Noah Benninga, The Material Culture of Prisoners in Auschwitz Project Description
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Noah Benninga, The Material Culture of Prisoners in Auschwitz
Project Description
1. Abstract
My doctoral study concerns the material culture of prisoners in Auschwitz, and makes use of a
plurality of relevant sources: narrative accounts; memoirs, “Holocaust literature”, and oral
testimony (archival as well as material from interviews I conducted myself); Rabbinical literature
(Responsa); photographs and material remains; and NS documentation. This material is used to
illuminate the praxes, in De Certeau’s sense, through which these objects were used by the
prisoners.1 In this consideration, the concept of “material culture” is not limited only to concrete
objects, but concerns such “borderline” objects as language and the body. The research proposal
for this project was authorized in September 2009, and the expected date of completion is 2013.
The dissertation attempts to approach the subjective experience of the historical subject
(here, the Auschwitz Häftlinge) by asking after the significance of objects in his or her camp
experience. The Jewish experience, dictated by Nazi racial hierarchy, is taken as the rock-bottom
reference point, the degree zero against which the valency of all other experience in the camps
are superimposed. What is underlined are both explicit references to material circumstances of
survival, as well as the ‘latent content’ in testimonies which refers to this crucial point.2
2. Structure
Chapter 1: Metacritics – The Jewish Voice?
The first chapter deals with the background to the project, namely the problematics posed by oral
testimonies for the historiography of the Holocaust, and the attempt to use such sources
1
De Certeau, M., The Practices of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press: 1984.
2
Cf. White, H., “Historical Discourse and Literary Writing”, in K. Korhonen, ed., Tropes for the Past: Hayden
White and the History/Literature Debate, Editions Rodopi: 2006, pp. 25-33.
1historically to consider the rather lacking Opferperspektive, and the writing of victim experience
in a way which does not abnegate their agency.3
The turn toward an integration of the voice of the Jewish victims into Holocaust
historiography is considered one of the major shifts to take place in the research of the last two
decades. Prominent examples of this shift are Friedländer’s Years of Extermination (which
incorporates the voice of Jewish diarists), Browning’s work on Starachowice, and Na’ama Shik’s
recent dissertation on the experience of women in Birkenau.4 Already in 1995 Dalia Ofer and
Naftali Greenberg took up the study of Jewish intellectuals and everyday life in the ghettos, and
suggested this study also be expanded to include the Alltag in the concentration and
extermination camps.5 Boaz Cohen thinks that the issue of testimonies will be a dominant feature
of Holocaust research and writing in the coming years.6
This chapter sketches the historical neglect of the voice of the victims and its
permutations over time, and suggests a “two and a half” step paradigm regarding the use of
witness testimony. The first model is an essentially historicist one, where testimonies from a
specific time and place are set off against each other in an attempt to discern the “true” nature of
events.7 The drawback of this approach, in Sigrid Weigel’s terms, is its total incompatibility with
what she calls the “Gestus” of the testimony.8 The second model uses testimony essentially as
“ornament”, “decorating” or dramatizing a traditionally established narrative.9 This leaves us
with what is I consider an essentially “maverick position” – such as (debatably) Friedländer’s
3
For recent historiographical overviews, see: Michman, D. and D. Bankier, eds., Holocaust Historiography in
Context, Yad Vashem: 2008; Cohen, B., “Jews, Jewish Studies and Holocaust Historiography”, in J.M. Dreyfus
and D. Langton, eds., Writing the Holocaust, Bloomsbury: 2011, pp. 100-115.
4
Friedländer, S., The Years Of Extermination: Nazi Germany And The Jews, 1939-1945, Harper Perennial: 2008;
Browning, C., Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp, W. W. Norton: 2011; Shik, N., ‘In Very
Silent Screams’ – Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp, 1942-1945,
unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Tel-Aviv 2010.
