Hybrid Testimony and Moral Indictment: A Survivor's Poetic Response to the Mauthausen Nazi Concentration Camp Experience

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-477
Author(s):  
Siegrun Bubser Wildner
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Poetic Response

Geochemical assessment of soils in the German Nazi concentration camp in Stutthof (Northern Poland)

2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (sup1) ◽  
pp. 47-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Przemysław Charzyński ◽  
Maciej Markiewicz ◽  
Magdalena Majorek ◽  
Renata Bednarek
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Northern Poland ◽  
Geochemical Assessment

scholarly journals The ambiguous victim: Miklós Nyiszli's narrative of medical experimentation in Auschwitz-Birkenau

HISTOREIN ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Turda
Keyword(s):  
Medical Research ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Primo Levi ◽  
The Past ◽  
Medical Experimentation ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Eyewitness Account ◽  
Perpetrators And Victims

While recent scholarship has – for the past two decades – endeavoured to transcend initial reservations about memoirs of Holocaust survivors, the difficulty with some of these memoirs – namely their authors’ implicit complicity in unethical medical research and in the Nazi Holocaust in general – remains however problematic. To address this thorny issue, this article considers the memoirs of a Jewish inmate doctor, Miklós Nyiszli, who worked with and for SS medical officers in Auschwitz, and his Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. His memoirs can help us understand wider truths about the “bond of complicity” that, according to Primo Levi, existed between perpetrators and victims in the Nazi concentration camp.<br />

It’s Still There

boundary 2 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-143
Author(s):  
Paula Rabinowitz
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Visual Examination ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Alain Resnais ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Chantal Akerman ◽  
History Of

Daniel Blaufuks’s video Als Ob/As If formally interrogates the history of Holocaust imagery using a close visual examination of the 1944 “Staged Nazi Film” shot in Thereseinstadt. Layering his footage from present-day Terezín with a number of earlier films and television shows shot at or about the Nazi concentration camp, he contemplates the role of the image, both still and moving, in the creation of memory and history of the Holocaust. His video and phototextual book connect to literary explorations of the Czech concentration camp—by Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald, and Jiří Weil—as well as cinematic documentaries about the Nazi murder of European Jews by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Jean-Luc Godard. By focusing on contemporary Terezín, Blaufuks also brings to light aspects of memorialization within post-totalitarian societies investigated by filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Chantal Akerman, as well as by scholars of the Holocaust and post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

The Surveillant Gaze: Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon

October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Martin Blumenthal-Barby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The One ◽  
Sociohistorical Context ◽  
The Village

Michael Haneke's 2009 The White Ribbon is set in the village of “Eichwald.” Eichwald cannot be found on any German map. It is an imaginary place in the Protestant North of Eastern Germany in the early twentieth century. What is more, Haneke tells his black-and-white tale as the flashback narration of a voice-over narrator—a series of defamiliarizing techniques that lift the diegetic action out of its immediate sociohistorical context, stripping it of its temporal and topographical coordinates. Against this backdrop, is it possible to hear the name “Eichwald” without being reminded of, on the one hand, Adolf Eichmann, Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the key architects of the Holocaust, and, on the other, the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald? To be sure, Eichwald is not Buchenwald, and no 56,000 humans are being murdered here. Yet why this peculiar terminological fusion? What characterizes Eichwald, this model of a society in which adults have no names but merely function as representatives of a particular class and profession: the Baron, the Pastor, the Teacher, the Steward, the Midwife, etc.? What distinguishes this village that appears to be largely isolated from the outside world, this village that outsiders rarely enter and from which no one seems to be able to escape? What identifies this prison-like community with its oppressive atmosphere, its tiny rooms and low ceilings, its myriad alcoves, niches, windows, and hallways that evoke a general sense of “entrapment” and incarceration? This world in which even the camera appears to be shackled, to never zoom, hardly to pan or tilt, thus depriving the image of any dynamism, any mobility? Who—in this confining milieu—are the guards, who the detainees? And what characterizes the putatively illicit activities that appear to lie at its enigmatic center and around which the entire film seems to revolve?

