Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Nazi concentration camp inmates' writings”

Stories abound about the medical abuses that have come to define medicine and the “pseudo”-neurosciences in the Third Reich. Well known are the Nazi program of euthanasia and the neuroscientific publications that arose from it. Nevertheless, during this widespread perversion of medical practice and science, true medical heroics persisted, even in the concentration camps. In December 1942, inmates of Camp Vapniarka began experiencing painful lower extremity muscle cramps, spastic paraparesis, and urinary incontinence. In order to reduce the cost of feeding the 1200, mostly Jewish, inmates of Camp Vapniarka and surreptitiously hasten their deaths, the Nazi-affiliated Romanian officers of the camp had begun feeding them a diet high in Lathyrus sativus. L. sativus is the neurotoxin implicated in neurolathyrism, a degenerative disease of the upper motor neurons. Dr. Arthur Kessler, one of the camp's prisoners, eventually identified the source of the epidemic. Armed with this knowledge, the inmates collectively organized to halt its spread.

The Bergen Belsen Nazi concentration camp has been widely described and studied, especially as the images taken by British troops at the moment of the camp's liberation shaped the very representation of Nazi crimes and the Holocaust. Much less-known are the debates about the exhumations of more than 20 000 corpses of inmates, the ones who died in the weeks before or after the liberation. The French mission in search of corpses of deportees, the so-called 'Garban mission', tried to negotiate the access to the camp grounds. After an international uproar and a decade of negotiations, the permission was finally not granted.

Too often histories of the concentration camps tend to be ignorant of the wider political context of nazi repression and control. This article tries to overcome this problem. Combining legal, social and political history, it contributes to a more thorough understanding of the changing relationship between the camps as places of extra-legal terror and the judiciary, between nazi terror and the law. It argues that the conflict between the judiciary and the SS was not a conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as existing accounts claim. Rather, it was a power struggle for jurisdiction over the camps. Concentration camp authorities covered up the murders of prisoners as suicides to prevent judicial investigations. This article also looks at actual suicides in the pre-war camps, to highlight individual inmates’ reactions to life within the camps. The article concludes that the history of the concentration camps needs to be firmly integrated into the history of nazi terror and the Third Reich.

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.

Abstract Why did Nazi concentration camps routinely send death notifications and even cremation urns to families of dead prisoners, including Jewish prisoners, until well into the war years? This article challenges the assumption that these practices served solely to provide reassurance that the prisoners had died under ‘normal’ circumstances. In the case of Jewish prisoners, urns sent home for burial to families in the Reich were part and parcel of a system of intimidation waged through local Gestapo offices. These urns also illuminate changing practices around prisoner deaths within camps themselves and the dissonant character of Nazi camp organization. On the one hand, camp administrators adhered to long-standing German state practices, establishing civil registries on camp premises to record prisoner deaths. On the other hand, they flouted bureaucratic norms, fabricating the causes of prisoner death on a grand scale and using bureaucratic procedures to veil the gross mistreatment of inmates. In many camps, prisoner labour was forced to help manufacture and uphold this imperfect subterfuge. These histories point to one of the few places in which the death of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi detention system was systematically recorded and conveyed back to families and Jewish communities in the Reich. Yet, paradoxically, the ‘processing’ of death in the major concentration camps was in many respects untrustworthy, and intimidation now also hovered over what had been a credible, neutral civil procedure.

In a series of experiments done in wartime Nazi Germany, inmates of the Dachau concentration camp were exposed to cold by being immersed in ice water, or kept outside in freezing temperatures; their responses were measured, and various techniques were used in an attempt to revive them. The immediate application of these hypothermia studies was to the war effort, to try to protect or save soldiers exposed to cold water or air. An account of the procedures and results of these experiments was written by an American officer, Major Leo Alexander, on the basis of his post-war discovery of documents and interviews in Germany. These reports reveal the ghastly and abominable details of the experiments.Recent scientific work in British Columbia has caused some ethical debate when it consulted the Alexander report and used some of the Nazi experimental data. The scientists in the Hypothermia Unit of the University of Victoria, unsurprisingly but reassuringly, have no intention of repeating the Nazi atrocities, and condemn them. The current controversy concerns the morality of their using the Alexander data in their study. This out-of-the-way case has some small intrinsic interest; but its consideration leads to broader concerns.

