales of distinguished citizens. Probably, the only way they have been remembered is in a stigmatising context.

This does not matter much today. We must finally want to hear their whisper.

Bibliography:

Götz Aly, Obciążeni. »Eutanazja« w nazistowskich Niemczech. Wołowiec: Czarne, 2015.

Wolfgang Ayaß‚ »Gemeinschaftsfremde«. Quellen zur Verfolgung von Asozialen 1933–1945. Materialien aus dem Bundesarchiv, H. 5, Koblenz, 1998.

Helga Amesberger, Brigitte Halbmayr, Elke Rajal, »Arbeitsscheu und moralisch verkommen«. Verfolgung von Frauen als »Asoziale« im Nationalsozialismus. Wien, Berlin: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2019.

Helga Amesberger, Brigitte Halbmayr, Elke Rajal, Stigma Asozial. Geschlechtsspezifische Zuschreibungen, behördliche Routinen und Orte der Verfolgung im Nationalsozialismus. Wien, Berlin: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2020.

Agnieszka Dauksza, Klub Auschwitz i inne kluby. Rwane opowieści przeżywców. Gdańsk: Słowo/obraz terytoria, 2016.

Urszula Glensk, Historia słabych. Reportaże i życie w dwudziestoleciu (1918-1939). Kraków: Universitas, 2014.

Julia Hörath, »Asoziale« und »Berufsverbrecher« in den Konzentrationslagern 1933 bis 1938. Göttingen (u.a.): Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 2017.

Joanna Ostrowska, Przemilczane. Seksualna praca przymusowa w czasie II wojny światowej. Warszawa: Marginesy, 2018.

Christa Schikorra, Kontinuitäten der Ausgrenzung: »asoziale« Häftlinge im Frauen – Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2001.

Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell. Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2022 (3. Auflage).

55 In the text, I use historical names of places (e.g. Bytom/Beuthen), thus acknowledging both their situation with respect to changes in states’ borders and their common Polish-German history.

56 This text is devoted to herstories, yet it is worth mentioning that with many biographies we do not know the gender identity of the persons they pertain to. Inclusiveness is a category which yields a broader perspective on the reconstructed biographies.

Translator’s note: The quotation marks are used by the author to emphasise her use of the Polish structure “osoba” [EN: person] + [adjective], which has recently become a popular way of avoiding obligatorily gender-specific nouns in the Polish language.

57 This fragment references the dedication in Robert Sommer’s book Das KZ-Bordell. Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern: Gewidmet den weiblichen und männlichen Opfern der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, besonders denen, deren Zeugenschaft wir niemals hören konnten oder wollten. [Dedicated to the female and male victims of the National Socialist concentration camps, especially those, whose testimony we never wanted or were never able to hear.]

58 I use the phrase to reference the language of the perpetrators. Persons deemed “hereditarily diseased”, “unworthy” and “asocial” were described as “ballast” in the Nazi society. At the same time, their post-war experiences are very often a continuation of the persecution – also on the level of not recognising their victim status and, eventually, lack of commemoration.

59 Translator’s note: Here, the present author discusses her use of the Polish term “przeżywcy”, coined by Agnieszka Dauksza in her book Klub Auschwitz i inne kluby. Rwane opowieści przeżywców. Dauksza presents the coinage as necessary in light of the normal Polish equivalent of “survivor”, i.e. “ocalony”, putting too much emphasis on being saved by others rather than surviving by one’s own effort, determination and sheer luck, which seems to be crucial in the contexts discussed both in her books and the present text.

60 I always use the term in quotation marks, in order to emphasise its Nazi use and the stigmatising character of the language, which persisted into the post-war period.

61 Z. Kossak, Z otchłani, Warszawa 2011, p. 149-150.

62 Archiwum Akt Nowych, Fundacja Polsko-Niemieckie Pojednanie w Warszawie 2680, sygn. 081371.

63 Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Archive (APMAB), sygn. 7478 (photograph).

64 APMAB, Instytut Higieny SS Rajsko, seg. 20 k. 469, 470.

65 APMAB, Mat./9855 inw. 160398 (survey).

66 ibid.

67 APMAB, sygn. 253 (photograph).

68 APMAB, Gestapo Ciechanów/103, t. 3 inw. 176114, k. 227-229; Gestapo Łódź / 3 inw. 155916, t. 3 mikrofilm 88/301-305.

69 Arolsen Archives, 1.1.35.2 / 3778438-39 (Individuelle Unterlagen Ravensbrück); 1.2.2.1 / 11402620-22 (Akten der Geheimen Staatspolizei, Staatspolizeistelle Litzmannstadt).

70 APMAB, Instytut Higieny SS Rajsko, segr. 40, k. 310, 931, 937, 1160; segr. 39, k. 172, 414, 720, 1073.

71 L. Knops, Maria Potrzeba [online], https://zumfeindgemacht.de/fall/maria-potrzeba/ [28.02.2024].

72 ibid.

73 ibid.

74 See: Maria Potrzeba – Als “Polenliebchen” unschuldig im KZ, Nora Hespers’ podcast with dr Insa Eschebach [online], https://www.podcast.de/episode/596233551/maria-potrzeba-als-polenliebchen-unschuldig-im-kz [20.02.2024].

75 …dass das heute noch immer so ist - Kontinuitäten der Ausgrenzung [film], dir. H. Rode, T. Weller, 2016 [online], https://vimeo.com/368488373 [20.02.2024].

Please distribute. Claude Cahoon and Marcel Moore’s antifascist campaign

Agata Cukierska

Workers! Fellow soldiers! Comrades! Wait not for infernal flames to burn our homes to ashes! Slow your machines down... Tinker with them secretly... Stop them.. if you want to stop the war!

Nameless soldier

An Underwood typewriter, a Kodak camera, a Philips radio and two pistols; books, press articles, one large wooden cross placed by Lucy on the fresh grave of a German soldier, pieces of fabrics and coins on which, with Lucy, they wrote “Down with war!” with nail polish. Furthermore, a pile of clippings, cigarette rolling papers and leaflets – altogether, a few hundred pieces of paper which became evidence of a crime punishable by death.

Over the 1940-1944 period, two French artists carried out a daring anti-Nazi campaign, aimed at damaging the morale of the German soldiers occupying Jersey, an island in the English Channel. The artists in question were Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, a couple of queer surrealists, better known as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. As opposed to many other female artists of the era, they never became muses for a male colleague, rather inspiring one another, having achieved a mastery in the field of demolishing established codes.76 When they met in 1909, Cahun was only fifteen years old and Moore was seventeen. It was then that they began what was euphemistically described as “friendship”, but what was in its essence, first and foremost, a romantic and intellectual partnership upon which they built their whole adult lives and artistic strategies.77

Despite having been a fully-fledged artist, co-author of surrealist manifestos and an outstanding writer and photographer, after her death Claude Cahun fell into total oblivion, only to be rediscovered in the second half of the 1980s. Doubly marked by otherness: a Jew and a lesbian, she became famous mostly thanks to her exceptional self-portraits discovered on Jersey in the 1980s, known to this day.

It is already on the level of her pseudonym that the artist’s playing with her identity becomes evident. Her new name can be male or female, while the surname is typically Jewish78, which shows how important she found her roots.79 Born in 1894 in Nantes, in a family of Jewish intellectualists. Her uncle was Marcel Schwob, the founder of the “Mercure de France” periodical. Educated in England, she subsequently returned to France, where in the 1930s she frequently participated in exhibitions and a variety of surrealists’ endeavours, wrote articles, plays and short stories. In the early 1920s, she moved in with Suzanne – a fellow artist, photographer, designer and illustrator, but also a friend, stepsister, stripteaser and lover.

While describing Claude Cahun’s life and work, it is vital that one pays particular attention to the figure of Marcel Moore. Until recently, Moore’s entire identity was often perceived in one of the following ways exclusively: either a stepsister and a lifelong companion or a lover.80

Art history has a tendency to treat the artist as an individual genius. In the case of Marcel Moore, it is crucial to understand that it is predominantly her who stands behind the camera, while Cahun poses for her eyes. She is the one whom Cahun calls l’autre moi, the other me.81 They were together for forty-five years, inseparable since their first meeting. Although one may only speculate, it was probably the long-term loneliness Moore was experiencing after her loved one’s death that led to her suicide in 1972.

Before the war, they were a couple actively participating in Paris’ intellectual and artistic life. They both had ties with communists, worked with such organisations as the antifascist Society of Revolutionary Artists and Writers82 or the Contre-Attaque group, took part in political rallies, and socialised with the greatest artists of the era.

Eventually, Claude and Marcel left Paris in 1937. The reason for this were growing divisions, political conflicts, right-wing riots and antisemitist demonstrations in the city. The war, however, did not spare the island of Jersey, where they hoped to find refuge, either. Recognising the strategic location of the Channel Islands Hitler gave an order to turn the biggest one – Jersey – into an unconquerable fortress. Since 1st July 1940, as long as until 9th May 1945, it was occupied, strictly isolated and ruled with an iron fist by Nazi Germany. In an unexpected answer to the German invasion, the British government demilitarised the island, thus discouraging its inhabitants from resisting the occupation.83 It is this decision taken by the government that led to historians frequently presenting the islanders mostly as collaborators, rather than dissidents. Only independent channels of communication, such as the BBC radio, encouraged the inhabitants to “try to do something anti-Nazi every day”.84 The illegal use of radios, after their possession had been banned in June 1942 roku, became the few inhabitants’ main form of resistance.85 In 1942, the German military collected over ten thousand radios.

Cahun and Moore gave one radio to the authorities, hiding another one. The artists decided that, since they were stuck on the island, they had to make use of their skills and avant-garde background, in order to create their own resistance campaign.

“Lucy and Suzanne began discussing how to escalate their actions. Lucy told Suzanne that she would like to do something serious, regular, and systematic. She wanted their actions to have a bigger impact.”86

For four years, they were creating a unique type of performance, using art as a tool of resistance. To quote Jeffrey H. Jackson: “Not everybody goes out in the streets to protest. They were in a very difficult situation in occupied territory with hundreds and hundreds of German troops around them, but they still found a way to resist and to keep going in that resistance in what were quieter ways — writing notes, passing messages. But it really had a big cumulative effect. Even though it wasn’t as public, it still ended up having that kind of power to speak to people.”87

They began creating their own messages, bulletins, leaflets and letters – including insults aimed at Hitler, calls for rebellion and fictional seditious dialogues, mostly in German – which constituted a campaign of their own. They slipped those into soldiers’ pockets, left them on military vehicles’ windscreens or placed them at newsstands. Signed by the Nazi “Soldier With No Name”, the materials were intended to gradually decrease soldiers’ will to fight and make them doubt their mission, encourage them to return home and to realise that the war was lost. Many of the notes included obscene jokes, songs, summaries of BBC news, dialogues, poems, slogans, and sometimes photomontages. The authors were trying to get into the German soldiers’ heads and make them think about the war differently.

Very little of the visual material they created during the occupation has survived until today. Cahun described how they would collect all German items they could find, still not knowing how to reuse them, in a way resembling the practices of Duchamp and other Dadaists in the recontextualisation of objets trouvés/found objects. The materials they dropped initially were so unobvious that they probably failed to be registered as acts of protest. Their first action included a photomontage of a photograph of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas together, combined with an image of German soldiers.88

“In a postwar letter, Lucy described the day that she and Suzanne came upon a photograph in a German magazine that showed a regiment of soldiers on the march. (...) They decided to cut the picture in half, keeping the bottom portion and turning an image of Nazi strength into one of a muddy mess. Then, with red paint, Lucy wrote what she called “our jingle”—ohne Ende—across it, rendering the soldiers as endlessly trudging through the muck. Not satisfied, she removed an old photograph she had of Oscar Wilde and his lover, Alfred Douglas, from its cherished frame. (...) Edna had heard that the Germans were about to commandeer a nearby abandoned house as sleeping quarters for the soldiers. It was the perfect place to complete the joke, Lucy thought, and that night Suzanne crept inside the dark, empty house and found the perfect spot to bang in a nail. The next day, the light from one of the windows would hit the photograph just right.”89

Their use of photomontage as a tool for resistance movement resembles the pioneering work of John Heartfield, whose anti-German works from the interwar period also had an enormous influence on Cahun and Moore’s artistic practice.

