Palimpsest Muranów. Einschreiben, Löschen und Neuschreiben als hypertextuelle Prozesse der Stadtgeschichte

Abstract

Until 1942, Warsaw's inner city, and the Muranów neighborhood in particular, was the largest Jewish urban settlement in Europe. This paper analyses Muranów as a multi-layered palimpsest and shows how, after the murder of over 350,000 Warsaw Jews in nearby Treblinka, the German occupiers eliminated the material representation of Jewish presence in the Polish capital. After the end of World War II, in the Communist Poland a new district was built on the debris of the Jewish district. The new architecture incorporated rubble as a specially developed building material. On a theoretical level, the paper argues that urban palimpsests do not consist solely of the archaeologi-cal layers of objects of different ages. As a complex process of writing, reading, and er-asing, palimpsests map the simultaneity of recoding and erasing historical meanings. This is shown for the Muranów special exhibition at POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which reflects on the museum’s situation in the midst of Muranów. The analysis exemplifies how the re-reading of Muranów as a palimpsest takes place in the early 21st century.