SAYYIDA ZAYNAB IN THE STATE OF EXCEPTION: SHIʿI SAINTHOOD AS “QUALIFIED LIFE” IN CONTEMPORARY SYRIA

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Szanto
Keyword(s):  
Refugee Camp ◽  
The State ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
The Law

AbstractAccording to Giorgio Agamben, a “state of exception” is established by the sovereign's decision to suspend the law, and the archetypical state of exception is the Nazi concentration camp. At the same time, Agamben notes that boundaries have become blurred since then, such that even spaces like refugee camps can be thought of as states of exception because they are both inside and outside the law. This article draws on the notion of the state of exception in order to examine the Syrian refugee campcumshrine town of Sayyida Zaynab as well as to analyze questions of religious authority, ritual practice, and pious devotion to Sayyida Zaynab. Though Sayyida Zaynab and many of her Twelver Shiʿi devotees resemble Agamben's figure ofhomo sacer, who marked the origin of the state of exception, they also defy Agamben's theory that humans necessarily become animal-like, leading nothing more than “bare lives” (orzoē) in states of exception.

scholarly journals ‘Lightning flashes of my burning memory’

1970 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-66
Author(s):  
Claudia Benthien
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
First Person ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Textual Structure ◽  
Human Experiments ◽  
Extreme Variant ◽  
The Moment

Thomas Lehr’s novella Frühling (Spring, 2001) presents the last seconds of the fifty-year-old protagonist’s life – between the moment he shoots himself and the advent of his death. As an adolescent he realised he was the child of a perpetrator father who conducted human experiments on inmates as a Nazi concentration camp doctor. Written in an extreme variant of autonomous inner monologue, the novella interlaces perceptions and memories without transition. The textual structure dissects these incidents, as the syntax is often destroyed by punctuation marks and irregular orthography. At one point, the first-person narrator chooses the formula ‘lightning flashes of my burning memory’, which aptly describes Lehr’s poetic technique, reminiscent of traumatic flashback. This article argues that the protagonist undergoes residual experiences of dissociation as a result of his insurmountable entanglement in the guilt of the father. Thus, Frühling is a radical and disturbing literary treatment of trauma.

scholarly journals El testimonio como imposibilidad de sobrevivir a la consciencia de la muerte

2011 ◽  
pp. 184
Author(s):  
Daniel Arroyo Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Jorge Semprun

¿Es posible sobrevivir a la consciencia de la muerte? El presente ensayo aborda la imposibilidad de retornar a una forma de existencia ordinaria o inauténtica tras la experiencia del horror en un campo de concentración Nazi. Para ello, este estudio analiza el testimonio autobiográfico de Jorge Semprún La escritura o la vida, texto que, al margen de relatar la supervivencia física del testigo, constituye también un intento por superar la consciencia de la certeza de la finitud propia como posibilidad significativa. A través de la inversión del proceso de indagación en la existencia ontológica del Dasein que propone Martin Heidegger en Ser y Tiempo, Semprún trata de articular su consciencia como ser-para-la-muerte en base a parámetros ónticos. Esta aproximación responde a la intención del superviviente español de sumergirse en la existencia inauténtica como ser-en-el-mundo, desde la que pretende dar cuenta de su propia historicidad. Is it possible to survive one’s own consciousness of death? This essay analyzes the impossibility of returning to a form of ordinary existence after experiencing the horror of a Nazi concentration camp. In order to develop this idea, this study focuses on Jorge Semprún’s autobiographical testimony La escritura o la vida, a text that, apart from accounting for the witness’ physical survival, is also an attempt to overcome the survivor’s certainty of his own finitude as a meaningful possibility. By means of reverting Martin Heidegger’s philosophical theory, Semprún tries to articulate his ontological consciousness according to inauthentic paradigms. This approach responds to the Spanish survivor’s attempt to return to an ordinary form of existence from which he intends to account for his own historicity.

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