After the photomontages, there came time for other small subversive actions, such as writing the words “Without end” (Ohne Ende) on packets of cigarettes and other products, which were intended to signify a never ending war the Nazis subjecting their troops to. In the tactic, which proved crucial for their approach, the phrase Ohne Ende was taken from the pre-war Nazi slogan: “Terror without end or an end to terror” (Schrecken ohne Ende oder Ende mit Schrecken). Then, there came such actions as placing coins with the words “Down with war!” at an amusement park, writings on graves in a nearby graveyard (crosses with the ironic statement: “For them the war is over” on soldiers’ graves) and slogans at a Catholic church (a banner on the altar saying: “Jesus died for us, but we must die for Hitler.”)90

Over the four-year long campaign of political resistance, their efforts were becoming increasingly clear, though no less abstract. The main element of Cahun and Moore’s resistance strategy was the fictional newspaper titled Unsere Zeitung (“Our Newspaper”),91 which they disseminated among German soldiers, in St. Brelade’s Bay and in the Jersey capital, Saint Helier. They also began distributing anti-German propaganda written on cigarette rolling paper, often with a final note saying “Please circulate.” Cahun wrote most of the anti-propaganda text, while Moore translated it into German. She had concealed her fluency in the language from the authorities, even though it was legally obligatory to report such information.

The materials were placed in places where the soldiers could easily find them: in between pages of German-language magazines, in cigarette packets, or on telephone poles.92 “At least one time, probably other times, they put some sort of note in a bottle and threw it into the bay for it to wash up somewhere else. (...) Sometimes they would slip them into the pockets of soldiers.”93 Depositing the messages was a very risky endeavour. It was mostly Moore who did that:

“Suzanne would pick up a copy of Signal and begin leafing through it, acting as though she were simply reading the magazine. Lucy kept an eye on the newsagent and the other customers while also watching for police. There were too many ways to draw suspicion, so the timing of the drop was crucial. When Lucy gave her the sign, Suzanne pulled the photomontage out of her bag, quickly slipped it in between the pages of the magazine, and placed it back on the newsstand. Then they walked away casually, not looking back until they were at a distance.”94

Cahun described the details of their occupation-period activity in notebooks found at their arrest (those were lost, most probably destroyed by the Germans as capitulation approached). After the war, she documented their work, with clarity, humour and pride, in several autobiographical accounts which serve as proof of the women’s bravery, ingenuity and skill.95 The most lasting and systematic activity was writing and disseminating news as the “Soldier With No Name” (Der Soldat ohne Namen), formulated mostly in German. Nonetheless, content was also produced in Czech, Greek, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, in order to create the impression of the typewriter changing hands and that of an international conspiracy being at work there.

In one of the leaflets, Moore enhanced Cahun’s text with an illustration showing a Nazi soldier on a sinking boat, with his hands raised in surrender. The purposefully primitive drawing, lack of details and childlike simplicity stand in contrast to Moore’s education as an illustrator and designer.96 Underneath the drawing, there is the caption: “I think that at the end of the war, the waves will swallow both the sailor and the tiny boat, while Adolf Hitler’s yelling dies down.” Altogether, these form a clear metaphor of the Third Reich as a sinking ship.This example of anti propaganda effort, together with many others, proves that gallows humour was present in the leaflets as a political strategy. Such an approach references the surrealist tradition. André Breton himself perceived gallows humour as a way of debunking social myths.97 The director and writer Lizzie Thynne remarks: “Cahun and Moore realized that disrespect for Nazi authority could be very effectively evoked through laughter; irony and humour were anathema to the literalism and rule-bound thinking of their oppressors.”98

Another leaflet called for international dissemination of the propaganda, encouraging soldiers to “take it on holidays with them”, which was a gloomy_EN irony, as the island was fortified, which made it impossible to leave it. They also parodied the famous German poem Die Lorelei, emasculating Hitler by portraying him as the seductive river goddess. Instead of the beautiful song which distracts sailors, however, it is Hitler’s yelling that makes the war-torn nation veer off course and eventually crash, like a ship on rocks.

Elements of parody can also be seen in stylistic devices, wordplay, and the use of various rhetorical figures. This is exemplified in the case of the word Kampf (fight) repeated endlessly in one of the leaflets. Underlining capital letters, which suggest aggressiveness, repetitions, characters overlapping due to the same keys of the typewriter being pressed numerous times, and eventually the word being gradually degraded to single consonants: pf pfffff pffff – resembling the sound of breathing out, sighing or breaking wind. All this castrates the military rhetoric, drilling it phonetically. Other materials use the collective voice: “Our revolution must be done by everyone!”, creating the illusion of the scale of the operation being much larger than two persons. There is also no lack of typically surrealist elements, such as the rhetoric of dreams or spiritual visions, for instance saying: “This message is a prophecy!”.99

It is clear that the leaflets represent a special type of rhetorics, which refers directly to Cahun’s earlier poetic art. In the dramatically different circumstances of the occupied Jersey, she was finally able to implement, though on a smaller scale and with much more limited means than originally intended, some of the concepts and principles which she had designed while working with the revolutionary Contre-Attaque group in the 1930s. What is more, she could witness the influence of her subversive activity not only on the German commanders, who dubbed her and Moore spiritual franc-tireurs (“snipers”),100 but also, she was convinced, on the German soldiers she was later imprisoned with.

Manty elements of the resistance campaign go back to the roots of both women’s artistic practice, both those earlier than their work with surrealists and those originating from that period exactly. However, it is rooted not only in their earlier thinking about how art engages in politics, but also in their long-term practice of “imagining I am someone else” (imaginer que je suis autre) and the necessity of camouflaging.101 Cahun would constantly reinvent herself, from her teenage years until her death in 1954 roku, which can be seen most clearly in her series of alter-personas: in the photographic portraits and poetry. One of her collages has a caption saying: “Underneath the mask, a new mask. I will never stop taking further faces off.”102 Her interest in masquerade seems is consistent with Roger Caillois’ theory. For Caillois, unconscious mimicry of one’s environment reaches its extreme (which he calls “legendary psychastenia”), when a being is no longer capable of differentiating between itself and the world it inhabits. In human beings, such a state means a loss of personality and, eventually, mental illness. For Cahun, the extreme situation consists in unconscious obedience and acceptance of social roles.103

The issue of identity constantly reappears to be studied in the artistic couple’s entire body of work. Remarkably, during their stay on Jersey, not only did the artists abandon their pseudonyms and return to their family names, but they also changed their appearance completely, personifying the figure of respectable middle-aged upper middle class women.104 This decision of presenting a normative identity didn’t only render the sexual nature of their relationship invisible, but also erased their Jewishness and history of earlier ties with avant-garde and communist groups.

In Paris, Cahun’s image was that of bravely bald-shaven head, pencilled eyebrows and androgynous clothing. This look can be seen in many photographs. In a 1930 shot, in which they are both standing in front of a shop window at the premiere of her recently published book, Cahun is wearing a cap and a cardigan with a long scarf tied around her neck like a man’s necktie. Marcel Moore is wearing modern clothes: a dress with a square neckline, complemented by a belt and a daring necklace. On Jersey, in order to conceal her revolutionary identity, her queerness and Jewishness, Cahun became more feminine, even putting on velvet evening dresses.105
Although Claire Follain and Gen Doy wrote about Cahun’s identity on the island as a bourgeois, a closer look at the images reveals an identity that was more eccentric than normative.106 In addition to the change in their wardrobe, Cahun and Moore largely kept their distance in public places, thus gaining a reputation of eccentric sisters and that which they wanted most: invisibility in plain sight. Their photographs taken on Jersey before the introduction of a ban on photography in 1940 captured the change in appearance. The photographs seem to stand in opposition to their earlier portraits: taken outdoors and not in an improvised studio, at a medium distance and not close up, as well as showing Cahun in modern feminine clothing, as opposed to the daring avant-garde costumes. Nonetheless, reading these images as an extension to their earlier photographic practice shows a relationship between the artists’ visual identity and the subversive act that was soon to follow.

In that act, Cahun i Moore constructed a new identity, contradictory to each of their earlier ones. Created with the purpose of disseminating their notes and leaflets while avoiding self-presentation, it was the character of the anonymous German soldier. It was Cahun who came up with the idea of creating the “Soldier With No Name”, overcoming Moore’s initial reservations about using the pseudonym. Having learnt German from her governess and being fluent in the language, she doubted the point of using the phrase “with no name” (ohne Namen), while Namenlos (“nameless”) seemed more linguistically correct.107 The “Soldier With No Name” resembles the “Unknown Soldier” – the emblematic character representing the numberless troops fallen in World War I who sacrificed themselves to the fight for their countries’ freedom. Instead of that, the “Soldier Without Name” is disrespectful, refusing to give his life in the name of dubious patriotism. He subverts the rhetorics of justifying war, unmasking it as futile and exploitative.

Ascribing the leaflets to the “Soldier With No Name” shows how Cahun and Moore tried to occupy a subject position different from that of their own – without relying on photography. By creating the character of a Nazi soldier who decidedly opposes the German occupation, Cahun and Moore fought the system not through visible public protest, but through introducing an artistic fiction to the island, complicating the beliefs which might be expected in Nazi soldiers. Fiction as strategy subverses the distinctions between everyday life, aesthetics and political regimes, pushing the boundaries between those. When the spheres intersect, a new reality arises, unveiling what had been invisible and unexpected. Although their protest was private and anonymous, they still went into the public sphere to disseminate their materials, which put them in harm’s way. They were both aware of the risk and prepared for the worst: in case of arrest, they kept barbiturates in their coats’ pockets.

Throughout the campaign, the artists lived at La Rocquaise, a house next to the St. Brelade’s Bay hotel which was converted into Luftwaffe quarters. The closeness of the German troops protected the artists from suspicion, as the authorities could not imagine anyone daring to perform such deeds right under their nose. The German secret police (Geheime Feldpolizei) operated on wrong assumptions as to the suspects’ gender, class and race, as well as a stereotypical image of someone who would be capable of such persistent resistance. Until minor language mistakes were spotted in the leaflets, they had continuously suspected a soldier within their own ranks.

It was only after as long as four years of the campaign that the artists were arrested for their anti-Nazi propaganda activities. As their notes were often made on cigarette rolling paper, German authorities began investigating large-quantity purchases of the product, which they found suspicious due to the limited availability of tobacco on the island at the time. On 25th July 1944, having stocked up, Cahun and Moore were on their way home when a soldier traveling on the same bus requested that they show their identification documents.108 A subsequent body search found packets of rolling papers which became evidence of their activity.109

Even after the arrest, the women were not quiescent and continued their resistance. To keep up their fellow inmates’ spirits, they spread news about how the war was progressing and about the state of other prisoners. Some of those were soldiers sentenced for treason or desertion. The artists served them sharing cigarettes or bread, or simply offering a kind word. The German wardens of the Jersey prison were not hard-line Nazis, rather citizens simply doing their patriotic service. Lucy and Suzanne befriended and pitied them, which was in itself a form of rebellion against the system.

First and foremost, however, they always supported one another:

“Several times each day, Lucy and Suzanne sent messages to each other, occasionally using pages torn from a book or a sanitary napkin or some toilet paper they had stolen from the guards. Pencils smuggled into the prison were usually hidden inside a morsel of food brought by a friend from the outside and then passed between inmates. Suzanne also encouraged Lucy to tap on the pipe above her bed after lights-out to let her know all was well. (...) Suzanne tried to keep Lucy’s spirits up, telling her in one letter (...) ‘Good night, my poor little chick. I hope that the migraine passes and lets you sleep.’ ‘Good night, my bird-mouth (my cat, my wolf, my monkey), my love, and courage’.”110

When the trial was near, Suzanne would lie on the bed or sit on the small stool in her cell until late at night, writing letters to Lucy. She was trying to keep up her spirits, but also shared her own fears. “What I fear is a ‘magnanimous’ sentence, ten or twenty years in prison”.111

The women were sentenced to nine months and six years for possession of a radio and to death for calling German soldiers to fire at their officers. In her memoirs, Cahun describes her reaction: “And I said, to conclude, making them burst out laughing again with my feigned naivety, ‘Are we to do the nine months and six years before we are shot?’.”112 Eventually, they were not executed and the couple was imprisoned until the liberation of the island on 9th May 1945.113 When the war had already been over, on a walk in Saint Helier, they were approached by a strange woman who declared: “I am so happy to see you alive! Now you must forget about all that.”

The fact that two middle-aged French women were capable of pretending to be German troops for four years was an insult to the Nazi ideology. If this identity could be so skillfully appropriated, the very foundations of the ideology, based on the concept of substantial difference and dominance over “others”, e.g. Jews, homosexual persons, the Romani people, were undermined. A confrontation with gender norms is also significant here. Claude Cahun would often cross the borderline between typical displays of masculinity and femininity. The same device was utilised when Lucy and Suzanne contrasted the German archetype of the infallible father, husband and family member, with the Third Reich propaganda suggesting that the war makes the German nation stronger. Their notes asked, “While you are waging war in a foreign country, who is protecting your family at home?”

