An implicated museum, a museum of implication? : Upper Silesian Jews’ House of Remembrance in Gliwice in the context of the Polish museum boom

Tekst powstał w ramach projektu badawczego "Nowe polskie muzea historyczne", sfinansowanego ze środków Narodowego Centrum Nauki

This article is a presentation of the results of research on the history and mechanisms of the Polish museum boom in which I focus on seeking critical and opening potential of new Polish historical museums in the context of minority memories. In this vein, I conduct a case study of the Upper Silesian Jewish Remembrance House, a branch of the Gliwice Museum that opened to the public in 2018 and elaborates on themes that are doubly excluded within Polish memory culture: German-Jewish history. I take into account the museum’s spatial context (the Jewish cemetery), building (a restored pre-burial house from the early 20th century), the permanent exhibition itself, and, additionally, my autoethnography as a researcher of Polish historical museums, and a Gliwice native, placing the analysis in the context of the theory of the implicated subject (Rothberg) and the community of implication (Lehrer) - directly and, most importantly, indirectly implicated in a history in injustice, oppression, and violence. Finally, I propose a term of "a museum of implication", the infrastructure of difficult memory that would open up new possibilities for problematizing present relations with the past.