The Green Matzevah

ABSTRACT

This article examines the extent to which historical memory, including the symbolism of Auschwitz-Birkenau, can be considered not only in terms of its close connections to both Polish and Jewish national and political imaginaries, but also in terms of its entanglements with survivors’ memories of nature. I analyse the presence of the post-camp space of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Helena Birenbaum’s poetic testimonies. This is a space that has often been described as tainted and contaminated while being treated as a lifeless “landscape of death” and cemetery. Readings of Birenbaum’s testimonial poetry alongside archival and field research conducted at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum have enabled me to talk about grey and green camp’s landscape. I have sought to demonstrate that such spaces function in Auschwitz testimonies under the cover of metaphorical constructions and poetic images that I call “the green matzevah,” that contain significant analytical and empirical potential. I explore how the camp’s dead grey zones have over the years turned into green matzevahs, i.e. terrain that has experienced post-traumatic curating by invasion of plants. I argue that drawing attention to the world of nature as represented in testimonies can expand knowledge of the camp, challenging the martyrological framing that prevailed under communism and help to imagine how to preserve a memory of this place when there are no human witnesses.     

The Environmental History of the Holocaust

ABSTRACT

The introduction conceptualizes environmental history of the Holocaust as a subdiscipline of Holocaust studies. The authors approach this emerging field of research through the context of environmental humanities with its current interest in the Anthropocene, soil science, forensics, multispecies collectives, and explorations of relations between ecocides and genocides. Proposed approach considers post-Holocaust spaces and landscapes as specific ecosystems and examines relations between its actors (human and non-human) in order to show the Holocaust’s spatial markers and long-terms effects. The article outlines existing literature on the subject, identifies the central research problems and questions, and discusses sources and methods. The authors demonstrate that the environmental history of the Holocaust applies a hybrid methodology that uses methods from various disciplines with the aim of creating new theories and interpretive categories and thus should be considered complementary to existing approaches in Holocaust studies. The authors follow the methodological principles of grounded theory in generating new concepts and seeking multidisciplinary methods for explaining nature’s role in the Holocaust and how Holocaust has changed nature. The authors claim that environmental history of the Holocaust broadens Holocaust studies as a field of research and opens up new questions concerning relations between nature and extermination in order to provide a more holistic perspective for exploring the relationship between culture and nature, genocide and ecocide. The approach proposed here shows Holocaust and post-Holocaust landscapes in terms of ecological/natural heritage, which might influence the way these spaces are commemorated, conserved and preserved, as well as used for tourist purposes.     

Nails,tacks, and hinges: the archaeology of Camp Monticello,a World War II prisoner of war camp

ABSTRACT

“Provost Marshall General does not concur in the construction of outdoor dance floors at Monticello Internment Camp … Outdoor dance floors would be of no use at an internment camp,” the brigadier general responded to the chief of engineers in 1943. Camp Monticello, located in southeast Arkansas, was an Italian prisoner of war camp constructed according to a set of standardized building plans. Despite the brigadier general’s insistence that Camp Monticello “conform as far as possible to the standard plan,” archaeological research that combines archival research with a metal detector survey shows that the plans were influenced by local politics, access to materials, environmental conditions, and the everyday activities of the prisoners of war.     

Topographies/topologies of the camp: Auschwitz as a spatial threshold

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.     

Surviving the Holocaust: Emil Utitz’s ‘As-If Technique’

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to present the work of Emil Utitz, the Czech-German Jewish philosopher and psychologist, who was also a survivor of Theresienstadt. The power of the imagination and its intensification by the daily reality of the concentration camp was central to Utitz’s conception of life, which reveals the influence of the then popular ideas of Hans Vaihinger, and especially his theory of the importance of the human ability to act as though something was true. More specifically, the article reconstructs and contextualizes Utitz’s thought along two axes: the Kantian philosophical tradition, and Viktor Frankl’s and Hans Günther Adler’s conceptions of the Holocaust experience.     