The tactics of mimicry which they adopted hit their oppressors in a way that could not be achieved with a more direct approach. Although the main purpose of their campaign, i.e. inciting soldiers to rebellion, finally remained unfulfilled, it gave the artists the space to put themselves in a position of authority, so dearly missed at the time. The British historian Alan Milward emphasised the weight of even the smallest forms of rebellion during WOrld War II, arguing that the importance of gestures of resistance, regardless of their size, lies not in their real influence on the outcome of the war, but in raising individual morale and creating a sense of solidarity among persons impervious to propaganda.114

76 S. Wilson, Maskarady kobiecości, Poznań 1998, p. 170.

77 T. Lichtenstein, A Mutable Mirror: Claude Cahun, „Artforum” April 1992, p. 64.

78 Cahun is a French version of the Hebrew word cohen, meaning a priest.

79 M. Stępnik, Outsiderzy, mistyfikatorzy, eskapiści w sztuce XX wieku, Lublin 2016, p. 131.

80 R. Krauss, Bachelors, Cambridge 1999, p. 29.

81 A. Solomon-Godeau, The Equivocal “I”: Claude Cahun as Lesbian Subject [in:] Inverted odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman, ed. S. Rice, New York, North Miami, London 1999, p. 116.

82 ibid.

83 H. R. Knowles Smith, The Changing Face of the Channel Islands Occupation, Basingstoke 2007, p. 23.

84 ibid, p. 25.

85 Two years prior, cameras began to be confiscated as well, see: P. Sanders, Radio Days [in:] Protest, Defiance, and Resistance in the Channel Islands. German Occupation, 1940-45, eds. P. Sanders, G. Carr, L. Willmot, Londyn 2014, p. 66.

86 J. Davis, Jeffrey H. Jackson’s Paper Bullets A Rhodes College professor tells the story of two artists who risked their lives to defy the Nazis [online],

https://memphismagazine.com/culture/jeffrey-h-jackson%E2%80%99s-paper-bullets/ [15.01.2024].

87 ibid.

88 Protest, Defiance, and Resistance…, op. cit., p. 187.

89 J. H. Jackson, Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives do Defy the Nazis, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 2020, p. 71.

90 L. Thynne, Indirect Action: Politics and the Subversion of Identity in Claude Cahun

and Marcel Moore’s Resistance to the Occupation of Jersey, “Papers of Surrealism” No. 8, 2010, p. 10.

91 C. Follain, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe – Résistantes [in:] Don’t Kiss Me: The Art

of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, ed. L. Downie, New York 2006, p. 85.

92 G. Doy, Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography, London 2007, p. 115.

93 J. H. Jackson, Paper Bullets…, op. cit.

94 ibid., p. 72.

95 Indirect Action: Politics and the Subversion of Identity…, op. cit., p. 10.

96 L. Downie, Marcel Moore: Her Art and Life, “The Heritage Magazine” December 2005, p. 55.

97 D. Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, London 2004, p. 252.

98 Indirect Action: Politics and the Subversion of Identity…, op. cit., p. 11.

99 German originals of the notes can be found at the Jersey Heritage Archives, together with other documents. These are probably reconstructions prepared by the two women after the war and not original wartime items. The notes, messages, leaflets etc. confiscated by the Germans were part of the evidence in the trial and most probably did not survive. Their house was pillaged by the Germans, everything being either taken away or destroyed. Lucy believed that soldiers used their papers to make a fire in the fireplace. Suzanne’s handwritten note on one of the documents at the Jersey archive says that in that copy of a message she was trying to remember the exact phrasing and got as close to it as she could. See: https://jeffreyhjackson.com/paperbullets [10.01.2024].

100 Indirect Action: Politics and the Subversion of Identity…, op. cit., p. 10.

101 ibid, p. 2.

102 J.L. Shaw, Reading Claude’s Cahun Disavowals, Londyn-Nowy Jork 2016, p. 49-50.

103 ibid.

104 Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography, op. cit, p. 108.

105 K. von Oehsen, The Lives of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, [in:] Don’t Kiss Me…, op. cit., p. 18.

106 Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe – Résistantes, op. cit., p. 92.

107 L. Willmot, Women and resistance [in:] Protest, Defiance and Resistance…, op. cit., p. 187.

108 The Lives of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, op. cit., p. 20.

109 ibid.

110 J. H. Jackson, Paper Bullets…, op. cit., p. 326.

111 ibid., 210.

112 Indirect Action: Politics and the Subversion of Identity…, op. cit., p. 11.

113 Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe – Résistantes, op. cit., p. 92.

114 The Changing Face of the Channel Islands Occupation, op. cit. p. 187.

Diane Torr. A journey across the performativity of gender

Paweł Wątroba

James Cohan Gallery in London, 14th April 2007. A series of performative events is taking place as tribute to the artist Nam June Paik, a major character in the Fluxus115 movement. The final attraction of the evening is a revival of the 1962 Fluxus Champion Contest performance. The eponymous competition consists in urinating into a bucket while singing national anthems. The action entails an international character of participation and every instance of hesitation or discontinuity in the urine flow results in a participant being disqualified. The winner is the one whose stream flows for longest. Seven men volunteer to participate: an American, an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Pole, A Lithuanian, a Korean, and a Scot116. The participants are in position, with their backs to the audience and in front of white buckets. They open their flies. Angus McTavish from Scotland is the only one to let his trousers fall down, revealing his buttocks to the audience. Seven anthems in seven languages can be heard and seven yellow waterfalls are cascading into the buckets. Consecutive participants are eliminated from the contest. It is only Scotland the Brave that can be heard now – the winner is the mysterious Scot, whom the organiser, Larry Miller, presents with a prize, in the form of a decorative autographed toilet seat. The audience is giving him an ovation and cheering. Angus goes backstage, changes clothes and returns as a woman – the artist, performer and dancer Diane Torr. Some of the participants are furious, as they lost, in a field automatically considered male, to a woman who cheated the unsuspecting crowd with a urination funnel117. She recalls the experience as follows:

I was astonished, although perhaps I should not have been. One of the few things that still distinguishes men from women is that they can pee standing up. Had I somehow encroached on this final bastion of male privilege? Or are some people just sore losers?118

Diane Torr begins her journey across gender just like most girls, with socialisation. Born in 1948 in Canada, she spends her childhood in Scotland. She is growing up in the power of an authoritarian and violent father, an officer of the Royal Navy who knows how to enforce orders. Thus, Diane learns patriarchy the hard way, often with the hard blows she receives from the – usually drunk – head of the family. At the age of fifteen, her family moves to the English county of Kent. Her older brothers leave home, while her mother falls ill and is taken to hospital. Diane is left alone with her alcoholic father, whose all violence is now focused on her exclusively. She cannot bear this and runs away from home to London, where she spends six weeks living on the street. She is eventually caught and placed in a foster family. Meanwhile, her father dies. She attends the funeral escorted by police officers. Her father’s main worry seems to be that she cannot stay for the wake to serve cherry to guests, as the only woman left in her family ought to do. Finally, for running away from home, she is placed in a juvenile detention centre for much longer than she should be. The facility, in which she continues her education, offers the girls five vocational courses: sales assistant, housemaid, factory worker, typist, and gardener. Diane is, however, determined to develop academically, so despite the personnel discouraging her, she is the only inmate to pass college exams. She returns to London in 1969, finally able to decide about herself119.

She enrols in sociology at Fulham, where she finds out about marxist ideas and becomes engaged in the student socialist movement. She experiences the first act of female resistance at a conference, when a female participant takes the microphone from the hosts and gives a feminist speech. This act of civil disobedience leaves her more interested in performative action. Throughout the 1973-1976 period, she studies dance at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, supervised by the revolutionary choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham120.

I became completely hooked on learning as much as I could about the body, its mechanics, and what I was able to do with it. In class, during this process of developing our own movement vocabularies, we became conscious not only of our bodies and their capabalities but of ourselves as bodies, as physical masses moving through space, each one with its own height, weight, and density. As an avid feminist, I found that this new physical awareness of my body’s capabilities empowered me in a way that no amount of theoretical reading had done so far. In a culture in which women are still taught to think of themselves in two dimensions rather than three – as desirable objects that are there to be looked at – it’s easy to feel that body confidence is something we don’t own but must buy. In wearing a certain lipstick or the right pair of designer jeans we try to imitate the images presented to us, images most of us can never live up to. The best possible antidote to this ingrained inadequancy is to learn to experience ourselves as there-dimensional beings121.

Diane Torr begins to perceive dance and movement in an activism-related context, as a tool for performative change. In 1976, to deepen her knowledge, she moves to New York on a student visa. She continues her studies at Cunningham Studios, where she explores such fields as experimental dance and contact improvisation122. In the big city, she faces another form of danger to women. The 1970s New York is dubbed City of Fear. Drug trade is booming and street crime is on the rise: robbery, burglary, and rape.

In the United Kingdom I had never really felt threatened on the streets, but in New York I was attacked three times within the first year of my arrival. I tried various strategies to make myself less „visible” as a potentially vulnerable female: except for dress-up occasions, I stopped wearing makeup, and I started wearing gender-neutral clothing. I also learned to play the blues harmonica, and whenever I felt threatened I would play it as I walked along, as if to warn people off. That worked for a while, but I knew I needed a more effective form of self-defense123.

Thus, she finds herself in an aikido course at the New York Aikikai, supervised by Sensei Yamada. The main principle of this Japanese martial art is neutralisation of attack by using the attacker’s kinetic energy and redirecting it, instead of engaging in direct confrontation. The fact of greatest significance to Diane is that aikido breaks the gender binary. She is fascinated with how the dress in the classes is uniform. Gender is virtually indistinguishable. What is even more important, on the practise mat, as a woman, she is not inferior to men, as the interception and use of energy plays a role larger than that of sheer strength and brawn. Aikido will become a major factor in her development and prove a constant asset in her individual range of choreography.

I conjured up many fantasy utopias during my aikido training. I imagined a world in which all women would have this opportunity to learn to defend themselves, where all women were free from the tyranny of male aggression124.

Her situation makes it necessary for her to take up undeclared work as a go-go dancer. Making use of her dance background, she effortlessly learns to perform the female sex-appeal, choosing „Tornado” as her stage name to denote unbridled energy and wildness. At the night clubs, she earns rather good money: 10 dollars per hour plus tips125. However, she sometimes has some doubts – sex work is against the beliefs of the feminist circles of the time and her own activist engagement in women’s movements. Nonetheless, following Angela Carter, she reaches the conclusion that morality requires a budget and no technique of survival ought to be condemned126. She assimilates go-go dance as another tool for performative action and decides to use it to debunk stereotypes about femininity. Aware of the fact that seduction and sexualisation of the body is subjected to the male gaze, she does not romanticise erotic expression. What is more, she emphasises that go-go dancers make their living with tips, and these are men who give tips. Invited by the East Village Women’s One World Theatre Festival 1981, in cooperation with two other dancers, she produces the performance WOW-a-Go-Go consisting of choreographies intertwined with women’s monologues. The latter show experiences of domestic violence and patriarchal oppression, as well as autotematic motifs of shame and failure arising from the necessity of doing work that is sexual in its nature. The performance analyses the interdependencies of power, sex for money, and manipulation. Its critical potential finds recognition and, despite being considered risky due to the use of go-go choreography, it receives positive reviews127.

I felt that it was our responsibility, as women, to create a new culture, to create an eroticism that did not debase or humiliate, one that would critique the old forms and suggest and stimulate new ones. I wanted to raise the standards128.

A year later, Diane is invited to perform at the Melkweg International Women’s Festival in Amsterdam (1982). She also decides to dig deeper into the topic of sexual expression, this time focusing on the satisfaction of women’s desires. Her strategy for breaking the stereotype is confronting it with typical go-go dance, only to present a new perspective on erotics, as opposed to that performed for men, in the second half of the show. Again, she invites two dancers to join her and complete the show with alternative forms of expression, including visual arts. They have quite an audience, 1300 women from the world over, including major feminist activists. Diane begins her dance with golden shells on her breasts and a tight pink-gold skirt with tassels. At a certain point, the audience goes mad. The women are screaming, shouting that it’s a pornographic show for men. Accusations of fascism are also to be heard. First beer mats and later bottles are being thrown at the performers. Audience members are spitting on the stage. A scrimmage ensues. Someone cuts off electricity. The performance cannot continue. In the darkness, people are stumbling over one another. They are howling with a fury that arises from a feeling of the “safe” space of a women’s event being violated. Diane and her stage companions are led out through the back door in an atmosphere of scandal129.

