The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, and Nietzsche By Kristin Gjesdal. Oxford University Press. Oxford: United Kingdom, 2020; pp. xvii + 219, 8 illustrations. $74 cloth.

Abstract

with an Executioner) in Chapter 9, “Archive of the Missing Image”; and, from the post-Jedwabne era, Tadeusz Słobodianek’s Nasza Klasa (Our Class) and Krzysztof Warlikowski’s (A)pollonia inChapter 10, “Duplicitous Spectator,Helpless Spectator.” The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust joins a limited but growing number of English-language texts that examine Polish theatre as a broad subject, both chronologically and generically. Niziołek’s study provides English-language readership an impressive exploration of the specificities of postwar Polish spectatorship, with audiences confronted by a wide range of performances that cut through the symbolic norms of Polish wartime narratives. For readers coming to this work without advanced knowledge of Polish postwar realities and cultural makeup, the book would work best as a whole; the second part of the book relies upon the deep contextual understanding of Polish positionality founded in the first chapters. Chapters in the second part of the book more quickly address theatrical takeaways without dedicating much space to rehashing the historical or political specificities of the moment. That said, the whole text is well worth reading, and presents numerous lesser-known or less critically evaluated theatrical explorations at the intersection of Polishness and Jewishness in the postwar moment.