The Postholocaust Landscape of Chelmno on the Ner (Kulmhof an der Nehr): An Ecological Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article shows how the ecology and nature of the Rzuchów Forest (in the Rzuchów district of the Ko?o forestry inspectorate in Greater Poland) was indirectly affected by the extermination of the Jewish population as a result of it being used to camouflage evidence of the crimes. Tracing the environmental history of commemoration in the forested part of the former death camp at Che?mno on the Ner (Che?mno nad Nerem/ Kulmhof an der Nehr) will give an indication of the ecological consequences of efforts to preserve the material traces of the camp and its natural surroundings. These efforts continued into the late 1980s. The ecology of commemoration and environmental commemoration form the two poles of this ecological continuum. It is possible to bring them closer together by furthering debates on the relationship between genocide and ecocide, while also expanding existing narratives on the Holocaust by turning to environmental aspects. This research is guided by the idea that it is necessary to rethink existing (and planned) forms of commemoration of crimes against humanity in the context of environmental ethics, with this approach leading to forms of commemoration at killing sites that give more consideration to the environment.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

The Small Things of Life and Death: An Exploration of Value and Meaning in the Material Culture of Nazi Camps

The theft of mundane items of material culture from the ground of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2015 by English schoolboys raises a number of questions about the value of similar items at this and other Nazi camps. This paper explores questions of value, interpretation, and the categorization of objects from such camps, before examining the case study of Lager Wick, a forced labor camp in Jersey. Here, the value of such objects was perceived locally according to criteria very different to those which are commonly applied by archaeologists and people who work in the sphere of heritage and Holocaust education.     

The Environmental History of Mass Graves

ABSTRACT

The author presents an ecological-necrological perspective on the ontology of the human dead body and remains in the context of Holocaust studies. The article examines the environmental history of mass graves and reflects on the ontological status and condition of human remains. The author proposes an approach that combines humanities and soil sciences while thinking about post-genocidal spaces and sites of mass killings in order to discuss the issue of protecting human remains from politicization and commercialization and to prefigure appropriate long-term approaches to the preservation of sites containing human remains. The article suggests focusing on humus while examining the process of dehumanization through decomposition (organic decay) and unbecoming human by “becoming-soil.” To enrich and problematize the humanities’ conception of humus, the article draws on conceptions of humus proposed by soil scientists. What is argued here is that the ecological perspective becomes a necessary and essential element in managing post-genocidal (and post-Holocaust) sites, particularly when it comes to planning their conservation and preservation.     

Tourism and Tragedy: The Memorial at Belzec,Poland

In 1942, within in a period of 10 months, 500,000 people were systematically murdered in a specially built death camp at Belzec, Poland. When it had served its purpose the Nazis demolished it, and to hide its existence, grassed the site over, allowing the atrocities performed there to remain virtually hidden from public view for over 60 years. In 2004 an important new Holocaust memorial, covering the whole death camp area, was opened. Visually striking, this conceptual art/architectural artwork affectively elicits strong visitor responses. I explore ways in which the materiality of the reconfigured site makes the invisibility of such horror and collective loss paramount. My interpretation and visual analysis shows how ‘memory work’ can operate through viewer experience. This paper locates Belzec within its historical context and includes a related discussion about Polish–Jewish relationships up to the present. As a significant heritage site, Belzec’s new role in Polish Holocaust tourism is examined.     

Transformative landscapes: liminality and visitors’ emotional experiences at German memorial sites

Abstract

The atrocities of Nazi Germany included the radical transformation of natural landscapes. At Ravensbrück (Brandenburg), a lakeside setting became the site of the largest women’s concentration camp in Germany, processing approximately 159,000 inmates until 1945. Similarly, at Flossenbürg (Bavaria), a picturesque valley in the Oberpfälzer Wald housed a large concentration camp with approximately 100,000 inmates over seven years and a granite quarry to support Hitler’s extensive construction programme. After the war, part of Ravensbrück became a Soviet Army base, while large sections of Flossenbürg were removed to make way for a new housing and industrial development. Along with other former camps (particularly Auschwitz-Birkenau), parts of these landscapes were developed into memorial sites that aim to provide a liminal experience for visitors – a ‘rite of passage’. In attempting to regain a sense of place that evokes the trauma of the past, the landscapes of the memorial sites of Ravensbrück and Flossenbürg were recently altered to resemble their appearance in 1945. For visitors, however, the aesthetic experience of these landscapes lies in stark contrast to the narrative they encounter at both sites; they are surprised to see signs of life, objecting to modernisation at Ravensbrück or the existence of a supermarket next to the memorial site in Flossenbürg. This paper examines the transformative processes of these landscapes and explores how their liminality is constructed, experienced and challenged. Through empirical visitor research conducted at both sites, it provides a critical evaluation of the narrative given to visitors and suggests how these important sites can offer a more engaging ‘rite of passage’.     