5
Ofer, D., and Greenwood, N. “Everyday Life of Jews under Nazi Occupation: Methodological Issues”, Holocaust
Genocide Studies (1995) 9 (1), pp. 42-69.
6
Cohen, B., “Jews, Jewish Studies and Holocaust Historiography”, p. 112.
7
This model follows the criteria set out in Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research, Ivan R. Dee: 2001, pp. 45–
49, and explicitly underpins Christopher Browning’s Remembering Survival.
8
See Weigel, S., “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft, Klage und Anklage: Die Geste des Bezeugens in der Differenz von
‘identity politics’, juristischem und historiographischem Diskurs”, in Rüdiger Zill ed., Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft
(Jahrbuch des Einstein-Forums; 1999), Berlin 2000, 111-135. Here pp. 116–119.
9
See Kushner, T., “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation”, Poetics Today 27 (2, 2006),
pp. 275–295.
2Years of Extermination, or perhaps even more so, Lanzmann’s Shoah.10 This is not considered a
model because, although path breaking, I argue that such works cannot be repeated.
Chapter 2: Anecdote as Method
If, as Cohen states, “it is clear that the voices of the victims could only come from testimonies,”
this still leaves open the question of how the historian should work with these sources.11 Chapter
Two deals with Joel Fineman’s concept of the Anecdote as an analytical starting point for a
historical treatment of Witness Accounts, in a manner which would not violate what Sigrid
Weigel has termed the “Gestus” of the testimonies”.12 The chapter is subdivided into three
sections:
The first section recapitulates the “Crisis of Representation” in historiography and
Holocaust historiography, with reference to Hayden White’s work and its reception (three points
of reference are the 1973 publication of Metahistory, 1992s “Probing the Limits of
Representation”, and the 2011 encounter between Saul Friedländer and Hayden White in Jena.)13
The second section of this chapter is a theoretical consideration of Joel Fineman’s work
on the Anecdote, and its relationship to the historical Real. I argue that this concept be taken as
point of refraction which can be used both to “produce” historical statements – though not
unambiguous ones – about the past, and to structure an historical account (mode of presentation).
This approach, it is argued, is relevant for the Victim’s perspective, but is not applicable to the
perpetrators: the ultimate innocence of the Jewish victims – murdered and exploited for being
Jewish – does not override subjective feelings of guilt on their part, connected to forced
complicity in the NS scheme (Primo Levi’s “grey zone”). However, any self-perceived or actual
“guilt of the victims” cannot be compared to the Nazi position. As such, I suggest that an
anecdotalization of perpetrators would be quite different from the approach to be taken vis-à-vis
10
Lanzmann, K., Shoah: The Complete Text, Pantheon Books: 1985. Regarding this reading of Friedländer, see
Kansteiner, W., “Success, Truth, And Modernism In Holocaust Historiography: Reading Saul Friedländer Thirty-
Five Years After The Publication Of Metahistory”, History and Theory (48) (2) 2009, pp. 25-53.
11
Cohen, B., “Jews, Jewish Studies and Holocaust Historiography”, p. 111.
12
Weigel, S., “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft”; Fineman, J., “The History of the Anecdote”, in H. Aram Veeser, ed.,
The New Historicism, New York 1987, pp. 50–76; two of my own articles on the implementation of this approach
regarding Holocaust testimony have been accepted for publication and are forthcoming (see notation in the CV).
13
White, H., Metahistory: The Historical Imagination In Nineteenth-Century Europe, Johns Hopkins University
Press: 1973; Friedländer, S., ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, Harvard
University Press: 1992. The meeting in Jena took place in June 2011, under the auspices of the Jena Center for
20th Century History under the title of “Den Holocaust erzählen? Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher
Empirie und narrativer Kreativität” (publication forthcoming).