That experience brought home to me, forcibly, just what a volatile issue female sexual expression is. I realized that I would need to have the zeal and determination of a missionary if I were to continue in this direction, and to be willing to withstand all kinds of abusive treatment130.

The fact that the feminist – and particularly lesbian – circles of the time are not ready to embrace strategies of intercepting and retrieving female erotics from the power of the male gaze leaves the performer completely nonplussed. Diane Torr does not feel at ease with them any more. This is not only because of her job, but also because of her sexual orientation. As a bisexual woman, she is not entirely accepted in the circles of homosexual women, which is why certain groups treat her art with reservations131. Probably, exploring, performing and criticising cultural femininity before the gender revolution is still too innovative.

In the 1980s, Diane Torr begins to perform more and more non-female roles. In a duo with the dancer Bradley Wester, she explores the issues of bodily blurring of the borders between femininity and masculinity, emphasising similarities instead of differences between the genders (Arousing Reconstructions, 1982)132. In the solo Amoebic Evolution, she condenses billions of years of evolution, evolving on stage, from a water organism to a terrestrial one, from an amoeba to a reptile, then an ape, a Neanderthal, eventually to become a bored travel agent who falls asleep at his desk (1982)133. In 1983, on the Limbo Lounge stage in New York, she performs transformations between species with visible pregnancy. Crawling on the stage with the pregnant belly is a clear reminder of her own biology. When her daughter, Martina, is born (1983), Diane focuses on childcare. She returns with the topic of pregnancy and maternity in a performance of a meaningful title, Girl in Trouble (1985), including the monologue:

I want you to imagine that your belly is filling with water. It becomes so deformed that you feel the pressure tight against your skin. When you sit down, the bag protrudes into yous groin and chest, and you seem to have constant heartburn. Your stomach is bloated out of your control. There is a very large amphibious being living in the water. It’s pushed all your organs to the side, so it has room to dance, and it’s likes to dance. It floats around and you get fatter and fatter as it changes shape. You seem to be aware of it all the time, and you wonder, is this what I want?134

Her outlook on maternity is marked by traumas of her own childhood, two figures looming there in particular: that of a mother incapable of protecting her offspring and that of a father capable of killing his own child in a drunken frenzy. The memories and conclusions drawn from them are part of the performance. One of the conclusions is a rejection of the stereotypical distinction between parents: the male father and the female mother. According to Diane, a woman can sometimes be a mother, sometimes a father, and even a guide dog if need be135. The aspect of gender identity as a performative spectrum further reverberates in Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Queens, realised in collaboration with Chris Koenig and Lizzie Olesker (1986). The performance is inspired with the story of Herculine Barbin – an intersex person brought up as a woman in 19th-century France. In her adulthood, her gender was legally reassigned as male without her consent, which eventually led to her suicide136. Basing on this story, the artists are trying to untangle the ambiguities of perceiving sex and gender, also those present in the contexts pertaining to trans people, relevant to the 1980s. Whose thing is gender anyway? Who do gestures belong to? Who creates stereotypes? Why are the birth certificate and first gender assignment considered so important in society? And what if – as was the case with Herculina, forced to change her perspective to a male one by systemic violence – a person wants to remain a woman despite all else?137 Furthermore, Diane also introduces elements of aikido as a symbol of nonbinarity. In her performance, the archetype of a valiant persona does not have a fixed gender identity. It is the potentiality of unconstrained change, a liminal figure that does not need clear self-definition138.

We had stumbled, as three feiminists questioning notions of gendered identity, into an abstract, poetic exploration of ideas around intersexed and transsexual bodies, around the possibility of changing identity and even sexual designation. This all evolved through fits and starts, and we just had to trust each other and hold on because nobody else, as far as we knew, was addressing this material at the time139.

Her first appearance in male demeanor is accidental (1989). She portrays a guy for a photoshoot by Annie Sprinkle140, illustrating an interview with a trans man for the „Adam” magazine. The hero of the conversation, Johnny Science141, does not consent to being photographed, so it is Diane who transforms herself in front of the camera. She does not have the time to change after the shoot, so she goes to an exhibition opening at Whitney Museum in drag. Once there, even her friends fail to recognise her. To her consternation, she catches the eye of a certain woman, who starts obtrusively flirting with her. Diane recognizes all the womanly tricks she has used herself but, surprised with the situation and sweating from the stress, she feigns disinterest, eventually to run to the men’s restroom142.

I suddenly felt very alone, a newly born man that nobody knew, a nameless, never before seen on the planet man. But I also noticed that people were creating space for me as I moved; even in that wall of bodies, I was accommodated. As a woman I had never experienced such treatment. I decided to just get myself a beer and a wall to lean against because that’s what guys do, right?143

She learns male behaviour from observation. She can spend hours sitting at cafes, bars, poolrooms and diners, spying on guys’ behaviour. The way they hold a mug of coffee, way different from the way they hold a mug of beer, how they drink, swallow and eat. She is interested in all types of microgestures and behavioural cliches: ways of greeting someone, gait, facial expressions, gestures, articulation, spacial behaviour, approach to personal space... In these repeated structures, Diane also looks for gestures of power, such as jangling coins in one’s pocket or signs of heterosexual flirtation. The anthropological vivisection is to serve the artist in her continuous performance of masculinity, this time as a drag king144. The first stage persona she brings to life is Danny King (1991). He is a personification of a middle-aged heterosexual American man, employed in mid-level management at a men’s clothing sales department. He represents the most easily noticeable extreme stereotype of toxic white masculinity, suited and equipped with a deep conviction that he is a figure of authority and his racial privilege is justified. He is always right and does not bear opposition, which is reinforced by his conservative views and chauvinist behaviour. To a certain extent, he constitutes an anachronic extreme. His gestures and behaviours are the 1950s and 1960s model of masculinity that should have been long gone, yet still persists on TV, in the Senate, and in the streets of New York145. This is a character Diane Torr feels confident with and one she uses strategically, as a tool for special assignments and a kind of Trojan horse. In her Drag Kings and Subjects performance (1995), Danny King appears as a member of the Amerykańskiego Stowarzyszenia Mężczyzn, who admonishes the menfolk saying it is because of their own improper behaviour that their privileges are taken away from them, by women of course. In order to prevent emancipation and introduction of equal rights, a man ought to behave like a man, and it is him who knows best how to do that, so Danny King educates the audience in a short lecture146.

Rule number 2: Stop smiling. Now it’s very nice when women smile – it makes them very appealing, it makes them appear friendly and unthreatening. It’s sweet. But when a guy smiles, it leaves him open. It gives someone access, it makes him vulnerable to exploitation. And you don’t want to concede any ground whatsoever. You want to maintain impregnability, at all costs147.

Another significant persona created by Diane Torr is Charles Beresford148. The character is based on her homosexual friend who died from AIDS in 1992, at 32 years of age. The same year, her younger brother, Donald, also dies from AIDS. During the 1990-1996 period, Diane takes part in numerous funeral, while the queer community in the United States faces the second wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and ubiquitous mourning. The persona of Charles Beresford is meant to be a living requiem commemorating her friend: full of vigour and joy, a sarcastic spark of light. In this character, she visits his favourite places and recreates his habits, e.g. a morning coffee with a croissant at a Christopher Street cafe. Basing on her own ritual, from 1997 to 2005 she organizes the Brother for a Day events, which provide an opportunity for all sisters to impersonate the brothers they lost, both biological and chosen ones. The undertaking usually accompanies the celebrations of World AIDS Day, which take place on 1st December. In a celebratory atmosphere, women appear in male drag, momentarily resurrecting the joy of life, sex and pleasure, with the motto: Come on. Come all. But please wear a condom!149.

As a drag performer, Diane Torr does not limit her repertoire. Her arsenal boasts multiple personas: Jack Sprat, a fashionable and uncouth singer, Hamish McTavish, a Scottish poet and recitator, as well as Mister EE, a buffoon with a black mask around his eyes sans pants, enamoured with erotic yet clumsy choreograpies and striptease. Her personas serve as an example of the fact that women can represent masculinity just as well and effectively as anyone else, which constitutes a challenge to patriarchal norms. This is certainly more than merely the art of imitation, as Jack Halberstam would like to see it150. Although Diane Torr’s stage personas lack the rainbow camp, sequins and glitter, one cannot deny that they are caricatural in their nature. The behavioural sets performed by her, taken from real persons, are conceptual creations which she uses not only to criticise masculine stereotypes, but also to comment on how women are perceived by men. Joanna Krakowska aptly grasps the shift as follows: „Drag is invariably, though inextricably, tied to camp – inappropriateness, humour and dramatisation. (...) camp defuses fury and rebellion, transgressing serious and condensed despair by means of playfulness. This is what camp humour consists in – laughing at one’s own social situation, instead of falling into despair.”151 On stage, Diane Torr repeatedly portrays patriarchal aggressors: chauvinists, sexists and xenophobes, in order to face the threat, expose the enemy, and express subversive criticism. By ridiculing and intimidating the male members of the audience, she takes her revenge on them and regains control. Drag king can be perceived as a feminist tool used to break men’s monopoly for masculinity, including the monopoly for female drag, and to establish the visibility of non-male persons performing on stage.152 Despite this fight between the binary genders within analyses of queer performative arts, however, Diane is still saying something different: gender is nothing more than a set of repeated gestures153. Gender norms are not fixed once and forever. Rather, they consist of a set of unwritten rules that are constantly evolving through performative repetition of their behavioral assumptions and are changing depending on the specific context of class, race and geographical location.154 In light of the above, drag is a perfect experimental polygon, where clear distinctions between gender identities become suspended, situations and ephemeral happening break stereotypes, and playing gender reveals a whole range of nonbinary in-between states. Embodiment freed from restraints and balancing on the borderline of cultural constructs presents gender as a spectrum of possibilities.

As a feminist thinking in these terms, one quickly realizes that men and women are bound together as one species – Homo sapiens – and not separated as two. Our similarities vastly outweigh our comparatively insignificant differences. Why then, I wondered, did so many people – from male chauvinists to separatist lesbians – insist so adamantly on maintaining the imagined gulf dividing male and female?155

Diane Torr is not alone in her journey through the performativity of gender. Thanks to Anne Sprinkle, in 1990 she meets Johnny Science once more and begins collaborating in his drag king workshops based on make up techniques and portrayal of male personas. Torr artist complements the process with her own tools from the field of performative arts and continues to study male behaviour in the public sphere in order to develop a methodology of her own. The action is initially a niche one and accompanies New York feminist and queer events. In 1993, however, after including the workshop in the programme of Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, the project gains wider recognition. Not only is it described by „Boston Phoenix” and „The Boston Globe”, but the workshops are also joined by such participants as editors from major newspapers papers and magazines, including „The New Yorker” and „The Washington Post”, which results in even more extensive media coverage156. The events are successfully organised in the States as well as abroad, in Toronto, Amsterdam, London, Hanover, Berlin and Utrecht. In 1995, Johnny and Diane’s tandem falls apart due to differences in their priorities157. Torr decides to continue organising the workshops on her own. The project is called Man for a Day and is met with unfailing interest.
It is in this work-in-progress that all the treads present in Diane Torr’s earlier endeavours come together. The idea of the workshops is a shift in perspective, achieved with the participants through the experience of being a man for one day. The process is carried out with tools taken from drag culture and the artist’s performative experience. It arises immediately from the experience of being a woman, i.e. a person who constantly needs to prove her worth in the patriarchal world. What could happen if she joined men’s ranks unnoticed and, as a spy, infiltrated what is, after all, social minority? This is just like the energy in aikido, which, once intercepted by the defending party, returns to the unsuspecting attacker.

The workshops usually take 1-2 days. The process begins with building a male persona: giving him a name, visualising the appearance, coming up with a biography, a job, interests and marital status. The concept must be coherent and detailed enough for the character to seem authentic and be able to participate in social life, at least for a moment, e.g. during a conversation among men. For this purpose, anthropological field observation will be useful. According to Diane, men are perfect objects for spying, as they do not expect to be observed158. The next stage is turning into a guy visually. First, flattening the breasts with a binder, bandage or modelling tapes. Then, there comes the creation of the perennial symbol of creative power – the penis. The artist has a simple method for this. To form a realistic packer, it is enough to stuff a sock or a condom with tube bandage and cotton wool.

Whichever option you go for, remember not to make the penis too large! This is a penis at rest – so it should have a kind of spongy feel, and be about three or four inches in length, just enough to create a visible signifier in your pants when you sit down. You also need to wear men’s underwear for that authentic feel. (...) [It] will give you something to tuck your penis into, but make sure you secure it with something: you don’t want it to fall out when you visit the Men’s Room159.

