An annotated collection of original photographs of twins who survived the brutal medical experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau (1943-1945). These never-before-seen photographs, taken by the author at the ...40th anniversary of the camp's liberation (1985) and the hearing on Mengele's crimes that followed at Yad Vashem are unforgettable.
This paper, largely inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of the camp, reflects on the relationship between the ‘topographical’ and the ‘topological’ in reference to Auschwitz–Birkenau and ...its spatialities. After having discussed the concept of
soglia (threshold), we briefly introduce the ways in which the historiographical literature on the Holocaust treats the relationship between modernity, rationality, and Nazism. The second part of the paper is dedicated to an attempt to read ‘geographically’ the entanglements between the camp, Nazi spatial planning, bureaucratic rationalities, and the Holocaust. The notion of the camp-as-a-
spazio-soglia is central to this interpretation. Auschwitz, conceived as a metaphorical and real space of exception, is contextualized within the broader regional geography planned by the Nazis for that part of Poland; while ‘Mexico’, a specific compound within the camp, is described as a key threshold in the reproduction of those very geographies. The aim is to show how the topological spatialities of the camp were a constitutive element of the overall biopolitical Nazi project of ‘protective custody’ and extermination and that, for this reason, they deserve further investigation and need to be discussed in the relation to the crude calculative and topographical aspirations of that same project.
► Topographies and topologies of Auschwitz. ► Nazi geographies. ► Giorgio Agamben and geography. ► New ideas on biopolitics and geopolitics.
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What was the extent of allied knowledge regarding the mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz during the Second World War? The question is one which continues to prompt heated historical debate, and Michael ...Fleming's important new book offers a definitive account of just how much the Allies knew. By tracking Polish and other reports about Auschwitz from their source, and surveying how knowledge was gathered, controlled and distributed to different audiences, the book examines the extent to which information about the camp was passed on to the British and American authorities, and how the dissemination of this knowledge was limited by propaganda and information agencies in the West. In a fascinating new study, the author reveals that the Allies had extensive knowledge of the mass killing of Jews at Auschwitz much earlier than previously thought; but the publicising of this information was actively discouraged in Britain and the US.
This article examines the life and work of Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), a Francophone writer of Romanian origin, Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor, American citizen, Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1986. It ...specifically explores Wiesel’s complex engagement with the divine and the faith, which remained a central concern throughout his life, following his return from the Nazi extermination camps. This is most evident in his seminal book, Night, where he recounts the experience of God’s death in the death camps. Despite such profound crisis of faith, Wiesel remained a deeply religious Jew till the end. On the 16 July 2006, Oprah Winfrey dedicated her Book Club to The Night and called it “one of the greatest books of the century”. More than 3 million copies were sold in a few weeks in the United States. This study proposes that Wiesel’s confrontation with the divine can be best understood through his response to mysticism, expressed as a spiritual song of a fervent yet torn soul. It further suggests that his rejection of Nietzsche’s proclamation of “God’s death” and his alignment with Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav’s idea of a “broken faith” underscores his profound spiritual resilience.
My Life with Holocaust Death Langer, Lawrence L.
The Journal of Holocaust Research,
10/2020, Volume:
34, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The essay offers a chronological account of my introduction to Holocaust reality, beginning with visits to Dachau in 1955, Mauthausen in 1963 and the main camp at Auschwitz and Auschwitz/Birkenau in ...1964, at a time when little was known about the concentration camps and the gassing procedures in the deathcamps. The sites would not become tourist destinations for many years, and in fact at Dachau there were only two other visitors present and at Mauthausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau none. Such a sense of desolation is unrecapturable today, and I was forced to deal with the knowledge that I was standing alone on some of the largest cemeteries in Europe. I focus on how I slowly learned to absorb the magnitude of the catastrophe we call the Holocaust, especially the murder of European Jewry. Viewing the crematorium and small (unused) gas chamber at Dachau, standing inside the used one at Mauthausen, and contemplating the ruins of crematoria and gas chambers at Birkenau quickly teaches one the value and the limitations of the imagination in trying to conjure up the fate of the victims and the cruelty of their killers. I was helped in this endeavor by attending the war crimes trials in the summer of 1964 of SS General Karl Wolff in Munich and an array of Auschwitz personnel at their prolonged trial in Frankfurt. Listening to testimony from shattered survivors while sitting no more than fifty feet away from their tormentors, remorseless creatures like Oswald Kaduk and Wilhelm Boger, left me much to reflect on, and these comprise a large part of the essay. History was made more personal for me by these experiences, and they became an unforgettable foundation for what would eventually become a lifelong effort to find ways of challenging the validity of what still today is often referred to as an unimaginable experience.
