scholarly journals “After All of it, She is Here”: Gender, Identity, and Empowerment in Women’s Ravensbrück Memoirs

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Brown
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Female Inmates ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
The Holocaust

This paper examines how gender and identity function in the personal memoirs of female Holocaust survivors. The memoirs of Nanda Herbermann and Sara Tuvel Bernstein, two survivors of Ravensbrück, the Nazis' concentration camp for women, are explored as case studies of how feminine gender identity influenced female inmates' experiences and recollections of life in Nazi concentration camps. The different backgrounds of these women, as a German Catholic and a Jew, respectively, also affected their lives as inmates, and influenced how they constructed their personal narratives and identities through memoirs. Thus, gender and other aspects of personal identity intertwined both during their time in Ravensbrück and in their writings of their experiences. Their memoirs, moreover, serve as means of personal empowerment as they rewrote themselves into history on their own terms. These memoirs, therefore, enhance our understanding of the gendered and the personal dimensions of the Nazi concentration camp systems and the Holocaust. 

scholarly journals PROPAGANDA REARTICULATION OF A CRIME AGAINST CIVILIZATION: THE CONCEPT OF THERESIENSTADT IN THE SERIES HOLOCAUST

2017 ◽  
pp. 063
Author(s):  
Ivana Milovanović
Keyword(s):  
Senior Citizens ◽  
The Other ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
American Television ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Narratives

The most notorious Nazi extermination camps or death camps were Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, etc. Apart from the death camps, the Nazis established concentration labor camps where they exploited the labor force. By its function, one of the unique concentration camps was Theresienstadt, which became a Nazi concentration camp for Jews in November 1941. In fact, Terezin was advertised as a spa center for wealthy senior citizens who were promised safety and luxury. Media articles on the topic of the Holocaust have become a significant part of the culture of remembrance. The American television mini-series Holocaust is one of the media narratives that deal with crimes against civilization and its premiere was in 1978. The concept of Theresienstadt in the series Holocaust corroborates the statement that this camp was used for the purpose of propaganda rearticulation of a crime against civilization and it reveals the hidden and repressed fear and horror underneath the smiling façade of Theresienstadt. The colorfulness of the exterior in the scenes which show Terezin, and on the other hand a horror interior, as well as everything that was happening behind the scenes expressed in the form of secret images of the artists, clearly emphasize the living conditions in Theresienstadt, as well as its role in Nazi propaganda.

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?

scholarly journals Ludobójstwo w świetle wybranych relacji więźniów obozów koncentracyjnych Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof i Gross-Rosen

2020 ◽  
pp. 251-263
Author(s):  
Lucyna Sadzikowska
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Former Prisoners ◽  
The Holocaust

The article is devoted to the analysis of testimonies, accounts, memoirs, ego-documents by concentration camp prisoners of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof, and Gross-Rosen. Thesource material kept in the said KLs’ archives contains a multitude of individual histories of survivors of the genocide, either described in detail or concisely noted down. What the authorfocuses on is the variety of those testimonies to suffering and tragedy of people incarcerated in concentration camps. At the same time, she observes that for the former prisoners, decades after leaving the camps, the Shoah and hell are synonymous with genocide. The most common terms used by them to describe genocide are: mass extermination, the Holocaust, Annihilation, hell, the Shoah, hideous violence, total annihilation – both physical and moral.

1. What is a concentration camp?

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Working Definition ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Death Camp ◽  
The Holocaust

In order to consider why concentration camps are so important to modern consciousness and identity, we need to understand what they are and how they have developed. ‘What is a concentration camp?’ provides a working definition: it is an isolated, circumscribed site with fixed structures designed to incarcerate civilians. The Holocaust has confused our understanding of concentration camps in that a concentration camp is not normally a death camp. They are the consequences of large numbers of opponents, far too many for the discipline, order, and expense of prisons. When the concentration camp becomes a permanency, it is the sign of a regime that knows it cannot command national support or even tolerance.

scholarly journals Lived experience and the Holocaust: spaces, senses and emotions in Auschwitz

