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.     

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.     

General Groves and the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Part II)

Die Entscheidung für den Bau der Atombombe fiel in den Vereinigten Staaten aus der Befürchtung heraus, daß deutsche Wissenschaftler und Ingenieure die (in deutschen Laboratorien gemachte) Entdeckung der Urankernspaltung waffentechnisch verwerten würden. Aber sobald die U.S.A. sich einmal entschieden hatte, den Bau einer Atombombe ernsthaft zu betreiben, entwickelte das Unternehmen eine Eigendynamik. In dem Bestreben, das Projekt zu finanzieren, ohne daß die Öffentlichkeit etwas bemerkt, wurde es dem Army Corps of Engineers übertragen, in dessen beträchtlichem Kriegsetat die Ausgaben versteckt werden konnten. Das Projekt erhielt den Namen Manhattan Engineer District, um den Anschein zu erwecken, es handle sich um die lokale Abteilung irgendeines anderen Pionierkorps – was später abgekürzt wurde zu Manhattan Project –, und General Leslie R. Groves, bekannt dafür, Dinge in die Hand zu nehmen und zu Ende zu führen, wurde die Leitung übertragen. Die Beiträge der Wissenschaftler waren zwar entscheidend, doch hatten sie wenig Verständnis dafür, was erforderlich war, um ihre Labor-Experimente in den Maßstab industrieller Fertigung zu überführen; darin war aber General Groves ein Meister. Auf dem Höhepunkt des Vorhabens im Sommer 1944 beschäftigte das Projekt in großen und kleinen Einrichtungen überall in den U.S.A. und in Kanada über 160000 Menschen; und es kann als Zeichen für die Effektivität des Sicherheitssystems angesehen werden, daß die meisten der am Projekt Arbeitenden nichts über den wahren Zweck ihrer Tätigkeit wußten und daß die meisten Amerikaner erst durch die Meldung des Bombenabwurfs über Hiroshima vom 6. August 1945 eine vage Vorstellung von dem Projekt erhielten. General Groves war nicht nur für die Konstruktion der Bombe verantwortlich, er übernahm auch die Verantwortung für die Planung des Abwurfs der Bomben in Japan, und er gab – was weniger bekannt ist – auch die Befehle, welche die Bomben auf ihren Weg nach Hiroshima und Nagasaki schickten. Er war von Anfang an entschlossen sicherzustellen, daß sowohl die Plutonium-als auch die Uranbombe noch vor dem Kriegsende in japanischen Städten Verwendung fänden.     

Beware, the Historian! Hiroshima, the Enola Gay, and theDangers of History

Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory.
Edward T. Linenthal and Tom engelhardt, eds., History wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Post.     

From security blanket to security risk: scientists in the decade after Hiroshima

Aside from a number of early prophesies of abundant and cheap nuclear power, and increased supplies of isotopes for medical research, diagnosis and therapy, visions of the Atomic Age were overwhelmingly troublesome in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Not only did nuclear Armageddon seem likely to many observers, the steps taken to enhance national security in the United States cast classes of citizens into the doleful category of “security risk.” Scientists were among those feared—a stunning (and almost instantaneous) change from their perception in August 1945 as the nuclear wizards who brought World War II to an end. National security was the dominant factor in this transformation, but there were nuances to it. This article attempts a taxonomy of the ways in which scientists were viewed in the United States.