3victim testimony. Moreover, the Täter perspective can thrive through traditional
historiographical methods – working out of offices and equipped with typewriters, most
perpetrators continued essentially a normal bourgeois existence.14 Ironically, as Omer Bartov
puts it, “There is no reason to believe that official contemporary documents written by Gestapo,
SS and Wehrmacht or German administrative officials are any more accurate or objective, or any
less subjective and biased, than accounts by those they were trying to kill”.15
The third section of this chapter is a micro-study on the workings of Anecdotes in the
testimony and work of one Auschwitz survivor, the late Dr. Jacques Stroumsa. Stroumsa
volunteered for over 30 years at Yad Vashem, and is considered by many to be a “professional
witness”.16 As part of my research I met with Stroumsa repeatedly in the last 6 months of his life,
collecting some 50 hours of testimony, which I am currently transcribing.
Chapter Three: Materialities of the Degree Zero
This chapter stands at the center of the doctorate, and examines a limited number of examples of
what I am terming the “Material Culture of Auschwitz”. Three topics, which are already being
written and researched, in this chapter concern cannibalism, language and pockets. The sources
in each case vary, but include archival material, oral testimony, documents, memoirs and
rabbinical literature. At least two more subjects will be selected for inclusion in this section
based on the transcription of the interviews I conducted with Holocaust survivors in Israel (the
transcription process is currently underway). A brief overview of the current subsections:
First, the question of cannibalism in the camps in general and in Auschwitz in particular.
While the subject of cannibalism in the shadow of total war is not unknown, little has been
written about it in the context of the NS concentration and extermination camps.17 What has been
done has generally localized the subject to the end-phase of the camps existence (death marches
and the collapse of the KL system, and particularly Mauthausen and its subcamps, which were
14
See for example Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor; Sereny, G., Into that Darkness – An
Examination of Conscience, Deutsch: 1974.
15
Bartov, O., “Lecture at the Virtual History foundation USC”, March 2010:
http://college.usc.edu/news/stories/707/looking-back-to-move-foward [accessed January 2012].
16
Stroumsa, J., Tu Choisiras La Vie: Violoniste à Auschwitz, Les Editions Du Cerf: 1999.
17
See for example the discussion of the forced famine in Ukraine in 1931/2, in Snyder, T., Bloodlands: Europe
Between Hitler and Stalin, Vintage Press: 2011; Linne, K., “Hunger und Kannibalismus bei sowjetischen
Kriegsgefangenen im Zweiten Weltkrieg”, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 58/2 (2010), pp. 243-262. For
current research on cannibalism during the death marches, see Blatman, D., The Death Marches: The Final Phase
of the Nazi Genocide, Harvard University Press: 2011, pp. 238-241.
4the last to be liberated and suffered from terrible conditions).18 My contribution here is based on
a more exhaustive source work: 184 records in testimonies and documents at Yad Vashem,
which have not been studied extensively; references from Rabbinical Holocaust and Post
Holocaust writings (Shelot u Tshuvot); testimony regarding cannibalism from the Eichmann
trials (Yehuda Bacon, whom I interviewed); and the juxtaposition of the above with literary
descriptions of cannibalism (for example, Tadeusz Borowski).
Second, the question of the materiality of language, or language as an (inner) object
which strongly influenced the chances of survival and interaction with the camp environment.
Clearly, knowledge of languages was an important factor in surviving the impossible situation in
the Nazi concentration camps. German, the official camp language, allowed for better
communication with camp authorities and could translate into minimized risks. Knowledge of
languages was invaluable in forming social relations and barter. As such, language in Auschwitz
was an important “material” possession – a map or index which served not only for
communication, but also as a medium of a Weltanschauung which could open apertures between
prisoners (and guards). These are considered as the “positive aspects of language” in Auschwitz,
and explored through examples of Jewish Survivors whose testimony I collected between 2009
and 2011 in Israel. However, some survivors suffered severely damaging psychological effects
due to the “cut of language”. One striking example of this is the experience of Jean Améry.
Agnostic, “professionless” and defenseless, Améry’s deep investment in a literary and
humanistic German language served to heighten his weaknesses in the face of camp reality.