Certain changes will be necessary on the face: “5 a.m.” complexion, i.e. puffy eyes, a little greyness, a bit of paleness, and eyebrows emphasised with mascara. The look is meant to be a tad shabby – all defects are highly appreciated. Further, there is the facial hair. Advisably, made of woolen fake hair, finely cut and attached to the face with wig adhesive. Add men’s clothing. The workshops are partially led by Danny King, not Diane. This pertains to the performative part in particular: gait, sitting, body language, speech. An important element of playing the male part convincingly is manspreading, i.e. seizing public space, e.g. with legs spread wide while sitting – a practice criticised as a symbol of patriarchal dominance, therefore effective. Exposing the crotch is also an opportunity to present the packer as a bulge in one’s trousers. After all, the penis and testicles require considerable space to make a proper impression. You can also sprawl freely, recline, put your ankle on your knee instead of crossing your legs – let things happen. A guy does not need to adapt to any space, it is automatically assumed to be his possession. This should be emphasised with every step. Stiff gait, walk confidently, starting with the shoulders, not the hips. Hips frozen. Arms loose, slightly bent in the elbows. No smiling.

When you talk, you can speak really slowly, as people imagine you have something important to say. As a man, you have access to privilege. Each word, each jewel that you utter has thousands of years of philosophy behind it. When you pause to reflect, people imagine that you are contemplating these thousands of years of philosophy and that you have something important to say. You don’t actually have to say anything at all. They’re lucky to have you there160.

After further repetition of male gestures, working with space, a chair, greetings gestures, and self-presentation in a group – it’s time for the great finale. The workshops are crowned with the participants going into public spaces as men. This is the final test, verifying whether their covers are plausible enough. Diane usually lets the newly-formed men out in smaller groups, so that they do not raise suspicion and do not distract one another. Their destination might be a pub, a disco, a restaurant, or a strip-tease club. A men’s toilet is also worth a visit, out of sheer curiosity. After their return, they have a discussion, sharing their adventures, giveaways and difficulties. The entire process implemented in Berlin is documented from a backstage perspective in Katarina Peters’ 2012 film Man for a Day.

The uniqueness of the project consists in a collective female experience of transgressing the binary borderline and finding out what lies on the other side. The workshops are intended to provide sisterly empowerment, build self-confidence and enable a critical outlook at femininity from a new perspective. Activating the patriarchal models of behaviour within oneself and re-enacting them unmasks situations of dependence, control and objectification, thus opening up space for reflection on the complexity of gender identity. Thanks to the surveys she collects, Diane has an insight into participants’ individual experiences and motivations. Some of them treat the workshops as part of a risky experiment, others as a factor which complements their leadership skills, inspiration to enter the world of drag kings, or checking how they find themselves in the male role prior to transition. The skills they learn during the workshops can be successfully applied in their everyday lives, for instance as a tool for negotiations. One of the participants complains about the difficulties she experiences while buying a car. The dealers treat them in a patronising way, and her knowledge of motorisation is depreciated. It is only in the male disguise that she experiences a shift in perception: she is finally treated as a person who knows exactly what she wants, her knowledge is enthusiastically accepted and she can negotiate the price. She strikes the deal as a guy, convinced that she would not have reached such a bargain as a woman.161

Remember: Gender is an act. Whereas femininity is always drag, no matter who is wearing it (which is why it’s easy to caricature), maleness is the presumed universal. It is thus more invisible in its artificiality. This is to our advantage when trying to pass in male guise. Sociological studies have shown that maleness is assumed, unless proven otherwise. And even if you feel you don’t pass, the fact that you’ve entered into this transgressive act and are performing as a male is significant in itself. Maybe when people realize that gender is a cultural construct, it could eventually lead to a world where gender norms are abandoned, or in which genders proliferate beyond the pair commonly recognized. Just think, you are contributing to a dynamic revolution in the way we see ourselves, and how we are seen. You are creating a change in perception162.

Diane Torr continuously performs on stage, at festivals and exhibitions in the States and in Europe for over 30 years. With the Man for a Day workshops, she visits such places as London, Helsinki, Paris, Istanbul, New Delhi, Vienna and Brasilia163. As a drag king, she is at the forefront of popularising that queer art, thanks to which male drag breaks into mainstream press, television and art galleries. In her work, she continuously experiments with gender, practically verifying the great theories of sociology and queer studies, in which „(...) it is crucial to recognize that masculinity does not belong to men, has not been produced only by men, and does not properly express male heterosexuality”164. Her last public appearance is that at the 2016 TEDx Talks, during which she says: „I actually have no idea how it feels to be a man, and I have no idea how it feels to be a woman. All I know is how it feels to be me”165. She passes away on 31st May 2017 in Glasgow, having spent her final years in Scotland.

Her bravery and uncompromising nature are perfectly reflected in her reactive performance during the street protest in front of the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1997, on the premiere day of Corpus Christi directed by Terrence McNally166. Christians are outraged by the stage interpretation of the story of Jesus and his Apostles as gays. The street is filled with a crowd of furious defenders of religion and a counter-demonstration of creative circles defending freedom of speech. The groups are divided with metal barriers to prevent fisticuffs. Diane Torr as Danny King is standing on the side of the holy and righteous with a placard: JESUS CHRIST – GET OVER IT.

115 Fluxus was an international movement in 20th-century art, characterised by an interdisciplinary approach, spontaneity, experimentalism, humour, as well as rejection of traditional forms and institutions, aimed at democratising art and destroying the border between the artist and the viewer.

116 W. Fry, Larry Miller Homage to Nam June Paik, „The Brooklyn Rail” June 2007 [online], https://brooklynrail.org/2007/06/artseen/larry-miller-homage-to-nam-june-paik [15.02.2024].

117 D. Torr, S. Bottoms, Sex, Drag and Male Roles. Investigating Gender as Performance, Michigan 2014, p. xi-xiii.

118 ibid.

119 ibid, p. 38-42.

120 S. Bottoms, Diane Torr obituary, „The Guardian” 29.06.2017 [online], https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jun/29/diane-torr-obituary [15.02.2024].

121 Sex, Drag and Male Roles…., op. cit., p. 45-46.

122 ibid, p. 46.

123 ibid, p. 73.

124 ibid, p. 74.

125 ibid, p. 49.

126 ibid, p. 51.

127 ibid, p. 56-58.

128 ibid, p. 53.

129 ibid, p. 59-60.

130 ibid.

131 ibid, p. 70.

132 ibid, p. 77-79.

133 ibid, p. 81-83.

134 ibid.

135 ibid, p. 84.

136 Herculine Barbin’s story and her memoirs were published by Michel Foucault. In her memoirs, Herculine used feminine forms when writing about herself, although she publicly used masculine ones. See: M. Foucault, Herculine Barbin. Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, New York 1980.

137 Sex, Drag and Male Roles…, op. cit., p. 85-88.

138 D. Torr, L. Olesker, Ch. Koenig, Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Queens (1986), video documentation of a performance [online], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktflmMfZ1ws [15.02.2024].

139 Sex, Drag and Male Roles…, op. cit., p. 89.

140 Anne Sprinkle (1954) – American photographer, performer, actor and pornographic films screenwriter, sexuologist. A leading representative of sex-positive feminism, actively engaged in the New York LGBTQ+ movement. Many of her activities are focused on sexual activities. Privately, Diane Torr’s friend.

141 Johnny Science (1955-2007) – American activist, musician, make-up artist and drag king. A leading figure in the 1980s and 1990s New York trans community. Founder of the F2M Fraternity, the first support group for trans people, and of drag king workshops in 1989; See: Johnny Science: FTM Pioneer Remembered, „Transgender Tapestry” 2008, p. 19-22 [online], https://archive.org/details/transgendertapes114unse/page/18/mode/2up [15.02.2024].

142 Sex, Drag and Male Roles…, op. cit., p. 95-96.

143 ibid.

144 A person consciously performing masculinity with make-up, costume, movements and gestures, usually in stage performances within the field of LGBTQ+ culture, during which they use various modes of artistic expression, including: lip sync, dance, singing, stand up, burlesque and strip-tease.

145 Sex, Drag and Male Roles…, op. cit., p. 108-110, 166.

146 D. Torr, Drag Kings and Subject (1995), video documentation of a performance [online], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBLO6H7Uya8 [15.02.2024].

147 Sex, Drag and Male Roles…, op. cit., p. 242.

148 Q&A with Diane Torr, The University of Michigan Press 2010 [online], https://press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472071029-qa.pdf [15.02.2024].

149 ibid.

150 J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity [online], Durham-Londyn 1998, p. 250-252, https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2019-06-08_5cfba24a7c20f_judith-halberstam-female-masculinity-2.pdf [15.02.2024].

151 J. Krakowska, Odmieńcza rewolucja. Performans na cudzej ziemi, Kraków-Warszawa 2020, p. 50-51.

152 Female Masculinity, op. cit., p. 237.

153 Man for a Day [film], dir. K. Peters, Katarina Peters Filmproduktion, 2012.

154 Sex, Drag and Male Roles…, op. cit, p. 7.

155 ibid., p. 70-71.

156 ibid., p. 114.

157 Johnny Science: FTM Pioneer Remembered, op. cit.

158 Man for a Day, op. cit.

159 ibid., p. 260.

160 ibid., p. 267.

161 ibid., p. 157.

162 ibid., p. 269.

163 Man For A Day Workshop [online], http://www.dianetorr.com/man-for-a-day-workshop [24.01.2024].

164 Female Masculinity, op. cit, p. 241.

165 D. Torr, Man for a day, woman for a day [online], TEDxStGeorg 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paBsyBY_-dA [24.01.2024].

166 Sex, Drag and Male Roles…, op. cit., p. 166.

Prejudice, dialogue and shouting. Scripts for anti-discrimination workshops

Julian Czurko

One of the aims of the activities organised within the framework of the „Shout, Sister, shout!” project is for participants to experience and to reflect on the use of voice: reclaiming it, taking it away and giving it back. This is also a moment of reflection on what voice can do, both on the level of self-expression, i.e. sending a part of oneself into the world, and on what can be done to others with the use of one’s voice. The effects of using voice on others can be both constructive – supporting, showing sisterhood, caring, advising, validating – and destructive – belittling, rejecting, defaming, labeling, and hurting.

Part of the project were anti-discrimination workshops for teenagers, which served two purposes. The first one was to take a closer look at the habits of thinking in stereotyping, judgmental and labeling manners. The second goal was to prepare the young people to lead short workshops among their peers.

This publication contains two plans of such classes – to be used in school lessons or in non-formal education. They are ready for implementation in the form presented here, but they are also intended to inspire readers to do their own research, and eventually to enhance the proposed structures with new elements, tools and topics.

Additionally, this publication was carefully prepared with two groups of readers in mind, i.e. both those actively seeking ideas for classes with teenagers, and those reading these words out of curiosity, not necessarily planning to undertake any educational activity. Therefore, the contents have been arranged so that they begin with a dose of self-reflection, an intellectual exercise intended to be done on one’s own, only later proceeding to its reframing into a structure of a workshop.

The structure of the anti-discrimination workshops with teenagers was analogous: first, everyone engaged with the activities and with their own experience, and only later did they begin to learn how to lead workshops themselves..

Pre-judgement

The presence of judgment in interpretations, as well as the presence of interpretation in what would seem to be an objectively cold description, are two common topics both for considerations of anti-discrimination nature and discussions of art. Thus, the ambiguity of artistic activity provides an opportunity for a closer examination of manners of thinking and, in another step, of the consequences of cognitive biases, shortcuts, fallacies, distortions, gap-filling, omission, and erroneous categorisation.

Researchers working in the field of art studies propose the division into pre-iconographic (formal) and iconographic (meanings, allegories, symbols, allusions) description, as well as iconology (broad cultural and social context, including other sciences). All these, however, remain within the framework of intellectual discourse based on cultural competence.

The aim of this exercise is to make the human element, more deeply immersed in individual modes of experience, beliefs and values, a more significant aspect of the whole process. This might lead to conversations about art taking a new turn… Moreover, what comes to the forefront now is not cultural competence, but personal sensitivity, openness and creative flexibility.

