Moczarskis Gespräche mit dem Henker

The chapter examines Kazimierz Moczarski’s book Conversations with an Executioner. The book is based on the experiences of the Polish journalist and writer Kazimierz Moczarski, who shared a prison cell with SS Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop in Warsaw for half a year in 1949. Written in 1956 after Moczarski’s release, it was published in a censored version in 1972 and in unabridged version in 1992. For Moczarski, sharing a cell with a Nazi perpetrator posed a particular challenge: on the one hand, like Stroop, he was an avowed opponent of communism and a victim of the arbitrary prison regime; on the other, Stroop was a representative of the Wehrmacht and the SS, which he had fought against and which had killed members of his family and friends.

The chapter describes how Moczarski attempts to overcome his own victimhood through his journalistic work in prison and his retrospective, aesthetic refiguration of this experience post factum after his release, writing a portrait of a Nazi perpetrator and creating a form of legal prose. The dialogical form of Moczarski’s text opens up a space for reflection in which the interconnection between the discourses of victim and perpetrator becomes visible.

Anja Tippner, “Moczarskis Gespräche mit dem Henker. Zur Verschränkung von Opfer- und Täterdiskursen”, in Segler-Meßner, Silke /Nickel, Claudia (eds): Von Tätern und Opfern. Zur medialen Darstellung von politisch und ethnisch motivierter Gewalt im 20./21. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main u.a.: Peter Lang, 2013, 41-61.