Under the condition of absolute domination, Améry’s proclivity for the German language, and its
role in his own identity formation, left him totally open to the whirlwinds of the camp reality.
This example is the basis for an exploration of the negative material aspects of language in
Auschwitz.19
The third subsection of this chapter deals with pockets in Auschwitz, both literally and on
the meta-level. The practical use of pockets in camp uniforms is examined through a group of
witness testimonies. It is suggested that uniform pockets were officially “controlled”, not a fully
utilizable space expanding the sphere of the subject, but also the opposite: a space which could
18
For Mauthausen, see: Bauer, M., “Einmal möchte ich mich noch satt essen”: Lebensmittelversorgung und
Hungerkrankheit am Beispiel des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen in der Zeit von 1938 bis 1945, unpublished
Master’s Thesis, University of Vienna: 2009.
19
My paper on the subject will be published in cooperation between the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research
Center and the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (see CV).
5incriminate the subject and be used as evidence against him or her. Then, more intricate forms of
“pocketing” (or “folding”, in the Deleuzian sense) are examined: use of spaces between the feet
and the shoes; use of the body as a pocket (by repeatedly ingesting and excreting objects, or use
of other intimate body cavities); and the construction of “social pockets” (for example
collaborative work by groups of prisoners aimed at helping each other survive).20
Additional Material: Conclusion, Preface and Epilogue
The closing chapter of the dissertation is a summary discussing the phenomenology of “everyday
life” in Auschwitz, wherein commodities circulated in relationships of equivalence which were
both material and symbolic. What is the connection between the material economy of Auschwitz
and more common “urban industrial environments”? What is the correlation between ordinary
life and its “extraordinary” counterpart, as revealed in Auschwitz-Birkenau?
The project will also include a preface on the process of the Final Solution and
Auschwitz therein, based on my text on this subject, published in the Encyclopedia of Jewish
Cultures.21
3. Overview: Sources and Method, Approach, Relevance
The study of material culture in history has roots in classical Marxist thought, which addressed
“material conditions” as the all-important foundation of society, on which all social dynamics
and stratifications are based. Structural attempts at explicating material culture include Roland
Barthes’ Fashion System and Jean Baudrillard’s System of Objects (published in 1967 and 1968
respectively). Fernand Braudel’s three volume study, The Structures of Everyday Life:
Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century (1982), focusing on what he termed “material
life”, can be seen as a continuation of this structuralist approach in history. In contrast to the
perennially stable structures painted by Braudel, Brewer, McKendrick and Plumb’s The Birth of
a Consumer Society (1982) signaled the rise of a new wave of scholarship regarding
consumption and mass society. In the late 80s and early 90s, objects formed a common focus of
20
A working paper on the subject has been published online at:
http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/english/units.php?cat=2900&incat=2887.
21
See my entry on Auschwitz in the first volume of European Traditions – Encyclopedia of Jewish Cultures, ed.
Dan Diner (Leipzig: Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture and the Sächsische Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Leipzig); Jakob Hessing’s review of this volume, mentioning the article on Auschwitz, can be
found at: http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/vermischtes/article13463372/Der-verborgene-Schatz.html.
6a variety of discourses, which approach them at different levels. The result of this interest has
been that the study of objects, both as commodities at work in society and as objects of display in
museums, has become more integrated into academic discourse at large. These innovations in
thought joined preexisting trends in related historical fields – alltagsgeschichte, micro-history,
and cultural history, and the study of cultural memory – and the result might be said to be a
heterogeneous, multifocal and multidisciplinary interest in materiality and the way it structures
our lives.