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. This contribution is a review of two volumes of the Berlin edition of the Corpus of the Ancient Greek Inscriptions. Especially one of them, number XII 4 (the islands Kos and Kalymna), has luckily ...come to an end after more than one century’s work. Klaus Hallof, who has overseen the ‘Arbeitsstelle’ of the IG at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences since 1990, gave a final report of the problems in publishing that volume, the political and the objective ones. The paper is resuming these problems as far as legal historians are concerned. The technical problems of IG X 2,1s2 (Thessaloniki) are mentioned too.
Resumo Neste ensaio investigamos de que maneira o longevo topos “depois da tempestade, a bonança” comparece em autores como Homero, Aristóteles, Virgílio, Dante Alighieri, Giacomo Leopardi e Herman ...Melville para, em seguida, analisarmos sua presença no trabalho de Primo Levi (1919-1987), químico turinense e escritor que sobreviveu e testemunhou os horrores de Auschwitz. Embora o referido lugar-comum apareça, de forma mais evidente, em Os Afogados e os sobreviventes (1986/2016), seus pressupostos ampararam as reflexões de Levi sobre as experiências no Lager, especialmente no que diz respeito aos limites da representação. O itinerário de uma tópica em diferentes (con)textos admite significados nem sempre análogos, pois cada formulação se ampara em prescrições, categorias, orientações e estilos particulares. Por meio deste estudo, pretende-se contribuir com as reflexões sobre o “irrepresentável” na literatura de testemunho, evidenciando um esforço no sentido de figurar o inaudito e amplificar eventos dramáticos e/ou trágicos com argumentos convencionais, muitos deles provenientes de práticas letradas antigas.
Abstract In this work we investigate how the old topos “after the storm comes the calm” appears in authors such like Homer, Aristotle, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Giacomo Leopardi, and Herman Melville, so as to analyze its presence in the work of Primo Levi (1919-1987), a chemist and writer from Turin who survived and witnessed the horrors of Auschwitz. Although this commonplace appears in a more evident way in The Drowned and the Saved (1986), its assumptions supported Levi’s reflections on the experiences in the Lager, especially in what concerns the limits of representation. The itinerary of a topical in different (con)texts admits meanings not always analogous, because each formulation is based on prescriptions, categories, orientations, and particular styles. Through this study, it is intended to contribute with reflections on what is “unrepresentable” in the literature of testimony, by showing an effort to figure the unheard and amplify dramatic and/or tragic events with conventional arguments, many of them derived from ancient literate practices.
Throughout his career as a prosecutor, Fritz Bauer has always avoided looking back: from the capture of Eichmann to the Auschwitz trial he was never guided by intentions of revenge, nor was he ever ...satisfied with arresting those who were guilty; if anything, his intention was to promote democracy by educating the population, and to trigger reflections and debates around the problem of responsibility. Such an attitude emerges clearly from his writings, as well as from numerous public speeches, and interviews. From his first works, the very first one published when he was still in exile in Sweden, his Marxist-socialist vision stands out: the problem is not Hitler, it is the society that promoted him. And therefore it is this society that has to be changed. Of course, by preparing new cases aimed at past mistakes, but primarily through a deep self-analysis.
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