The Polish debate around Jan Tomasz Gross’s "Fear" took place at the beginning of 2008. The book relates to the question of Polish anti-semitism after Word War II, and by the same token, it identifies the Polish self-image of a nation of victims to be a problem. The presented analysis of the debate around Fear concentrates on: analogies with the German debate on Daniel Goldhagen’s "Hitler’s Willing Executioners" from 1996; meta-discursive aspects of the Polish debate (the debate concerned the book and the debate itself rather than historical events); some features of debate’s politicization and medialization; the problematic “ethnization” of the debate; polarization of the standpoints and the lack of “intermediary work” aiming at an intermediation between standpoints. The conclusions lead to the postulation of an “intermediary” discourse analysis