Introduction

The aim of this exercise is to look at a given representation (a painting, a photograph, or another artistic or historical object) with curiosity and attempt to view it in three categories (the words printed in bold are ones characteristic for each category):

description – very formal and factual e.g.: „The black-and-white film presents figures turning and jumping, moving in a synchronised manner. Two of them are dressed in skirts with aprons, shirts, and waistcoats, their hair braided and partially hidden underneath head scarfs. The other two are wearing tall shoes, trousers, waistcoats and jackets. They have short hair, without any headgear. The persons are smiling.”

interpretation – a description of one’s understanding of a given representation basing on knowledge and associations, e.g. „The film seems to be historical material, showing two couples dancing a traditional dance. The dancers, two women and two men, are wearing folk costumes. Everyone appears to be laughing and having a good time.” (Various levels of specificity might be applied to the discussion of the type of dance or the names of items of clothing here.)

evaluation – revealing one’s emotional attitude to the representation, positive or negative, e.g.: „The dancers shown in the film are light and happy while helping to keep alive and develop local traditions, which are progressively disappearing. It is important to present cultural heritage in an enthusiastic manner” or „Referencing folk art, the film presents traditional relations between women and men. The artificial smiles of the dancers who feign happiness in front of the camera constitute an element of irony here. Their roles can be seen from a similar perspective, being only pretence and often masking personal unhappiness.”

Individual exercise

Prepare a sheet of paper and something to write with.

Browse the catalogue below to find a work that might be ambiguous for you: it might make you feel apprehensive, it might not be exactly clear what it represents or what the intention behind its creation was. You may also choose another representation, e.g. a reproduction of a work of art, a photograph, a commercial – as long as you find it interesting to practise on.

What you note might be, but does not have to be, what you think personally. It is perfectly fine for them to be contradictory. This exercise is based on flexibility of thinking and exploring various options, not on coherence of opinion.

Step 1.: Describe the representation. Just like in the example above, focus on the facts – so that your description might serve someone who would like to recreate or roughly draw a similar representation.

Step 2.: On separate sheets of paper, write two different interpretations of what you can see. If you are convinced that you know what your object represents, this is your first interpretation (we are not evaluating its legitimacy!) and you might need to put yourself in someone else’s shoes in order to formulate another one (e.g. that of how the same thing may be understood by a person from another country, from a different generation, with different access to knowledge). The interpretations may be radically different, mutually exclusive, or focusing on different aspects of the representation.

Step 3.: On each of the interpretation sheets, write two judgments about the interpretation to be found there: a positive one (appreciative, optimistic, resulting from good will), and a negative one (pessimistic, prejudiced, mean, made from a fault-finding perspective. You will have four different judgements altogether.

Reflection

Which part of the exercise was the easiest? Which one was the most difficult? Why?

Which perspective was easier for you to adopt? The appreciative or the critical one?

What might the direction in which interpretation goes depend on?

What might the direction of the judgment depend on?

How can those directions be influenced by the following: knowledge, emotions, beliefs, values? Which of these might be crucial?

What conclusions do you draw from the practice?

For the next step, you might invite another person, who is going to read your text from a distanced perspective. The task is to mark:

such expressions in the description that are actually interpretations already: what is something more than merely a description of appearance? what required some knowledge? what introduces a context from outside the representation itself?

such elements in the interpretation that already carry elements of judgment: showing a personal attitude, preference or dislike, instead of mere understanding of the representation.

What reflections do you have after the analysis?

To what extent is it possible to provide a description devoid of interpretation?

If the phrases marked were corrected, what would an even more formal description look like? What do you think about such a text? Where should we set the limit of using one’s knowledge, in order to remain as close to facts as possible?

How much evaluation was there to be found in the text? What could this indicate?

Context

The present reflection is intended to analyse stereotypical thinking – a habit which leads to prejudice, which in turn might lead to discrimination.

Here, stereotype should be understood more broadly than a simplified opinion about a certain group. Following Hans-Georg Gadamer, we might understand it as prejudice, i.e. the whole structure of knowledge preceding experience1.

To take the earlier example of the black-and-white film: before I learn where the shots come from, I already have my beliefs about such films (“old stuff”, “documentary”, “arthouse film”, “stylisation”). Once I have seen some relations between the characters, I already have a conception of who they are (“they are men and women”, “the men want to look self-confident and the women want to be attractive”, “they are from the countryside”, “these are some folk group dancers”, “this is all for the camera, cheap show just pretending to live the traditions”).

The mind takes shortcuts and tries to maximise the effectiveness of thinking by recalling all the knowledge it already has about what it is currently experiencing. The reception of pure form (as it is in the case of the description) only lasts for the minimum time necessary to identify the object and recall information about it, together with all the contexts, emotions and memories. And among those, the negative ones might be priorotised.

It is for this reason that giving a pure description might be so difficult. Although form is perceived first, the inner dialogue appears so fast – albeit discreetly – and it is so intensive that the description is rather a reconstruction of a first impression than a report of perception itself.

Such a reference to the topic of stereotypical thinking might be introduced to continue a workshop on description, interpretation and evaluation.

Script

Introduction: The aim of this workshop practice is to facilitate an analytical perspective on how one’s own interpretations and judgements are formed. Stimulus for the exercise is proposed to be found in catalogue objects or other visual material published by the Kronika Centre For Contemporary Art, but other objects might be used as well. It will be beneficial for the task if they are objects of ambiguous nature (it is difficult to establish what they are really representing), ones that can be found inspiring or somewhat discomforting. Such materials can be works of art, preferably socially engaged art, but also e.g. ethnologic documentation showing relatively unknown traditions, unusual dress or original events. Finding such representations can be made easier by online collections made available by museums, galleries and archives in the public domain (open licenses which do not require for the author of a work to be identified and allow use of the work free of charge).

Preparation: The exercise ought to be done individually or in groups of no more than 3 persons. It is more beneficial for the work to be done in multiple groups, but if there are too few participants (e.g. 5), it will be more interesting for each of them to work separately and later compare their results.

Prepare enough materials for everyone. Every person/group should be given their own visual material (a file printout, a catalogue, a leaflet, or direct access to a work of art – in the case of a lesson taught at a gallery/museum) and paper for notetaking. You can prepare a form (a table on an A4 sheet) with a central section for description, two sections (on the sides or below) for interpretations, and then two sections for judgment/evaluation next to each of those.

You may also provide writing materials. If the form fits a single-sided A4 sheet, pens will work best.

Contract: At the beginning of a session, agree a few basic rules with the group (you can add more if need be):

we do not judge persons and do not refer to who they are – we only refer to what they say and do, to what is concrete and factual

everyone speaks on their own behalf – without generalisations such as “we”, “it is generally known that…”, “we all agree that…”, “always”, “everyone”, etc.,

the interpretations and evaluations to be proposed are only there for the purposes of the exercise and do not need to reflect the authentic views of the person noting them,

we intend to treat the exercise seriously – the workshop is based on common involvement – treating it superficially or as a joke will result in reflection that is only superficial.

Steps:

Introduce the contract – a list of rules necessary for the workshop to work out. If you have much time and the group is a small one, ask them if they would like to add any rules to the collection.

Present the goal of the exercise: to take a closer look at how interpretation and evaluation of events is created; to indicate that we always have a chance to look at matters from a different perspective.

Divide the group into small teams or tell them they will work individually.

Distribute materials: the visual materials and sheets for note taking or forms to be filled in.

Explain the order in which the exercise is to be done. You may present the instruction as a whole or split it into subsequent stages:

observation of the visual material,

preparation of the formal description,

preparation of two alternative interpretations,

preparation of two judgements, positive and negative, for each interpretation...

Say how much time the participants will have for completing each task – depending on how much time you have for the whole workshop, but no less than 10 minutes per task.

Ask if there are any questions and answer them. If there are none, say that you are available for assistance and explanation at any time, if any doubts arise while working on the tasks.

Give participants time for all the activities.

When all the groups are done, invite them to present their results. If you have a lot of time, they may read all the ideas. If there is less time, suggest that they select the most interesting fragments or let only some groups, those most willing to do so, present their results.

Sum things up – either after every presentation or more generally, after all of them. Pay special attention to the moments when you hear elements of interpretation in descriptions or elements of evaluation in interpretations.

At the end, ask all the participants about:

what they found the most difficult,

what was easiest for them,

whether anything surprised them,

what conclusions may be drawn from the exercise.

Thank everyone for their participation, involvement and contributions, say goodbye.

Dialog i krzyk

The second part of the present article continues a discussion of the same topic, yet transporting it into a different dimension: from an intellectual approach and exploring the preconditions of people’s prejudice, judgements and labels, to opening up a space for expressing personal experience and reflections. Groupwork-based deliberations, analyses and deepening of comprehension, all give way to dialogue, listening to one another and deepening mutual understanding.

Educationally, this part – along with its script – may be treated as another step following the previous chapter or as a separate programme.

Dialogue

What we propose here is a dialogic approach, one rarely found in young people’s experience. When adults ask them questions, it is usually to check something, test them or specify something. Young people often report feeling not listened to and misunderstood. They say that adults do not seek relations based on partnership, in which more delicate topics could be discussed. What they do experience instead is judgement, criticism, and a transactional approach bringing about reward or punishment. The typical school experience is a question with a hidden answer key, which, instead of inspiring deeper thought and self-realisation, encourages a strategic attempt at guessing the correct answer, so as to pass to the next stage and never to return to the present one.

Dialogue is not an exam. Neither is it an interrogation or an instance of manipulation. What sets it apart from a debate is a renouncement of the category of a fight. There is no need to dig trenches in one’s argumentation or to shoot questions. There is no dispute with an adversary to be defeated with the might of our own reasoning.

Dialogue provides an opportunity for self-expression, but also for attentive listening. It means giving others the space to change or to remain on their positions. In any case, peaceful, and even empathetic, coexistence of various positions makes horizons broaden. We can differ, and this can be beautiful.

Shouting

Seeking and freeing one’s voice is the main topic of the “Shout, Sister, Shout!” exhibition. It is incorporated in further part of the workshops. This part of the anti-discrimination workshop is not about learning how to avoid discriminating against others, but about taking a closer look at the moments when we experienced forms of belittling or isolation, even subtle ones, ourselves. This is also a moment for naming issues important to ourselves: our subjectivity, expression, being heard and seen. A moment for finding validation.

Exercise

The topic of this part is dialogue. This can also be an inner dialogue, so this exercise can be done on oneself in the form of self- reflection. Its full form, however, is a meeting with another person.

Step 1.: Begin by asking yourselves a question nobody is going to answer out loud. Spend a little time in silence, giving your mind time to gather thoughts and to form initial answers. The question is: „How significant is our voice?”

Step 2.: Now read a series of statements. After each one, refer to it saying to what extent it describes your own experience. If you find anything moving, interesting or unclear, ask each several additional questions. Below, you will find the statements and examples of follow-up questions:

I often feel silenced by others.

How often? By whom? Have you felt silenced in our relationship? How would you like to react to that in the future?

Every voice should always be heard.

Why yes/not? What influences this? Who should decide about what is worth attention? How to solve conflicts between an individual’s needs and a group’s needs?

There are situations when it is necessary to shout.

What are the situations? How do we evaluate shouting in other situations?

There is a person whose truth I want to hear.

Who is it? What do you want to hear from them about? Why is it important to you? What can you do to create such a space for the two of you?

There are persons or groups whose voices I have never heard.

What emotions does that make you feel? What do you want to hear from them? What can be done to make their voice heard?

Step 3.: Return to the question which opened the exercise: „How significant is our voice?”

How did your approach to the question change throughout the exercise?

What moved you?

What aspect of the exercise is going to stay with you for long?

Script

Introduction: This short workshop is based on an exercise called “A dialogue for four walls”. The point of departure is a question which you are going to ask the group. Subsequently, you will invite them to comment on a series of statements read by you. Each person is going to take their position by standing in a specific spot within the workshop space. Then, it is your task to select a few persons from each group whom you will ask to present their reflections on the topic. After each statement and a group having moved, talk to other participants, so that each person has the opportunity to speak at least once during the exercise (depending on the size of the group). If someone wishes not to speak, do not push them and do not continue asking, only thank them for communicating that.

It is a very important aspect of the activity, also related to the topic of the workshop, that each person can communicate their position throughout the whole conversation. Standing in a particular spot within the workshop space is simultaneously a silent commentary on the statement currently read by the facilitator. Participants express their beliefs even when they are not speaking. They may change their minds and move, and that will be a declaration visible for everyone. When the facilitator asks someone a follow-up question, even refusing to answer will provide certain information.

Preparation: Prepare 4 sheets of paper with the following phrases written on them: “yes”, “no”, ”maybe”, “I don’t know”. Prepare a sheet with the following question and statements:

What do I want to shout out?

I often feel silenced by others.

Every voice should always be heard.

There are situations when it is necessary to shout.

There is a person whose truth I want to hear.

There are persons or groups whose voices I have never heard.