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 27-58
Author(s):  
Nikolaus Wachsmann
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Construction Sites ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of

This article examines lived experience during the Holocaust, focusing on Auschwitz, the most lethal Nazi concentration camp. It draws on spatial history, as well as the history of senses and emotions, to explore subjective being in Auschwitz. The article suggests that a more explicit engagement with individual spaces�prisoner bunks, barracks, latrines, crematoria, construction sites, SS offices�and their emotional and sensory dimension, can reveal elements of lived experience that have remained peripheral on the edges of historical visibility. Such an approach can deepen understanding of Auschwitz, by making the camp more recognisable and by contributing to wider historiographical debates about the nature of Nazi terror.

Cementing the Enemy Category: Arrest and Imprisonment of German Jews in Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-8/9

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 576-600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Wünschmann
Keyword(s):  
Minority Group ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Critical Stage ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Structure And Dynamics ◽  
Heterogeneous Groups ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Holocaust

Understandably, research has focused overwhelmingly on Jews in the camps of the Holocaust. But the nazis had been detaining Jews in concentration camps ever since 1933, at times in large numbers. Who were these prisoners? This article analyzes nazi policies that brought Jews into the concentration camps. It ventures into the inner structure and dynamics of one of the most heterogeneous groups of concentration camp inmates. By contrasting the perpetrators’ objectives with the victims’ experiences, this article will illuminate the role of the concentration camp as the ultimate means of pressure in the fatal process of turning a minority group into an outsider group: that is, the act of defining and marking the enemy which was the critical stage before the destruction of European Jewry. Furthermore, it will examine Jewish reactions to SS terror inside the camps.

scholarly journals The phenomenon of «man between life and death» in the space of the Nazi concentration camp

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-201
Author(s):  
S. A. Voronin ◽  
B. G. Yakemenko
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Sex Characteristics ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Physical Functions ◽  
Camp System

The article explores the phenomenology of a special category of prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, who were in a state close to death, but for a long time did not die, being in a special, borderline state of mind and body. In camp jargon, they were called “Muslims”, which was not related to religious confession - the etymology of the term is controversial. The state in which the “Muslims” were, is an unknown phenomenon, since it is characterized by almost complete fading of mental and physical functions, the Erasure of age and sex characteristics. This category of prisoners can be considered the apotheosis of the Nazi concentration camp system.

Concentration Camp Memorials

2021 ◽  
pp. 192-250
Author(s):  
Martha Sprigge
Keyword(s):  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
P Concentration ◽  
Musical Activity ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Memorial Sites

Concentration camps were a central part of East Germany’s commemorative politics. National antifascist memorials opened at three former concentration camps between 1958 and 1961. The narrative visitors encountered at these memorial sites valorized the camps political prisoners and devoted little—if any—attention to other victims of the Holocaust. Running corollary to these antifascist memorials were efforts to memorialize political victims of the camps in music. This chapter considers two forms of musical activity involved in concentration camp remembrance: collecting songs from the camps as part of the nation’s antifascist heritage, and composing new works about the Holocaust. Both forms of musical activity involved engaging with the memorial traces and spaces of the camps, which inadvertently facilitated more complicated narratives of the Nazi genocide to be voiced in music.

scholarly journals Georges Didi-Huberman, Écorces, and Otto Dov Kulka, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death – as Lager essays? Imagination and remembrance of the title formulations in relation to the formulation “anus mundi”

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Kuczyńska-Koschany
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World

The article is an attempt at interpretation of two essays, which may be called „Lager” essays. These are Écorces written by G. Didi-Huberman and Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death written by O.D. Kulka, their books are deeply related as the negation or at least as the questioning of the title of autobiographical book Anus mundi written by W. Kielar. Both authors do not describe Nazi concentration camp as „the anus of the world”. Their imagination is a post-imagination, their memory is a post-memory. In her paper Kuczyńska-Koschany considers the condition of the essay as quasi-genre after the Holocaust, after the genocide and in reference to the experience of a Lager.

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