However, while this dissertation can be read as continuing the interests noted above, the
use-value of this literature is open to doubt when faced with the task of elucidating the intimacies
of material everyday existence at the Zero Degree. The material economy of Auschwitz, with its
radical relation to death, is taken as a Novum, which must be approach in itself, and only then
reintegrated into history. Epistemologically, this posits the Holocaust, and specifically here the
material economy of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as a seminal event, challenging and demanding new
modes of thinking and writing.22 As Leni Yahil put it regarding historiography: “It is as if all the
instruments and conceptions of Jewish historiography [read here, material culture] that had
hitherto existed did not enable us to study this period.”23
Sources and Method
As mentioned above, the evidence from Auschwitz is heterogeneous in nature, and includes
narrative accounts; memoirs, “Holocaust literature”, and oral testimony (trial testimony, archival
accounts, and material from interviews I conducted myself); Rabbinical literature (Responsa);
photographs and material remains; and NS documentation. This study makes use of these
multifarious sources with a view toward elucidating the “material culture” of prisoner society,
with direct reference to Jewish prisoners’, at the limits of existence. This perspective is in
agreement with Philip Friedman, one of the early founding members of Holocaust research, who
stated already in 1959 that:
22
Boaz Cohen has recently pointed out that “as opposed to scholars in the fields of Jewish philosophy and theology,
scholars of Modern Jewish History were late in coming to [this] realization”. Cohen, B., “Jews, Jewish Studies and
Holocaust Historiography”, p. 105. I would also add literary criticism and psychoanalysis, and such prominent
scholars as Lawrence Langer, James E. Young, Sigrid Weigel, Aleida Assmann, and Dori Laub.
23
Yahil, L., “The Holocaust in Jewish Historiograpy”, Yad Vashem Studies, no. 7 (1968), pp. 57-73, here p.68.
7“The ghettos and camps served as the ‘test tube of a vast psycho-sociological laboratory’,
because this was ‘the first time in the history of human civilization a group of people of a
comprehensive social structure and with a highly developed cultural and social standard
found themselves compelled to live under the shadow of death, yet managed to leave for
posterity survivors to tell the story and a significant amount of information on what had
taken place.’”24
Alongside the scholarly literature of the last decades, this study utilizes primary sources
of different natures requiring different avenues of approach. One can here make use of Jacob
Burckhardt’s dichotomy, which distinguishes between “Botschaften” (encoded texts) and
“Spuren” (un-encoded remnants, or traces). While the messages are encoded, the traces are un-
encoded, because they have ceased to function within the context in which they were originated;
these traces have to be re-encoded by historical interpretation, otherwise they have no meaning,
or their meaning remains inaccessible.25 Material remains constitute “un-encoded” traces; their
re-encoding is performed primarily in museological or curatorial frameworks. Memoirs and
Witness Accounts are “encoded” messages – as I argue in chapter 2, they are fundamentally
encoded on the basis of an Anecdotal Logic.
Approach: Witness Accounts – Beyond Ornamentation
Daily survival – the minutiae of the everyday lives of the Häftlinge – is not well documented in
the extant NS sources, which prove to be of limited use. These sources are not interested in what
should not, according to their conception, have existed: in a general sense, the life of prisoners,
and above all Jewish prisoners, was of no consequence. What was considered illegal in camp
terms was, indeed, sometimes noted, but mostly in the form of rectification. Witness accounts of
the same subjects – seen here as means of life within an extremely destructive environment – are
incomparably more detailed. The reality of the daily existence, as it is reported in witness
accounts, is by contrast replete with details and variations on the minutiae of “everyday life” in
24
Friedman, P., “Problems of Research on the European Jewish Catastrophe”, Yad Vashem Studies, no. 3 (1959), pp.
34-5.
25
For a recent discussion of Burkhardt from an archaeological perspective, see: Veit, U., “Über die Grenzen
archaeologischer Erkenntnis und die Lehren der Kulturtheorie fuer die Archaeologie”, in Veit, U. et. al., Spuren
und Botschaften: Interpretationen Materieller Kultur, Tuebinger Archaeologische Taschenbuecher Band 4
(Waxmann Verlag, 2003), pp. 463-490.