Contract: At the beginning of a session, agree a few basic rules with the group (you can add more if need be):

we speak individually – in the part of the workshop that includes moving around, the moderator (you) indicates persons who will speak, but they can also volunteer (but it is not necessary for you to accept all volunteers, particularly if you have a large group and must deal with pressure of time)

we care about confidentiality – we do not discuss participants’ personal contributions outside the space of the workshop. If we wish to return to someone’s contribution after the workshop, we ought to ask the person if they wish to return to it.

we do not judge persons and do not refer to who they are – we only refer to what they say and do, to what is concrete and factual

everyone speaks on their own behalf – without generalisations such as “we”, “it is generally known that…”, “we all agree that…”, “always”, “everyone”, etc.,

Steps:

Introduce the contract – a list of rules necessary for the workshop to work out. If you have much time and the group is a small one, ask them if they would like to add any rules to the collection.

Announce the fact that you will be working with dialogue. Say that the opening and final question is „What do I want to shout out?” Ask the participants to remain silent and think about the question for a moment.

Ask the participants to stand up. Put the 4 sheets with the answers “yes”, “no”, ”maybe” and “I don’t know” on the floor. Put them next to walls, preferably in the central part of each wall. “Yes” and “no” should be placed on opposite one another. Ask participants to stand in the middle of the room. Read the first statement and ask everyone to stand in a spot corresponding with their attitude to the statement. In each group, have 2-3 people answer follow-up questions, e.g. “What do you think about this?”, „Why are you taking this place?”

Repeat the above for each statement. Try to enable everyone to speak out at some point.

After discussing the statements, invite everyone to sit down in a circle. Recall the opening question: “What do I want to shout out?” And ask who would like to comment on it or answer it. Moderate dialogue on this topic for a while.

At the end, you may sum up significant threads, trends or conclusions stemming from the dialogue session.

Thank everyone for their participation, openness and contributions, say goodbye.

Summary: The opening question and the statements are suggestions formed with the “Shout, Sister, shout!” exhibition in mind. You may propose your own ones – adding them to the originals, replacing some of those, or creating a new topic and a new set.

1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Prawda i metoda, transl. Bogdan Baran, Inter Esse, Kraków 1993, p. 337 and further.

works

nr 1

Sie / They, Sisters

Małgorzata Szandała

prints on fabric, 3x3 m

2023

Their fate is unknown. We do not know where they were deported to, where they died. No mementos or photographs of them have survived. I try to imagine their faces. I find them on the pages of pre-war newspapers – in advertisements for women’s products, Nivea creams, Palmolive soaps and offers from German travel agencies. Smiling women’s faces, still carefree, gazing off into the distance.

The faces of the women in the adverts could be just that: Elsa Croner or Marianne Kohn, or all the other women. They are just faces in adverts, figures in drawings, they can disappear unnoticed.

nr 2

All that was left for her was the joy of the journey

Małgorzata Szandała

archives: lightbox and German and Austrian newspapers in a display case („Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung” Nummer 18, 2. Mai 1935, „Das Illustrierte Blatt. Frankfurter Illustrierte” Nr. 16, 15 April 1939, „Verkehrswirtschaftliche Rundschau” April 1938)

2023

Für Sie bleibt nur die Freude an der Reise – this is the caption of a photograph advertising a travel agency in the magazine ‚Das Illustrierte Blatt’ of April 1939 (special edition on the occasion of Fürer’s 50th birthday). Looking at the picture of a woman against the backdrop of a picturesque valley, one could paraphrase the title as: „All that remains for her is the joy of travel”. As an advertising slogan, it sounds ordinary, but its pronunciation can vary and depends on the context. We will perceive it in a completely different way when we think of the reality that changed so much in the following years - when we think of the deportations of the Jewish population to death camps, when we see people crammed into freight cars, not yet knowing what awaits them at the end of their journey. The language itself is also significant: calling it a journey signals a kind of displacement resulting from the collective consciousness’s rejection of knowledge of the crime (which occurred during the Second World War and continued, to some extent, for many years in the post-war period).

Female figure against a landscape background

Landscape painting, so favoured by the Nazis, depicted the beauty of nature, mountain landscapes (watercolours by Adolf Hitler himself depicting Alpine landscapes are also known), forests, small villages as well as distant open spaces. For the Nazis, reflecting both the soul of the Nation (Volk) and the vast expanses of living space (Lebensraum) needed by the Third Reich. The train rushing into space that we see on the pages of newspapers of that time can be read as a symptom of the expansionism of that era.

In our story, the figure of the woman against the landscape eventually disappears from the picture – her soul does not belong to the soul of the Nation.

nr 3

Landshaft. Disappearance

Małgorzata Szandała

video (1’19’’)

2024

Among other things, Volkism holds that the human soul is part of the larger soul of the Nation (German: Volk), which is the soul of the world. The soul of a people is shaped by the landscape (German: Landschaft) and, once shaped, is not subject to change, and that national characteristics are determined by the landscape in which the nation was formed at the beginning of its history; e.g. the characteristics of the Jews were formed in deserts and therefore, according to this concept, this nation is to be characterised by shallowness, barrenness and dryness. (...) The opposite is the climate of the North, characterised by the damp and cold forests of Pragermania, where people long for the sun - that is why Germans are people of light (Lichtmenschen); their blond hair and blue eyes indicate purity of soul. The Pragermans, as a settled people, are supposed to be a people rooted in the land; the Jews, as the original nomads, are supposed to be a naturally uprooted people, with a nomadic mentality, incapable of loving their homeland and rooting themselves permanently in any land; their nomadism supposedly reveals itself in the form of a natural tendency to cosmopolitanism. [Wikipedia]

The Volkist landscape – a landscape that absorbs

We are thus entangled in various relations with landscapes. The landscape, made up of two words - country and image – is something partly mystical, it is basically an idea. It is also a completely invented image, necessary for the nation-state, which has its terrain with boundaries drawn on maps and marked in space. Only those who belong to the nation can live in it. The Volkist landscape is a landscape that predates those who do not correspond to the delimited criteria: those who do not have a proper soul.

It is in this landscape that the female figure disappears. He consumes her, devours her. No trace is left of her.

*The landscape also devours the disappearing people in the forest on the green border.

**Land is also the land and what lies within it: natural resources, deposits, fertile soils. The war in Ukraine is also about land and its natural resources.

nr 4

Die Reise / The Journey (the Road to Berlin)

Małgorzata Szandała

wideo, 1 h 46 min

2023/2024

Once again the train rushes through space, through fields, villages and forests. The road to Berlin, the snapshots of which we are watching, is again a story concerning disappearance.

Else Croner, educator and writer, was born on 4 May 1878 in Bytom. She spent her teenage years in Breslau and was one of the few women in Germany who had the opportunity to study at university. She then moved to Berlin, where she lived and worked for many years until around 1932. After ‚35, the trace of her disappears until 1942, from which the last information about her comes: she dies in a Berlin hospital after a suicide attempt.

I get on the train, go to Berlin, look out the window at the fleeing landscape, I want to see the world through her eyes.

nr 5

We Walked Through the Fields

Małgorzata Szandała

installation: sculpture, metal + video story

2023/2024

The inspiration for the installation entitled Szłyśmy przez pola (We Walked Through the Fields) was the story of Margareta Fuchs, who, along with thousands of others, experienced the consequences of the 1938 Operation Polenaktion.

On 28 October 1938, Margareta Fuchs, a saleswoman in a luxury fashion house living in Bytom, received an Ausweisung-Befehl (deportation order). The reason was the Jewish origin of her husband, a tailor, Ignatius Fuchs. After trying unsuccessfully to intervene at the Polish consulate in Opole, Margareta returned to her flat, which turned out to be sealed, and found the police in the house instead of her husband and 13-year-old daughter. She was allowed to take 10 marks with her and was immediately taken to the police station, where she was placed in a cell. In the middle of the night, a hired bus took her to the Dąbrowa Miejska area, to a forest on the then German-Polish border between Bytom and Radzionków. Together with two thousand other people, she was forced to cross the green border without prior notice or preparation. The refugees were subjected to violence from both the SS and the reluctant Polish border guards, who were ordered to push them back into German territory.

Eventually, Margareta managed to get to the Radzionków area, where she camped out for a few days and from there made her way into Poland. Despite the tragedy of the whole situation, Margareta could talk about luck. As part of the same action, the events taking place in Zbąszyń, where a transit camp was set up for around 6,000 stateless persons who were not allowed to enter Poland, made the strongest history. Due to the weather and the lack of adequate infrastructure, conditions in the camp proved particularly difficult. In spite of the efforts of the Polish Red Cross and Jewish charities, there were situations in which imprisoned people took their own lives as a result of hunger, fear and ill-treatment.

Among those in the Zbąszyń camp was the family of Herschel Grynszpan, who, in retaliation, carried out an assassination attempt on the secretary of the Third Reich embassy, Ernst vom Rath. The German authorities of the time used this event as a pretext for the pogrom against the Jews that we know as Kristallnacht.

In their testimonies, Margareta and her husband describe the gradual and slow process of the deformation of bourgeois everyday life in Nazi Germany, culminating in their violent expulsion from the country. The ordinary suburban forest through which they had to flee becomes monstrous, and the chaos, very bad weather conditions, darkness and omnipresent violence they describe turn out to be the universal experiences of refugee people who are actors and actresses in wars and political events also taking place today.

Apart from the tragedy in Zbąszyń and the few mentions of the action, information about the thousands of people driven across the border in Bytom, near Chojnice and Wschowa was ignored in the press of the time and, despite the enormous scale of the repression, remains little known to this day.

In the narrative layer of the installation We Walked Through the Fields, a fragment of Margareta Fuchs’ testimony about the green border between Bytom and Radzionków intermingles with literary fiction inspired by the Alpine folk tale about Sennentuntschi, puppets created by men to satisfy their sexual needs. According to the legend, the creatures created from hay, moss and other materials available at hand came to life and accompanied the men until they wanted to leave them. The abused dolls took revenge by brutally killing their creators and decorated their homes with skins torn from their bodies. The metalwork form alludes to an excerpt from the story, becoming a metaphor for fetishes created from darkness, great stories and borders.

The work refers to the theme of the dangers of national myths. Romantic narratives become more and more detailed over time, and when fiction mixes with the everyday they come to life influencing political reality, legitimising violence and exclusion.

nr 6

All About My Scream!

Anna Piotrowska, Ewa Noras

triptych. concept and realisation: Anna Piotrowska, Ewa Noras

soundscape: Anna Piotrowska

camera, editing: Aleksandra Kępińska

organisational support: Martyna Fras

technical support: Kobra, Paweł Murlik, Dastin Greczyło, Kuba Zapartowicz, Krzysztof Soszka

partners: 10 years! Rozbark Theatre, Dance Development Foundation_eferte

2024

The title of the triptych by Anna Piotrowska and Ewa Noras Wszystko o moim krzyku! (“All About My Scream!”) is a paraphrase of the title from the film drama directed by Pedro Almodóvar “All About My Mother”. The expression of the scream itself can be the result of certain entanglements, relationships, impossibilities and incapacities resulting from fears. At the same time, screaming can represent strength, courage and a desire to communicate one’s needs.

As artists for whom the closest medium is the body, movement and physicality, we started a conversation about the essence and meaning of the scream itself and its physiology. The first association was Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, which has become a symbol of expressionism in art. Stunning is the grimacing androgynous figure that has become part of the collective cultural identity. In the artist’s diary, we find the sentence: ‚(...) I felt an infinite scream piercing nature’, which pushes us to examine whether there is a need in us for the scream as a source not only derived from fear, but also as a source of power and presence, marked by individual experience. Munch, in the act of observation, doubles the narrative. It is a world made up of the scream of nature, a sound felt rather inwardly, bodily. It is also a world of the scream of a figure or character perceiving the scream of nature. Anxiety in this interpretation is caused by the noise of an aggressive world that incapacitates the individual, becomes an existential trap of powerlessness and disillusionment. It itself becomes indistinct, undefined, frightened, fearful and suffering. We wish to explore in a sublime way the layers of our bodies to express inner emotions by creating a space to consider the process of screaming. We ask ourselves, what is it? What is its organics? What is the pre-stage? Is the courage to scream a sign of my consciousness? Of my disagreement with something or someone? Is shouting a sign of noticing myself? A kind of marking of the territory, or a shedding of frustration? Do we have space in our lives for its expression?