Michał Borwicz was a Polish poet, prose writer, and a publicist of Jewish origins. During the Nazi occupation he was resettled to the Lvov getto, and in the years 1942–1943 he was imprisoned in the Janowska concentration camp. He managed to escape and next he was active in the resistance movement. After the war as a director of the Jewish Historical Commission in Kraków he tried to collect and publish testimonies of the Holocaust survivors. In 1947 he decided to emigrate to France. In 1953 Borwicz defended his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne. The dissertation was published the same year. It presents writings of people “condemned to death” under Nazi occupation, and is considered a pioneer study of literature and writing practices in the camps and ghettos. Unfortunately the singularity of the author and the strength of his work are still underestimated.

In the United States we have very mixed feelings about research with human subjects. The Nuremberg Code (the Code), which provides a foundation for the protection of human subjects, was written by American judges in the context of trying Nazi doctors who committed atrocious acts of human experimentation on concentration camp inmates. The Code provides ten common-sense guidelines controlling research. For example, a researcher may not conduct research on human subjects without that subject's informed consent, or if there is an a priori reason to believe that the research will cause death or disabling injury to the subject. What is remarkable about the creation of the Code is that it was thought to be necessary to document and impose the most fundamental moral principles on researchers. The Code demonstrates a remarkable suspicion of research with human subjects and those who perform such research.

Abstract Can The Merchant of Venice be performed in Germany after the Holocaust, and if so, how? Is the claim that the play is a touchstone for German-Jewish relations, with a philosemitic tradition – and therefore eligible to be performed today – verifiable? The article begins by briefly surveying this tradition from the Jewish emancipation in the mideighteenth century, which, with a few relapses, continued – especially in productions directed by Jews and/or with Jewish actors in the role of Shylock – until the rise of the Nazi regime, to be resumed after the Second World War. The main part analyses a test case, staged by the Israeli director Hanan Snir at the Weimar National Theatre (1995), and intended rhetorically to avenge the Holocaust on the German audience: Merchant as a viciously antisemitic play with in a play, directed by SS personnel in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp with eventually murdered Jewish inmates compelled to play the Jewish parts.

Can The Merchant of Venice be performed in Germany after the Holocaust, and if so, how? Is the claim that the play is a touchstone for German-Jewish relations, with a philosemitic tradition – and therefore eligible to be performed today – verifiable? The article begins by briefly surveying this tradition from the Jewish emancipation in the mid-eighteenth century, which, with a few relapses, continued – especially in productions directed by Jews and/or with Jewish actors in the role of Shylock – until the rise of the Nazi regime, to be resumed after the Second World War. The main part analyses a test case, staged by the Israeli director Hanan Snir at the Weimar National Theatre (1995), and intended rhetorically to avenge the Holocaust on the German audience: Merchant as a viciously antisemitic play-within-a-play, directed by SS personnel in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp with eventually murdered Jewish inmates compelled to play the Jewish parts.

In the aftermath of World War II, Austria once again achieved notoriety as a “prison of peoples.” In 1951, theOst-West Kurier, a newspaper in Essen, decried the degrading mistreatment of Austria's so-called “prisoners of the postwar.” Men, women, and children were wasting away in former concentration camps and were denied citizenship rights, the right to work or to travel freely, and basic social protections, the newspaper reported. These “prisoners” were not, however, former Jewish concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war (POWs), or displaced persons (DPs). They were German expellees from Eastern Europe—the very Germans on whose behalf the Nazi war for Lebensraum had allegedly been fought. “In the entire Western world, there is today no group of human beings who has been sentenced to live with so few rights as the so-called Volksdeutsche in Austria,” the newspaper's editors proclaimed:300,000 people, whose homes and property have been torn from them through the expulsions, all too often by their closest neighbors, endured a hard journey to Austria, where they believed upon arrival that it could be something like a greater Heimat for them. Because only three decades ago, they too were Austrians.