8the camp. Material culture relates to the intimacies of everyday existence; in the case of prisoners
in Auschwitz this historical stratum can only be accessed by detailed information exactly
antithetical to the kind of information the Nazi authorities were interested in and recorded.26 It
should be recalled that what Primo Levi termed “the grey zone” involved the complicity of the
prisoners and the SS. Some of these contacts were part of the management of the camp.
However, trade with prisoners, the production of “private” articles in the workshops for private
SS purposes, to be repaid either in kind or through privileges, and the entire culture of
“organizing”, were essentially illegal from the NS organizational perspective.
It seems clear that the daily practices of prisoners in Auschwitz and the importance of
objects in this context are best approached through witness accounts, based on first-hand
experience. Yet the integration of the voice of the victims remains, in the words of one critic, still
“far from uncontroversial”.27 Writing in 1997, James Young noted that Jewish testimony is
excluded from the historical record: “Ironically, we have moved from a time in which facts
seemed to declare their own importance, thus making the eye-witness to events the best historian,
to a time when fact is regarded as completely dependent for both meaning and factuality on its
context, making the authority of the eye-witness somewhat negligible.”28 In a monograph written
in 2006, Tony Kushner argued that “Survivor testimony, whether in written, oral, or video form,
has to be taken seriously on its own terms.”29
Saul Friedländer’s 2007 The Years of Extermination has found innovative ways of
incorporating the voices of the victims. And yet, the role they play vis-à-vis the narrative is
worthy of exploration: has Friedländer – how, and to what extent? – moved beyond using victim
material as a (dramatic) mise-en-scène set in a (historically and causally established) chain of
events? Moreover, not all victims’ voices are represented: it is mainly the voices of victims who
26
See, for example, the detailed description of the varieties of “prisoner fashion” within the camp in Vrba, R., I
Cannot Forgive, Grove Press: 1964. For the function of the camp black market, see for example Pawelczynska,
A., Values and Violence in Auschwitz, University of California Press: 1979.
27
Chamberlain, B.S., “Doing Memory: Remembrance Reified and Other Shoah Business”, The Public Historian, 23
(3, 2001), pp. 73–82. For another example see Karin Orth’s remarks to the effect that “the memories of former
prisoners to not directly portray the reality”, which strengthens (in her eyes) the necessity of using the perspective
of the perpetrators. Orth, K., Nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Eine politische
Organisationsgeschichte, Hamburger Edition: 1999, vol. 1, pp. 18–19.
28
Young, J. E., “Between History and Memory: The Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor”, in History and
Memory (9) 1997, pp. 47-58. Here p. 52.
29
Kushner, T., “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation”, p. 289.
9left records of their own while living through the events themselves, that is, mostly Jewish
diarists, to whom reference is made.
What I am suggesting is a move “beyond ornamentation”, that is, away from the
“grafting” of memory onto a pre-established narrative chain of linked events. The problem here
is that event selection – the main criteria seem to be the event being considered both
“significant” and “established”, in the sense of “true” – already predetermines the secondary
nature of what is termed “memory” with regards to what is termed “history”.
Relevance: The Jewish Voice
As already noted, the continuation of the Nazi racial hierarchy into the concentration and
extermination camps system means that the Jewish experience was the basis of the ‘Zero Degree’
of materiality. Jews weren’t allowed to use the canteen, receive packages, write postcards, go to
the brothel, and only had a “free” Sunday every other weekend and so on.30 This is used as the
reflecting point against which all other testimonies are read.
In order to access this Jewish Voice, I collected some 100 hours of testimony from
Auschwitz survivors living in Israel, using a “open ended interviewing system”, that is, I
encouraged them to talk about their experiences but did not interfere or direct them. I met most
of the people several times, in some cases on a weekly basis (or more). These survivors included
both Jewish men and women.