Shouting is a kind of exposing an emotion that is often born out of tension and pain. What are the places where we are free to shout? What is the sense of awkwardness to one’s own voice, all the more raised? Unknown to us is often the vibration, echo, range and strength of our inner experienced emotion hidden in our voice. A shout is a FORM that arises from tension to relaxation. We knew that we were not looking for the image in which it is exposed. We are curious about the moment of decision to scream. Its expression becomes introverted, moving away from individuality. We experience crying into a pillow, we bite our jaw, we gnash our teeth, we suppress the intensifying expression of the presence and power of ourselves. Whatever the experience, whatever the trauma, it is important to understand how can I inhabit my body? How, regardless of the situation, can I live in harmony with myself? What does a scream contain! What do we know about the scream? Especially our own. Is screaming part of testing boundaries?

nr 7

Etlekhe verter oyf mame-loshn / A few words in the mother tongue

Irena Klepfisz,

from the volume Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021, publisher Wesleyan Poetry Series
polish translation by Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota
poem on lightboxes

2022

Irena Klepfisz was born in 1941 in the Warsaw Ghetto, from where she was evacuated with her mother during the uprising. In 1949, she emigrated to the United States where she still lives today. In America, she was active in feminist and lesbian organisations, as well as secular Jewish associations. She co-founded The Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. She has contributed to feminist magazines such as “Conditions” and “Bridges”. She was co-editor of the volume “The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology”.

Her survival, but also the fear she experienced in her early years, defines her poetry. Multilingualism is extremely important in her work - she simultaneously uses Yiddish as the language of her ancestors and English as the language of her studies. Her poetry deals with alienation, life in exile, a disappearing culture, and homosexuality, thus breaking the taboo. In her poem Etleche werter in mame-loszn (“A few words in mother tongue”), the poet used the word lezbianke for the first time, thus introducing the term into Yiddish.

nr 8

Bed Doll No. 21,

a play by Djordje Lebović directed by Jan Kulczynski,
Television Theatre,

Author: Djordje Lebović

Translated by: Edward Płaczek

Directed by: Jan Kulczynski

Set design: Wojciech Sieciński

Television production: Joanna Wiśniewska

Cast: Halina Mikołajska (Wilma Jelinek), Henryk Borowski (Emil Grabner), Stanisław Zaczyk (Husband) and Włodzimierz Press

1971

A 1971 play that did not receive its television premiere until 48 years later.

Djordje Lebović, the author of a play written in the 1960s, tackles the painful subject of the sexual abuse of female concentration camp prisoners selected by the Nazi authorities for forced labour in brothels. It is a taboo subject that, for many reasons, was not addressed in the post-war discourse on the Holocaust. Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an unexpected guest turns up at the flat of the doctor Dr Wilma Jelinek, a neat, middle-aged woman – the lawyer Emil Grabner, a former SS officer, the commandant of the brothel in Auschwitz, known by the Germans as the „Dolls’ House”. What begins is a tense conversation between the victim and the torturer about the events of a time when the struggle for survival and the preservation of dignity confronted women with tragic choices. The play was not broadcast on television after its realisation due to the subject matter raised and the oppositional commitment of Halina Mikołajska, who played the title role.

nr 8

Swish, Slash, Slide

Barbara Gryka and Wiktoria Dragan, Martyna Gawor, Natalia Gola, Julia Gucwa, Małgorzata Kita, Wiktoria Kłos,

video,
movement work, performative actions: Patryk Dariusz Gacki
photography: Marcin Polar
voice: Agata Cukierska
lace making: Beata Młynarczyk-Gryka

2023/2024

The work is the result of a workshop with girls from Youth Education Centre in Radzionków. The first stage was to build together an architecture of hopes and dreams about what might happen when the residents leave the centre.

Based on the guidelines of Rudolf Laban’s creative gymnastics, choreographic actions were combined with words and rhythm. Pressing, pushing, twisting, cutting, sliding, flicking, drifting, shaking - these are the girls’ gestures, each one referring to the slogan in their own way after hearing it. In the audio layer, we hear texts that deal with the workshop participants’ ideas of what a perfect day might look like.

nr 10

Can you hear me, Sister? (Чи ти чуєш мене, Сестро?)

Alla Zagaykevych

electroacoustic installation

2024

The electroacoustic installation is conceived as a space for the symbolic search for one’s own freedom, one’s own path, one’s own exit - from total darkness to light. The musical material of the installation consists of electronically generated noises and sounds of a woman’s voice – whispering, singing, breathing...

nr 11

The Palm,

neon
design: Marcin Wysocki
execution: IRSA neon

2024

Twenty seven bones,

Thirty five muscles,

Nearly two-thousand nerve cells

Are in each of our five fingertips.

That is more than enough

To write “Mein Kampf” or

or “Winnie-the-Pooh”

(Wisława Szymborska, The Palm, from the volume Enough, 2011)

nr 12

Stojna Marinković’s 1902 illustrated travel book

Lidija Mirković,

1902

Stojna Marinković 1902 - 1970

The history books won’t remember my grandmother, she wasn’t important in any way, but she led a rather remarkable life as a Gypsy* in her time.

She was born in Serbia in 1902 as the daughter of a farmer and a musician. She was the eldest child and only daughter of her parents, who were not rich but had enough money. They were able to send all their four sons to school, at a time when school education was not yet common. According to custom and practice, Stojna was not allowed to go to school. Although she was brought up in the Vlach Roma tradition, she enjoyed freedoms that most women of her time (Gypsy and non-Gypsy) did not have. She was allowed to smoke early, travel alone, divorce and marry a man 15 years younger. The invasion of the German army ended Stojna’s idyllic and safe life, if an idyllic and safe life for Gypsies is at all possible.

Before World War II, Šabac was a prosperous, peaceful town with about 15 000 inhabitants. After the invasion, the district where Stojna lived was burnt down by the German Wehrmacht. All her brothers were partisans on the front line, her husband was killed as a partisan fighting against German troops and she lost all her possessions. During this difficult time, Stojna was left alone with three young children and her frail mother. After the German army entered the town, two camps were established in a short time. The preferred victims were Jews and Gypsies. Already in August 1942, Dr Harald Turner, head of the German military administration in Serbia, reported: „Serbia (is) the only country where the Jewish and Gypsy question is solved”.

Stojna never overcame her hatred of the Germans and remained traumatised throughout her life. Although many members of her family lived in Germany after the war, for example her eldest brother Draga, she refused to visit them. She used to say: „I will never set foot on German soil”.

When Stojna was a little girl, her father used to buy her books with no written words, only pictures. These were travel books with landscapes of the world. I inherited one of them.

* The artist uses the term „Gypsies” exclusively.

nr 13

Z-10889

Lidija Mirković,

video, 30 sec

2011

At the end of 2008, sitting in front of my computer, I found reports and videos about right-wing groups and their propaganda. The killings of Gypsies in Hungary had just taken place. I was so shocked that I cried for three days. From childhood my mother hid that she was a Gypsy, so I always tried to be a confident Gypsy woman. That’s how we raised our adopted son. But he didn’t like to be seen as a Gypsy either. My mother looks like a Gypsy, and so does my son. Most of my Gypsy family look like Gypsies. Except for me. After that day, I asked myself if I was doing the right thing by teaching my son and mother to show their ethnicity. Can I take responsibility for this? What if history repeated itself? Would I be brave enough to stand beside my loved ones? What if the killings from Hungary reached Serbia or Germany? Would I be spared? Would I want to be left out? Would I go into hiding? What would happen to my family?

Z-10888 is the number of Albine Weiss, a German Sinti, the last Gypsy woman registered under this number in the books of Auschwitz. The idea of marking myself as a Gypsy woman had been growing in me for three years. From time to time I had the impression that the mark was burning on my left hand. The burning eventually stopped and I began to wonder if I really wanted to live with such a stigma for the rest of my life. Then the burning started to return more often, so I felt an almost physical need to immortalise this number on my body. I got the tattoo in December 2011. All members of my Gypsy family were part of the armed resistance during the Second World War. In the former Yugoslavia, my mother was recognised as the daughter of a fallen soldier.

nr 14

Angela, Żaneta, Danuta

Lidija Mirković

three-channel video,

2023

The artist’s residency in Bytom is summarised in four conversations in the form of video works. Their protagonists are three Roma women, residents of Bytom: Angela, Żaneta and Danuta, as well as Lidija. With this work, the artist wants to start a long-term process of creating a museum of Roma women; the heroines answered the artist’s questions about their basic values, vision of happiness, needs and dreams. For Lidija Mirković it is extremely important to make Roma women visible and audible, now we can get to know them better.

nr 15

archive photography

Lidija Mirković

lightbox

2012

The photograph was taken during the workshop “A Man for a Day”, conducted by Diane Torr on 28-29 July 2012 at the Berlin Theaterhaus. Torr’s original workshop was about performing masculinity and was mainly aimed at women. Their aim was to put female participants into masculine roles in order to evoke or reinforce the awareness that gender is merely a repetitive set of gestures and behaviours. Pictured here are Lidija Mirković and one of the participants after their image transformation.

nr 16

Dialogue with Carmen

Lidija Mirković

continuation of the cycle started in 2011, photographs taken in Bytom and Zabrze,

2023

Carmen is one of the most distinctive figures in European culture and literature. Just as Shylock from Shakespeare’s works became the object of anti-Semitic projections over the centuries, so the figure of Carmen has shaped perceptions of the Roma community since 1845, when Prosper Mérimée published the novella on the basis of which Georges Bizet later created his famous opera.

Carmen is a sensual, wild creature of nature, a femme fatale. She is usually portrayed as a black-haired Roma woman with large earrings, deep cleavage and promising eyes – a fearless, independent woman, confident and coquettish. Carmen can be found everywhere: in opera and operetta, numerous films, musicals, music videos, ballet, puppet theatre, modern dance, literature, fairy tales, illustrations, cartoons, comics, paintings, kitsch decorations and advertisements.

All of these are joined by the fact that they reproduce and reinforce existing stereotypes, following narrative conventions and locating the dangerous, evil and sinister in the outside world.

Each photograph follows the same pattern: A Gypsy woman holds in her hands a photograph portraying Carmen. The artist leaves it up to the person to decide whether or not to show her face. This arrangement is meant to ironically express that the people involved in the project are aware of socially binding stereotypes and that they are ready to enter into a dialogue with the photographically captured image present in the continuum of their daily activities.

nr 17

Toma

Dorota Hadrian

sculpture, audio

voice: Toma and Agata Cukierska

2023

Toma is 67 years old. She comes from Ukraine, from the Kryvyi Rih. 10 days after the Russian invasion began, she came to Poland with her three cats. At first she earned money cleaning offices in a Katowice bank, but now she cleans stairwells in Bytom blocks and tenement houses.

Dorota Hadrian’s work refers to the most depreciated sector of work - the domestic helper or cleaning lady. Between 53 and 100 million people worldwide work in this sector. There is a progressive feminisation of migration, to which the migration wave from Ukraine also contributes. Ukrainian women, along with other women from Central and Eastern Europe and the Global South, very often find employment in the domestic services market as cleaners.

They are referred to in the literature as the ‚immigrant class’, ‚international proletarians’, ‚servants of globalisation’. A factor attracting migrant women is the increased demand for paid domestic help in developed countries. The vast majority of them still work informally. A contract is therefore a privilege for a few. No pension contribution is made on their wages, they are not entitled to paid holidays and often to health care. In addition to the instability and temporariness they experience, they also remain ‚invisible’, cleaning offices in corporations - before or after employees leave, cleaning stairwells from the morning, often remaining impersonal. Dorota Hadrian placed the figure of Toma on the ceiling to emphasise her invisibility; in this position she does not disturb anyone and can do her work in peace.

nr 18

Silesian Dances

Eugeniusz Cękalski, video
1936

Shout, Sister, Shout, Rosetta Tharpe, audio,
1938

Reportage showing traditional Silesian dances from 1936 combined with a piece by Sister Tharpe from 1938.

nr 19

Ph. Pragati Sethi

Marta Romankiv in collaboration with Pragati Sethi

video

voice: Pragati Sethi

2024

According to the Central Statistical Office, currently 25 per cent of doctors in Poland are of retirement age, while at the same time hospitals are sounding the alarm about the shortage of doctors, and according to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 2020 calculations, there is a shortage of between 30,000 and 50,000 doctors in Poland.

Pragati Sethi is a medical student whose university moved to Bytom with the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory. In June 2024, Pragati plans to pass the final exam that will allow her to obtain her medical licence. However, her years of study will not translate into the opportunity to work where she currently lives and studies, as her licence will not be accepted in the European Union due to complicated formal procedures.

In their joint activities, Marta Romankiv and Pragati Sethi focus on the dreams of the future doctor to be able to practice her profession in the place where she currently lives. The girl shares the knowledge she has gained through a recorded video work in which she gives her dream medical consultation. In addition, Pragati draws the documents she longs for, necessary to practise her profession within the European Union.