Taken over by the Nazi in September 1939, Polish prisons became not only the gallows of many thousands of Poles but also the site of heroic struggle against the invaders ‒ a struggle in which both the inmates and the Polish prison staff were involved. Warsaw prisons, especially the Pawiak prison, became symbols of martyrdom of the Polish nation and of persistent struggle fought by soldiers of the underground Polish State. The Polish prison staff were obliged to stay in service during the Nazi occupation of Poland for two reasons. The first one resulted from the Nazi authorities’ order that all Polish employees should resume work; acts of sabotage carried severe sanctions. The other reason was related to the policy of the Penal Department, revived by the invaders in the territory of Nazi-occupied Poland and renamed the Central Prison Administration in 1940. Its rudimentary powers included, among other things, the staffing of prisons in the Warsaw district. In October 1939, the institution summoned the prison staff to resume work: this staff policy was designed to improve the psychological situation of inmates, to facilitate material assistance to prisoners, the political ones in particular, and to help create in the future, basing on the Polish staff, the structures of prison intelligence service of underground organizations. The actual decisions of individual members of the prison staff were prompted by a variety of motivations: a fear of the consequences of sabotaging the Nazi orders; a sense of being subordinated to Polish prison administration; and a need to secure one’s own source of maintenance. Many functionaries were also ideologically motivated: by a wish to help imprisoned Poles or subordination to suggestions or orders coming from persons involved in the arising structures of anti-Nazi conspiracy. Having made up his mind to work in a prison under Nazi administration, each and every member of the prison staff faced the problem of defining his attitude towards prisoners in general, and political prisoners in particular. Under Nazi occupation, the actual contents of the notion of “political prisoner” did not correspond with its former statutory definition. The need for a different attitude to political prisoners, against the prison regulations and the orders of Nazi authorities, resulted from the situation of occupation, the ever-intensifying terror, the Nazis’ attitude tu prisoners and to Polish staff, the pressure from society, and the cxpectations formulated in this rcspect by the first underground organizations. In this situation, most of the Polish prison staff developed a protective attitude to political prisoners, aimed at the greatest possible liberalization of provisions of the prison rules and, to an extent determined by reasons of their own safety, actually sabotaged Nazi instructions. Such attitudes could be found as early as October 1939 in a prison in Daniłowiczowska street and in “Serbia” (women’s ward of the Pawiak prison); they persisted till the closing of Polish prisons, whatever the restrictions imposed on Polish prison staff during the occupation. The most widespread form of assisting prisoners was to pass on news from inmates to their families or other persons and vice versa. The staff also secretly supplied inmates with food, medication, cigarettes, and books. Also religious practices were permitted against the regulations, and imprisoned priests could say masses and render religious assistance and services to their fellow inmatess. This attitude of Polish prison staff was reinforced by the activities of newly- formed underground organizations which tried to get in touch with the inmates by winning over the Polish staff members. Organized intelligence in Warsaw prisons started in early November 1939 when the Headquarters of Poland’s Victory Service were notified by a prison staff member of the imprisonment of the Mayor of Warsaw Stefan Starzyński in the Daniłowiczowska street prison. Having received this signal, an Headquarters oflicer Emil Kumor started winning over the staff of the succession of prisons in which the Mayor of Warsaw was kept. Regular activities towards the building of prison intelligence structures were started late in November 1939 by the head of Information and Propaganda Department of Poland’s Victory Service Warsaw Headquarters, Zygmunt Hempel. In each of the prisons, he managed to win over an officer of the prison staff; sworn under the organization’s bylaws, those officers, were charged with the task of forming prison intelligence networks in their respective institutions. A special stress on the building and functioning of this type of network for communication with inmates was laid in the Pawiak prison, a security police jail. The prison intelligence network included internal