Death in Tiergarten

Abstract

The subject of the article is the comparison of two approaches to German-Polish relations: the one of Helmuth Plessner, the founder of the contemporary philosophical anthropology and one of first theoreticians of German “Sonderweg” in the history of Europe, and that of a Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz as one of the most radical critics of the Polish “national Form”. Its starting point is the presentation of the main assumptions of Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, especially his idea of the human as an eccentric positional being, as well as the literary representation of man as a being shaped from outside, which one can find in the work by Gombrowicz. The historical source of that comparison is, on the one hand, the analysis of German national consciousness and political culture, first introduced by Plessner in 1935 in his Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche, and further published in 1959 in the book entitled The Belated Nation, and, on the other hand, the fragments of the Diary by Gombrowicz from 1964, published separately on German as Berliner Notizen (1965). While presenting the substantial convergences of those views as well as subjecting to critical assessment the premises of the same substantial differences between them, author, on that basis, aims at the reconstruction of the conditions which would enable, German-Polish recognition, that would go beyond the national solidarities.