Tradition and Reform: Aristotle’s Response to Modern Alternatives

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to articulate an Aristotelian alternative to two prominent contemporary ways of understanding human freedom and dependence on the past, and to the implications these understandings have for political life. While a liberal tendency, following Machiavelli’s emphasis on new modes and orders, understands political life to begin with breaking from the past, the more conservative camp in modern thought, following Burke in his emphasis on tradition, understands political life to begin with laws and customs inherited from the past. Aristotle’s teaching in his Nicomachean Ethics on the freedom and responsibility that make human beginnings possible points us, I propose, to a better understanding of political founding than either modern alternative. In the Politics, he connects the city to natural beginnings in the family but also calls the first who founded a city one “responsible for the greatest of goods” (Pol. 1253a31-32). And in the Ethics, he offers his own founding of a way of inquiring about politics, which engages with his predecessors, as a model for politics itself. In this way, Aristotle offers us a deeper understanding of political founding and change, even presenting his own philosophic inquiry in the Ethics as its ground and model.     

‘Dissidence’ in Holocaust Memorials in Literature: Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop (Chladnou zemí)

Abstract

Established Czech precedent has made the town of Terezín an important literary symbol of Holocaust memory, used in the 1960s to construct myths of Czech innocent victimhood. Jáchym Topol’s novel, The Devil’s Workshop (2009), returns to the theme with great originality, avoiding such myths by using a compromised first-person Czech narrator, who is involved in setting up ‘dissident’ commemorative museums at Terezín and in Belarus. These draw on documented accounts of real atrocities for their authenticity. Competitive in national terms, commercialized, and ethically compromised, they are finally, arguably inevitably, silenced. Topol’s ‘truth-telling’ is discussed in the context of Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of committed Holocaust literature, Benedict Anderson’s interpretation of museums as commercialized constructions of nationality, and Timothy Snyder’s historical account of the killings in Eastern Europe; the ambiguous pessimism of his novel stands up well to criticism and, it is argued, has lessons even for historians of the Holocaust.     

Expanding (Environmental) Histories of the Holocaust

ABSTRACT

This epilogue draws out three ways that environmental histories of the Holocaust might challenge the current historiography to expand its horizons. Firstly, environmental histories of the Holocaust expand the range and nature of actors studied as we seek to understand genocide and its aftermath. Secondly, and closely linked to this, environmental histories of the Holocaust expand the range and nature of sources and methods drawn upon in genocide research. Thirdly, environmental – and ecological – histories of the Holocaust expand the chronological boundaries of study when conceptualizing histories of genocide. Taken together, the nascent literature on environmental and ecological histories of the Holocaust offer an important extension of what writing “integrated” histories of the Holocaust might entail.     

No proxy for quality: why journal rankings in political science are problematic for political theory research

ABSTRACT

Journal rankings for political science have been regularly published, from the 1970s onwards, by the American Political Science Association’s ‘state of the discipline’ journal. Politics journals have also been officially ranked by the Australian Political Studies Association into four bands (A*, A, B and C) from 2007 onwards. This article shows, first, that the assumption grounding these exercises (namely, that disciplinary journal rankings can serve as proxies for the quality of articles in their pages) is undermined by the findings of the broader research evaluation literature, especially with respect to sub-disciplines (like political theory, Australian politics, and some types of qualitative comparative politics) that bear certain characteristics. Next, outlining the findings of a 2018 survey, it is argued that the disciplinary use of journal rankings in political studies not only has damaging effects on research in political theory, but also advantages other sub-disciplines. The paper closes with two recommendations.     

