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

Author(s):  
Ivana Milovanović

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.

October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Martin Blumenthal-Barby

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?


2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Brown

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. 


boundary 2 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-143
Author(s):  
Paula Rabinowitz

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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 251-263
Author(s):  
Lucyna Sadzikowska

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.


Author(s):  
Dan Stone

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.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farzana Bhatty

"The media are crucial to our worldview, thus, this paper will demonstrate how American television news media was used to present and define an enemy immediately following the events of September 11. Furthermore, this paper will problematize the stereotypes associated with the enemy, and bring into the forefront the reasons for and consequences of establishing and maintaining an enemy "Other," specifically questionable political actions by US President George W. Bush and his administration. As the violent events of one day became showcased in the media, this facilitated the implementation of restrictive and pervasive laws and legislation, which were part of a larger initiative by the Bush administration to incite fear and apprehension surrounding a new enemy"--From the Introduction page 1.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 27-58
Author(s):  
Nikolaus Wachsmann

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. LW&D198-LW&D222
Author(s):  
Roelof Bakker

Photographer Roelof Bakker revisits a George Rodger photograph recorded in a Nazi concentration camp, Bakker first encountered as a child growing up in the Netherlands forty years ago. Finally developing this image, which registered in his mind yet remained unprocessed, Bakker actively engages with the photograph as a photographer, investigator and spectator, but also as a human being, integrating thought and feeling into an ethical and responsible process of analysis. Responding to critical texts by Ariella Azoulay, Ulrich Baer, Susie Linfield, Werner Sollors, and others, Bakker looks beyond the photograph as a static object, addressing the other participants in the photographic act, including the photographer’s subject Sieg Maandag, and connecting the photograph to a world outside its frame, towards a future unknown at the time of exposure.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farzana Bhatty

"The media are crucial to our worldview, thus, this paper will demonstrate how American television news media was used to present and define an enemy immediately following the events of September 11. Furthermore, this paper will problematize the stereotypes associated with the enemy, and bring into the forefront the reasons for and consequences of establishing and maintaining an enemy "Other," specifically questionable political actions by US President George W. Bush and his administration. As the violent events of one day became showcased in the media, this facilitated the implementation of restrictive and pervasive laws and legislation, which were part of a larger initiative by the Bush administration to incite fear and apprehension surrounding a new enemy"--From the Introduction page 1.


Author(s):  
Joseba Gabilondo

This article is a first attempt to elaborate a Hispanic reading and relocation of Europe and modernity in an Atlantic space/time that is neither European nor modern, and can be denominated Atlantic transmodernity (Dussel). The goal is not to refashion a more problematic Europe and modernity, even in a postcolonial fashion, by provincializing it (Chakrabarty), but rather to create a new geopolitical space, the Hispanic Atlantic, and a temporality, an Atlantic transmodernity, that turns the idea of Europe/modernity into an ideological effect produced by the geopolitics of the Atlantic. In order to do so, the article concentrates, on the one hand, on 19th-century Spanish history of the state of exception, and, on the other, on the not-so-well known history of the inception of the concentration camp in Cuba between 1896 and 1898.


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