Karski, the Holocaust "Books are weapons in the war of ideas", the famous WWII poster proclaimed. It was produced by the US Office of War Information (OWI), and featured a quotation from President Roosevelt and the phrase coined by W.W. Norton, the publisher and chairman of the Council on Books in Wartime (Hench 2010, 45). As a 1944 OWI memo pointed out: "The impact of a book may last six months or several decades. Books are the most enduring propaganda of all" (ibid., 70). The impact of a book, especially one dealing with war and conflict, may not only last long, but also change over the years. If history is a "retrospectively composed and meaning-endowed narrative", the processes of "selecting, excluding and assigning importance to specific pasts" play a key role in the construction of such narratives, which in turn are closely linked to identity and collective memory formation (Heer and Wodak 2008, 1, 6). In her work on the discursive construction of history, Ruth Wodak points out that particular narratives and arguments, which are always in a process of evolution, are frequently recontextualized and transferred from one area, such as history books or museum exhibitions, into another, for example, politics or mass media. This recontextualization may include a range of transformations, including deletion, addition or substitution of elements in a narrative of the past.
Tablet, written on behalf of his "Polish friend" Adam Żółtowski. Eliot was asked to write a foreword to "a little publication about the German Concentration Camp at Oświęcim [Auschwitz]." 1 He replied in the affirmative, adding that though as a rule he wrote prefaces only to books published by Faber, in this case he might be ready to make an exception. This is how the correspondence between Eliot and Żółtowski, Director of the Polish Research Centre in London, began. 2 This article traces the origin of the Auschwitz text, which I have identified as Jerzy Andrzejewski's Roll Call (Polish: Apel), and the journey it made from Nazi-occupied Warsaw to Eliot's desk in London. Since Eliot's preface to Roll Call did not appear in print in 1945, as originally planned, and remained unknown to the scholarly community for over seventy years, its recent publication in vol. 6 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by David Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard, gives rise to a number of questions. 3 One of them, which is discussed in this paper, is the absence of any references to Jews and Jewish suffering in both Andrzejewski's text and Eliot's preface. 4 I also address the question of why the English edition of Roll Call with Eliot's preface was not published in 1945. To answer these questions, I examine unpublished correspondence between Eliot and Żółtowski within a wider context of wartime publishing and journalism. More specifically, I focus on Christian debates on the meaning of totalitarianism and religious narratives of World War II that dominated the political discourse of the 1940s. Thus, the paper aims to shed light on what Marina Mackay referred to as "the submerged relationships between modernism and political culture, where 'political' ... conveys its old meanings of parliamentary, journalistic and diplomatic discourses." 5 To contextualise the unpublished translation of Roll Call and Eliot's
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