The contentious sovereignties of the camp: Political contention among state and non-state actors in Italian Roma camps

The global proliferation of camps manifests an alarming phenomenon of burgeoning marginalization, and shows that the concept of ‘camp’ is today increasingly crucial to grapple with current changes in the world’s geographies of exclusion and inclusion. Specifically, this article focuses on ‘institutional camps’, i.e. created by government agencies in alleged emergency situations and aims to conceptualize sovereignty over this type of camp. After critically reviewing the ongoing scholarly debate on camp sovereignty, I situate my approach within the work of scholars who see political authority over the camp as comprising a multiplicity of both state and non-state actors. The article contributes to this perspective by drawing on the theory of ‘contentious politics’ advanced by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001). Through this analytical framework, I suggest construing camp sovereignties as contentious, i.e. inherently constituted by conflicting and ever-evolving power relations that change according to framing strategies, political opportunities, resources and repertoires of action. In order to show the benefits of such approach, the paper focuses on the empirical case of the Italian Roma camps in Rome, through which I show that camp sovereignty is not only fragmented into a multiplicity of actors but is also the result of conflict, compromise, negotiation, and co-optation among actors whose frames, opportunities, resources, and repertoires constantly change over time.     

Rethinking the representation of Gustavus Adolphus: the case of William Watts and The Swedish Intelligencer, 1630–33

ABSTRACT

Between 1630 and 1633, English newsbooks resounded with tales of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden’s victories against the “popish” armies of Emperor Ferdinand II. Such literary praise has been widely associated with Calvinist disapprobation of Charles I’s pacific foreign policy. This article throws new light on the alternative, non-Calvinist sources of enthusiasm for Gustavus Adolphus in the newsbook, The Swedish Intelligencer, which portrayed the Swedish king as the figurehead of a broad, confessionally flexible, pan-Protestant cause. This has important implications for our understanding of the relationship between English and European Protestant nations in the context of the Thirty Years’ Wars. News from the military camp of the Lutheran King of Sweden offered a subtle way of promoting and normalising non-Calvinist forms of worship in England, and thus provides evidence that a range of Protestants were utilising the London news presses to advance their religious agenda in the early 1630s.     

The camp and the question of community

Recent literature in camp geographies has sought to emphasize the significance of political agency among camp residents, particularly in refugee camps, as part of a critical reaction against the highly influential Agambenian conceptual vocabulary of exception and bare life. The concept of community has been integral to this body of work, with diverse accounts of the camp implicitly or explicitly positioning community as the natural scale through which camp resident and inmate agency is formulated, and yet there has hitherto been little research reflecting directly on the meaning that community takes on in the specific context of the camp. In this article we adopt Roberto Esposito's critique of the concept of community to problematize the assumption that camp communities necessarily constitute a space of empowerment and agency for camp residents and inmates. Drawing on Esposito's genealogical account of communitas (2010), whereby community is encountered not in terms of a property shared among individuals but instead as the loss of individuality and other forms of ‘the proper’, we suggest that the implementation of community, while generative of agency, is also fundamental to camp authorities and related regimes of power. Furthermore, we argue that the operation of camp communities includes its own forms of politics that are specific to the exceptional space of the camp and that potentially expose individuals to violence. We develop this argument through an experimental reading of communitas in relation to the two empirical contexts that have been most influential on the trajectory of camp studies within geographical debates, the concentration camp and the refugee camp, represented in this paper by Auschwitz and the contemporary archipelago of Serbian refugee camps respectively. The ambivalent account of power relationships emerging from these readings suggests that Esposito's rendering of community may have important analytic value in investigating the complexity of camp spatialities and the distinctive co-articulation of power and agency therein.     

Arendt in the refugee camp: The political agency of world-building

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or ‘bare’ life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of ‘the jungle’ in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activities – from the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of action – and their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.     

2. THE VICTIM'S VOICE AND MELODRAMATIC AESTHETICS IN HISTORY1

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.