network (function holders among the inmates, members of prison staff); external liaisons (prison staff); and external network (persons in charge of contact points, liaisons). This communication network was io acquire information about the circumstances of detention, the course of inquiry, the degree to which the entire organization was endangered, etc. Instructed by the organization, the intelligence network members among the prison staff passed on information, supplied food, medication (poison in some cases), things to help organize an escape, and underground press. They also prepared copies of lists of new admissions and of persons transported to concentration camps, executed, or murdered. They warned prisoners against Nazi agents and other dangers, and facilitated contacts between partners. Till mid-1942, there operated in Polish prisons, the Pawiak prison in particular, numerous structures of communication between inmates and underground organizations; they were independent of one another and varied as to the degree of organization. Acting as their liaisons were many a time the same members of prison staff; many of them only learned after 1945 for which underground organization they had been working. Beside performing the organizational tasks, those same functionaries often undertook, for humanitarian reasons, to establish illegal contacts with individual prisoners upon request of those persons’ families. Ultil mid-1942, the underground communication with inmates was spontaneous, largely improvised, and chaotic, and those involved in it tended to ignore even the basic principles of safety. Nazi counteraction took place as early as July 1940 when the first group of prison staff were arested and transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. They were accused of helping the prisoners and involvement in the underground activities of one of the organizations that struggled for the country’s independence. Thereafter, the prison staff were more and more often put under surveillance, searched, and detained. In the winter of 1941/1942, the Nazi succeeded to introduce their agent, Józef Hammer, into the prison intelligence structures of the Armed Struggle Union. Hammer established co-operation with a group of the most ideologically motivated prison staff; through their activity, the Nazi intelligence gained access to materials possessed by underground organizations. As a result of this activity, 33 functionaries of the prison staff were arrested in March 1942; most of them were subsequently killed in concentration camps. In April, furher 9 officers were executed. The repressive measures towards Po1ish prison staff continued in 1943, when further arrests and executions took place, and in the early half of 1944 when Polish functionaries were dismissed (the Pawiak prison). The staff of prisons in Daniłowiczowska and Rakowiecka streets were much less affected by the Nazi repressions as there were practically no political prisoners in those two institutions. On 30 June 1942, the death penalty imposed on Józef Hammer in an underground trial was executed; it took the counter-espionage of the Home Army Headquarters a mere several weeks to clear his associates of the charge of intentional co-operation with the provocateur. Instead, it was manifested in an inquiry that the men had been completely devoted to the cause of struggle against the invaders and motivated by patriotic reasons. The underground movement’s battle against the Nazi for channels of com- munication with prisoners finally won, the period of consolidation of the prison intelligence headquarters started, especially in the Pawiak prison. As a result of actions undertaken by the Home Army Headquarters, the whole of this sphere was taken over by its counter- espionage division. By way of the sole exception, the Home Representation of Polish Ęmigr Government were permitted to organize their own network for communication with prisoners. Starting from mid-1942, the internal and external networks were reorganized and adjusted to new conditions resulted from Nazi policies, reflected first and foremost in intensified repressions of Polish prison staff. Heads of the Home Army Headquarters counter-espionage division compared the participation of that staff in anti- Nazi prison conspiracy to going to the front; they stated at the same time that the prison staff actually encountered a more dangerous situation. In their case, the enemy was the Nazi political police; they paid with their own life and health for any mistake, unguarded moment, or forgetfulness of dangers. If we take just the staff of the Pawiak prison into consideration, 62 of its members were arrested, l0 of them were executed , and a few only of the 45 confined to concentration camps managed to survive the gehenna.

