La catastrophe en « je ». Violences de masse et pratiques diaristes au XXe siècle
6 décembre /14h30 - 16h30
« Selfless Witnessing? Ludwik Landau’s Chronicle of War and Occupation (1939-1944) and the Tradition of Polish Social Documentation » (Malgorzata Mazurek)
Ludwik Landau’s wartime chronicle, written on the “Aryan Side” in ethnically segregated Warsaw, is one the most detailed (nearly 2000 pages in print) and yet elusive diaries created under the Nazi occupation. Its author, Ludwik Landau–Polish interwar economist-cum-historian and the co-creator (with Michał Kalecki) of Poland’s first national income account– documented daily events in Warsaw, Poland, and the world at large for the Polish Underground State’s civic institutions from October 1939 until his mysterious disappearance in February 1944. This talk discusses the narrator’s extreme self-effacement, which manifested in statistically-minded objectivism, even in his most personal writing. Facing horrors daily, Landau had turned to dry facts rather than to the expression of his own feelings. For his closest friends and contemporaries, the Chronicle felt like a “work […] written in “subdued style of factual dispatches” (Michał Kalecki) or “by a hand directed by the faceless mass, by a needle in a seismograph” (Gustaw Herling-Grudziński). This talk discusses the puzzle of Landau’s narrative self-effacement and the choice of the chronicle genre in the larger context of Poland’s tradition of social documentation, economic statistics, social history writing, and underground knowledge production.