Concentration Camp Buildings as Artifacts: The Archaeology of Buildings in the Mauthausen-Gusen Complex

This article deals with the interpretation and display of the buildings and other built structures at the Mauthausen concentration camp. After decades of neglect the many standing buildings of the Mauthausen-Gusen complex are now being analyzed as a source of information about the Nazi terror system. This shift is part of a change in what is regarded as important and authentic at such sites and is connected to the educational approach now taking center stage. The archaeological investigation of buildings plays an important role in this process. Through many examples drawn from the killing and cremation area, the kitchen buildings and elsewhere, the article goes on to demonstrate both the explanatory potential of the architecture and how it is being presented in today’s memorial landscape.     

The Politics of Nature at the Former Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to develop a new approach in Holocaust studies, namely an environmental history of the Holocaust. A case study of the former concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau demonstrates the extent of the entanglement of the politics of memory and the politics of nature, or political ecology, to use Bruno Latour’s term. I suggest that memorials should be treated as an environment, and thus explored as an assemblage of human and nonhuman (f)actors. Analysing both the official preservation strategies adopted by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as well as artistic projects (including ?ukasz Surowiec’s Berlin-Birkenau), I consider commemorative practices’ environmental impact. My investigation thus primarily focuses on the role of the figure of the tree-as-witness in preservation work and in the use of powerful herbicides (namely Roundup) in preserving traces of the camp. This study could open the way to further comparative studies of ecocide and genocide.     

抗日战争时期的华侨与中国工业合作运动

抗日战争时期,世界的华侨给中国各种的支援,这是众所周知的事实.而关于这个专题的研究在战后很长的阶段里却没有展开,直至最近,在中国关于华侨支援抗战的研究,才取得了一定的进展.华侨对中国工业合作运动(以下简称“工合”运动)的积极支持也得到充分的评价.“工合”运动,是为了重建被日本侵略毁灭的工业而产生的小规模合作社式的工业自救运动,也是公开宣称为在国民政府行政院管辖下的抗日统一战线的运动.“工合”是由海伦·斯诺提出的构想,埃德加·斯诺加以宣传,路易·艾黎则积极推进展开形成.计划草案是由上海的实业界和文化界人士胡愈之、梁士纯、王艺生、王国秀、王立明、丁贵堂、徐新六、卢广绵等自发讨论协议而成,且向国民政府提出的.进而在1938年7月于汉口设立由国民政府行政院管辖的“工合”协会.“工合”主张“难民抗战”,得到中国共产党的毛泽东、周恩来的强烈支持;其运动作为抗日民族统一战线的一环,发挥了经济的机能作用;且由于得到海外广泛支援,成为国际反法西斯抗日统一战线的一个重要组成部分.“工合”跨国共两地区,西北、西南、东南各省偏远内地急速组织发展,大量生产军需、民用品,成为抗战工业生产的有力的支柱之一.本文专门以华侨援助“工合”运动专门以华侨援助“工合”运动目的、实态、特征及其意义进行考察论述.     

Nazi Leaks and Intrigues in Second World War Ankara: the Plot to Send Herbert Melzig to a Concentration Camp

This article excavates one of the stranger episodes that took place in the transnational microcosm of the German expatriate world in Ankara and Istanbul during the Second World War. ‘Professor’ Herbert Melzig's story, the ‘Melzig affair’, illustrates how this microcosm, with its very different constituent members - Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from Nazism, German pro-Nazi expatriates, and an extensive embassy and Nazi Party network - acted as a conduit in German–Turkish relations, albeit one that produced unexpected results. This ‘Melzig affair’ sheds new light on the German presence in Second World War Turkey as well as the so-called German ‘exile on the Bosporus’ as it has been (re-)constructed and used in recent years; it also contributes to our understanding of Turkish foreign policy during the Second World War, especially regarding Turkey's reluctance to join the war on Hitler's side. At the end of the Melzig affair stood the ‘leaking’ of an internal Ministry of Propaganda memorandum. It prepared the ground for further leaks of this nature and was one of the turning points of public opinion in Turkey against the Third Reich.     

Explaining "Auschwitz" after the End of History: The Case of Italy

Everywhere the 1990s have been characterized by an odd mixture of ideological triumphalism—Fukuyama's “end of history” being only the crassest example—and of ideological uncertainty—can there be, should there be, a “third way”? For all its pretensions to universality, the “New World Order” has never lost a fragility in appearance. Students of historiography can scarcely be surprised to learn that an uneasiness over the present and future has in turn frequently entailed uncertainty about the past and particularly about those parts of the past which had seemed most able to give clear and significant “lessons.” One evident example is the history of what in my Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima (1993) I called the “long” Second World War, that is, that crisis in confidence in the relationship between political and economic liberalism and the nation-state which, by the end of 1938, had left only Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia as in any sense preserving those “liberal” freedoms which had spread across Europe since 1789. In this article, I briefly review the most recent difficulties World War II combatant societies have had in locating a usable past in the history of those times. However, my major focus is on the specific case of Italy, very much a border state in the Cold War system, and today the political home of an “Olive Tree” and a “Liberty Pole” whose historical antecedents and whose philosophical base for the future are less than limpid. 1990s Italian historians thus give very mixed messages about the Fascist past; these are the messages I describe and decode.     

抗战时期驻华美军部署及作战概况——兼谈中国战区在美国战略棋盘上的地位

本文以珍珠港事件为分水岭,以美国官方史料为依据,论述了美国对中国抗日战争的态度由中立、暧昧向积极援助的转变;论述了美国在欧洲战场和亚洲太平洋战场的一般战略,尤其是美国对中国战区战略地位的估计及其在不同形势下的变化,以及美国直接向中国战区部署作战部队的情况。抗战期间,驻华美军最多时达10万人以上,其航空作战部队,弥补了中国空军的严重不足,增强了对日作战的空中打击力量和空中掩护力量;其空运部队的"驼峰运输",创造了世界航运史上奇迹,对极端困难的中国抗战起到了输血的作用,具有重要的战略意义。本文对抗战时期驻华美军的编成、番号、兵力、部署、作战、战果等,作了具体的介绍和评述;对美国军援的性质和作用,也作了客观的分析,以便人们对中国抗战的国际环境和国际军援,有更清晰更深入的了解。     

评19世纪英国的牛津运动

19世纪上半叶后25年是英国向现代国家转型的重要时期,是一个许多方面都在经历重大变革的时期,表现之一是英国从传统的认信国家转向接受宗教多元化原则的现代国家。爆发于该时期的牛津运动,在抵制政教分离和宗教多元化趋势的同时,更以其对宗教自由主义和理性主义等时代精神的批判和向古代基督教会传统的回归而成为一场典型的文化保守主义运动。     

Postsecularity,Political Resistance,and Protest in the Occupy Movement

This paper examines and critically interprets the interrelations between religion and the Occupy movements of 2011. It presents three main arguments. First, through an examination of the Occupy Movement in the UK and USA—and in particular of the two most prominent Occupy camps (Wall Street and London Stock Exchange)—the paper traces the emergence of postsecularity evidenced in the rapprochement of religious and secular actors, discourses, and practices in the event‐spaces of Occupy. Second, it examines the specific set of challenges that Occupy has posed to the Christian church in the UK and USA, arguing that religious participation in the camps served at least in part to identify wider areas of religious faith that are themselves in need of redemption. Third, the paper considers the challenges posed by religious groups to Occupy, not least in the emphasis on postmaterial values in pathways to resistance against contemporary capitalism.     

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.