Some doctors and nurses played a key role in Nazism. They were responsible for the sterilization and murder of people with disabilities. Nazi doctors used concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs in medical experiments that had military or racial objectives. What we have learnt about the behaviour of doctors and nurses during the Nazi period enables us to reflect on several issues in present-day medicine (research limitations, decision making at the beginning and the end of a life and the relationship between physicians and the State). In some authors' opinions, the teaching of the medical aspects of the Holocaust could be a new model for education relating to professionalism, Human Rights, Bioethics and the respect of diversity. Teaching Medicine and the Holocaust could be a way of informing doctors and nurses of violations of Ethics in the past. Moreover, a Study Trip to Holocaust and Medicine related sites has a strong pedagogical value. Visiting Holocaust related sites, T4 centres and the places where medical experiments were carried out, has a special meaning for medical students. Additionally, tolerance, anti-discrimination, and the value of human life can be both taught and learned through this curriculum. The following article recounts our experiences of organizing and supervising a study trip with a group of medical students to some Holocaust and medicine-related sites in Berlin and Hadamar (Germany). The study tour included lectures at universities in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

Abstract:The ban on German aviation and the creation/fabrication of its history The article traces the origins of two central features of the historiography of the German aircraft industry: while its contribution to technical progress by the end of World War II tends to be grossly exaggerated – particularly in the case of the so-called Wunderwaffen, the jet fighters of Messerschmitt and Heinkel – its industrial basis und its role in the German war economy are played down to an impression that, until 1945, the industry consisted of tiny workshops of mere handicraft character. It is shown that this narrative was carefully constructed between 1945 and 1953, highlighted by memoirs of former military leaders of the Luftwaffe like Adolf Galland and Werner Baumbach, but predominantely through the memoirs of Ernst Heinkel, the leading industrialist during the Nazi period. These memioirs appeared at a time when it seemed unlikely – due to a total ban on German aviation under the Allied occupation – that a German aircraft industry would ever rise again. By exaggerating the German technological lead in 1945 they eased the idea that the industry was outdated when the chances grew for its return to the international market in 1953. Meanwhile, the outright denial of the size and importance of the industry during the war indirectly provided a chance to gloss over the participation of the industrialists in the Nazi crimes, highlighted by the use of concentration camp inmates and slave labourers who formed the bulk of the workforce in the production of the Wunderwaffen.

Abstract: The ban on German aviation and the creation/fabrication of its history The article traces the origins of two central features of the historiography of the German aircraft industry: while its contribution to technical progress by the end of World War II tends to be grossly exaggerated – particularly in the case of the so-called Wunderwaffen, the jet fighters of Messerschmitt and Heinkel – its industrial basis und its role in the German war economy are played down to an impression that, until 1945, the industry consisted of tiny workshops of mere handicraft character. It is shown that this narrative was carefully constructed between 1945 and 1953, highlighted by memoirs of former military leaders of the Luftwaffe like Adolf Galland and Werner Baumbach, but predominantely through the memoirs of Ernst Heinkel, the leading industrialist during the Nazi period. These memioirs appeared at a time when it seemed unlikely – due to a total ban on German aviation under the Allied occupation – that a German aircraft industry would ever rise again. By exaggerating the German technological lead in 1945 they eased the idea that the industry was outdated when the chances grew for its return to the international market in 1953. Meanwhile, the outright denial of the size and importance of the industry during the war indirectly provided a chance to gloss over the participation of the industrialists in the Nazi crimes, highlighted by the use of concentration camp inmates and slave labourers who formed the bulk of the workforce in the production of the Wunderwaffen.

Introduction: The article aims at analysing the influence of beauty on the spirituality of women (in a philosophical sense) and the value of art history education during the secret teaching that women received in the all-female German Nazi concentration camp – FKL Ravensbrück. The clandestine lessons were initiated by the Polish teachers to save fellow prisoners, young Polish women, who were subjected to some criminal medical experiments conducted by the Germans. The researcher examines the role of telling stories about beauty and works of art in the extreme conditions, when the excruciating suffering was cumulating and depriving the prisoners of hope for survival. The author indicates the importance of influencing the listeners’ with the value of beauty contained in the lecturer’s words concerning the works of art and the emanation of her personal spiritual beauty. The research also underlines the role of the ancient method of learning through ekphrasis and emphasizes the therapeutic value of beauty. Method: Analysis of the source documents: the mémoires of the former Ravensbrück inmates and the results of Urszula Wińska’s survey. Conclusions: Attending the secret classes by the Polish women-prisoners (so called “Rabbits”, as they were subjected to the medical experiments) at FKL Ravensbrück and their education in the field of art history and aesthetics provided by prof. Karolina Lanckorońska had a double meaning. On one hand, it allowed the women to survive the camp (ad hoc effect of teaching), and on the other hand, it strengthened their need for a stronger attachment to their Polish roots and returning to the family home. It also boosted their love for the model of social life, in which one is to start one’s own family and protect the lives of its members.