Paradoxically, as Boaz Cohen points out, the “Jewish Historiography” on the Holocaust
has often been bound up with a marginalization of the importance of Witness Accounts for
historical research. Jewish historians have actually tended in the ultra-realist tradition, most
notably of course Raul Hilberg (whose work, though outstanding for organizational history and
the performance of the Final Solution, totally abnegates a “victim perspective”). Moreover, it is
actually the “non-Jewish historiography” which is trying to open up a space for this kind of
Jewish polivocal historiography: this was the issue (still unresolved) at the meeting between
Hayden White and Saul Friedländer in Jena in June 2011.
30
See Piper F., and Dlugoborski, W., eds., Auschwitz 1940-1945: Studien Zuer Geschichte Des Konzentrations- und
Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum 1999 (particularly vol. 2). On the struggle to
write postcards, see Dr. Bejlin’s testimony in Stoll, K., Die Herstellung der Wahrheit. Strafverfahren gegen
ehemalige Angehörige der Sicherheitspolizei für den Bezirk Bialystok, Berlin 2012, pp. 570-571.
104. Expected Contribution
This dissertation concerns a dimension of the concentration camp system that has as yet received
little attention: by investigating the conditions of a minimalist existence of the inmates in
Auschwitz, as reflected in their material culture, what will come to the fore is the point of view
of the inmates and their minimal and precarious conditions for survival.
Such a repositioning of perspective is made possible by combining different approaches
and sources, such as oral testimonies, historical research and archaeological remains and traces –
a combination of sources that have yet to be considered in synthesis. It is expected that such a
cultural history of Auschwitz will offer new perspectives on the internal experience of survival.
Moreover, the absolute scarcity of objects endowed them for the inmates with an
enormous function and meaning as a basis for their individual subsistence. Addressing this
element of survival will necessarily speak of the agency of the victims in their continual and
dismal struggle for survival. It is expected that this new focus on material objects will also open
up a new perspective that will also make it possible to reassess our knowledge and read well
known texts in a new light.
11References
Bartov, O., “Lecture at the Virtual History foundation USC”, March 2010,
http://college.usc.edu/news/stories/707/looking-back-to-move-foward [accessed January 2012]
Bauer, M., “Einmal möchte ich mich noch satt essen”: Lebensmittelversorgung und
Hungerkrankheit am Beispiel des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen in der Zeit von 1938 bis
1945, unpublished Master’s Thesis, University of Vienna: 2009.
Blatman, D., The Death Marches: The Final Phase of the Nazi Genocide, Harvard University
Press: 2011
Browning, C., Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp, W. W. Norton: 2011
Chamberlain, B.S., “Doing Memory: Remembrance Reified and Other Shoah Business”, The
Public Historian, 23 (3, 2001), pp. 73–82
Cohen, B., “Jews, Jewish Studies and Holocaust Historiography”, in J.M. Dreyfus and D.
Langton eds., Writing the Holocaust, Bloomsbury: 2011, pp. 100-115
De Certeau, M., The Practices of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California
Press:1984
Fineman, J., “The History of the Anecdote”, in H. Aram Veeser ed., The New Historicism, New
York 1987, pp. 50–76
Friedländer, S., The Years Of Extermination: Nazi Germany And The Jews, 1939-1945, Harper
Perennial: 2008
Friedländer, S., ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution,
Harvard University Press: 1992
Friedman, P., “Problems of Research on the European Jewish Catastrophe”, Yad Vashem Studies,
no. 3 (1959), pp. 34-5.
Kansteiner, W., “Success, Truth, And Modernism In Holocaust Historiography: Reading Saul
Friedländer Thirty-Five Years After The Publication Of Metahistory”, History and Theory (48)
(2) 2009, pp. 25-53.
Kushner, T., “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation”, Poetics Today
27 (2, 2006), pp. 275–295
Lanzmann, K., Shoah: The Complete Text, Pantheon Books: 1985
Linne, K., “Hunger und Kannibalismus bei sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen im Zweiten
Weltkrieg”, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 58/2 (2010), pp. 243-262
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