Profanity: Obscenity, Perversion, and Kitsch. Vernacular Efforts to Represent the Holocaust in Poland and the Question of Holocaust Decorum

Abstract Nonprofessional efforts to depict the Holocaust, archived in Poland’s ethnographic collections, force audiences to confront a specific genre of “awkward objects.” Viewers may perceive these vernacular representations as brutal, explicit, and voyeuristic. In response to a set of postwar works that Lehrer, Sendyka, Wilczyk, and Zych identified through their research—which they presented at the exhibition Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust—commentators and researchers have invoked the categories of “obscenity,” “perversion,” or “kitsch” to describe Holocaust folk art. By exploring how and why Holocaust-related folk (naive) art from Poland transgresses accepted norms of Holocaust representation, the author reveals how these critical concepts darkly mirror society’s perceived violation of shared standards; how “obscenity” transgresses moral norms, “perversion”—sexual conventions, and “kitsch”—aesthetic expectations. Consequently, viewers may easily interpret folk art’s departure from the mainstream visual language of the Holocaust as a distortion or corruption of memory. The author, however, argues that it is more productive and illuminating to understand this kind of art as a unique, vernacular commemorative format that challenges dominant epistemologies in Holocaust studies and Holocaust representation