The Kasztner train is one of the most well-known episodes of the Hungarian Holocaust. The action played a highly controversial role in the history of the Jewish self-rescue actions that elaborated in recent historiography. Instead of examining the negotiations between the SS and the Hungarian Zionist Rescue Committee, this study explores how the passengers of the Kasztner train narrated their controversial plight in their diaries, memoirs, and interviews. The inquiry seeks to uncover the history of the Kasztner action from a bottom-up perspective focusing on what was the role of news and rumors about the release in the narratives of the survivors. Hungarian Jewish families, i.e. the “Kasztner Jews” aspired to travel to Palestine, landed finally in Switzerland but directly left from Nazi-occupied Hungary to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The majority of them were spending months in a special sector of the camp between June and December 1944. The circumstances in the Hungarian Camp where the inmates were treated as “hostages” by the Nazis were unusual compared to the other – ordinary – camp sectors of Bergen-Belsen or other concentration camps. Due to this special status, the “Kasztner Jews” were not in emergency considering they did not suffer from starvation, aggression, and illnesses that lead to death. However, they were held under Nazi jurisdiction and were imprisoned by the SS, and were not convinced about their long-awaited survival. The accounts written during the months spent in Bergen-Belsen shed light on the flow of information between prisoners in a particular situation. Attitudes to the news and interpretations were influenced by the ideological, religious, and personal background of the “Kasztner Jews”. The differences within the group determined the access to information: the Zionist leaders and their families were much more informed but everyone became part of the information network created by the participants to a certain degree. The uncertain plight and the vulnerability to the Nazis evolved ideas and visions of the possible future. The so-called rumor culture was a major phenomenon that featured everyday life. People who were consistently isolated from credible sources of information became both the creators and the consumers of the news. Besides the uncertainty, the moral ambiguity of Kasztner action was reflected in the participants’ narratives. Their attitudes towards the news were largely determined by the conclusions they drew about their own situation and future, which were influenced not only by their political orientation but also by their family situation. The condition of the prisoners from Auschwitz aroused sympathy and pity among them. On the other hand, the poor physical condition of these prisoners reinforced their privileged position. News of potential deportation from Budapest was also at the center of the discussions. Those who feared for their family members and relatives who were on the train and those who stayed in Budapest were trapped. When they heard the good news, they were glad that family members who stayed in Budapest were secure from deportation. At the same time, the distressing news reinforced their decision to leave the country. Diarists and memoirists have struggled to narrate all of this contradictions.

In Western historical consciousness, National Socialist mass murder has become permanently identified with the Jewish Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's maniacal project to annihilate European Jewry. From its earliest days, the Nazi Party sought to exclude Jews from German public life, and when the Nazis came to power in January 1933, their anti-Jewish animus became official policy. What followed was legal disemancipation of German Jews, physical attacks on their persons, ghettoization, deportation, and physical extermination in the East. The story of the Holocaust is well known and generally accepted. Yet two years before German Jewish policy swerved from persecution and harassment to genocide, the Nazis were already involved in state-organized killing of another disfavored minority. Unlike the destruction of European Jews, the murder of this group—the mentally disabled—occurred within the Reich's own borders. Launched with the signing of a “Hitler decree” in October 1939 (backdated to 1 September), the centrally organized program targeted so-called “incurable” patients, whose lives were to be ended by a doctor-administered “mercy death” (Gnadentod). The Nazis attached the term “euthanasia” to their program of destruction, bolstering their rationale for it with humanitarian arguments and cost-based justifications, the latter legitimizing euthanasia as a means to free up scarce resources for use by “valuable” Germans. Over time, the restrictive use of euthanasia just for incurable patients ended; thereafter, the Nazis extended the killing program to healthier patients, sick concentration camp inmates, Jewish patients, and a variety of “asocials” (juvenile delinquents, beggars, tramps, prostitutes). The technology of murder developed in the “euthanasia” program—carbon monoxide asphyxiation in gas chambers camouflaged as shower rooms—would become the model for the first death camps in Poland. Many of the “euthanasia” personnel were likewise transferred to the Polish extermination centers, where they applied the techniques of mass death—refined in murdering the disabled—to the murder of the European Jews.

This is the first English-language publication of an interview with James Baldwin conducted by the German writer, editor, and journalist Fritz J. Raddatz in 1978 at Baldwin’s house in St. Paul-de-Vence. In the same year, it was published in German in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, as well as in a book of Raddatz’s conversations with international writers, and—in Italian translation—in the newspaper La Repubblica. The interview covers various topics characteristic of Baldwin’s interests at the time—among them his thoughts about Jimmy Carter’s presidency, his reasons for planning to return to the United States, his disillusionment after the series of murders of black civil rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s, and the role of love and sexuality in his literary writings. A special emphasis lies on the discussion of possible parallels between Nazi Germany and U.S. racism, with Baldwin most prominently likening the whole city of New York to a concentration camp. Due to copyright reasons, this reprint is based on an English translation of the edited version published in German. A one-hour tape recording of the original English conversation between Raddatz and Baldwin is accessible at the German literary archive in Marbach.

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.

Abstract Studies of forced labour in Nazi camps tend to stress the exceptionality of inmates’ experiences and their profound difference from common views of work. Yet examination of the wartime and postwar accounts of inmates and survivors reveals that they often combine features of the camp reality itself with phenomena from other times, places and situations. In this way, written, oral and visual depictions articulate a reality in which concepts and ideologies of work familiar from various cultural settings mix with those of the Nazi camp system, as well as with later experiences and current debates. This article traces three cultural frameworks that inmates and survivors utilized to make sense of forced labour in Nazi camps: war and the military, industrial concepts of productive destruction and destructive production, and Jewish religious culture. In exploring the relationship between the continuity and discontinuity of meaning between these cultural frameworks and the Nazi camps, we analyse a wide range of interviews, artworks, songs, memoirs and written reports from the 1930s to the early 2000s. We argue that in order not to make their suffering and work appear senseless, inmates and survivors understood forced labour within well-established frameworks of meaning. Their accounts, we suggest, use symbolic elements as creative acts that address inmates’ experiences by expanding the camp reality or going beyond it, thereby making them more comprehensible and communicable.

This article scrutinises the role railways played in the existence of the German concentration camp system during the Third Reich era. Through the lens of Jewish slave labourers’ experiences, I argue that the numerous daily transports of prisoners from site to site were the backbone of the SS camp system. Grounded in survivor testimonies and Nazi administrative records, this paper traces the pathways of Dutch Jewish deportees on a single deportation transport to the concentration camps and addresses the impact of the frequent displacements upon the inmates. In general, the Germans decided which detainee was sent where, yet sometimes the victims could interfere in the selection process or evade relocation to another site. The maps in this article visualise the trajectories of several Dutch Jews; they demonstrate that prisoner relocation was a common phenomenon and reveal the vast distance that inmates covered by train.

This article investigates translation and interpreting in a conflict situation with reference to the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. In particular, it examines the need for such services and the duties and the tasks the translators and the interpreters were forced to execute. It is based on archival material, in particular the recollections and the statements of former inmates collected in the archives of concentration camps. The ontological narratives are compared with the cinematic figure of Marta Weiss, a camp interpreter, as presented in the docudrama “Ostatni Etap”(“The last Stage”) of 1948 by the Polish director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp. The article contributes to the discussion on the role that translators and interpreters play in extreme and violent situations when the ethics of interpreting and translation loses its power and the generally accepted norms and standards are no longer applicable.

This article investigates translation and interpreting in a conflict situation with reference to the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. In particular, it examines the need for such services and the duties and the tasks the translators and the interpreters were forced to execute. It is based on archival material, in particular the recollections and the statements of former inmates collected in the archives of concentration camps. The ontological narratives are compared with the cinematic figure of Marta Weiss, a camp interpreter, as presented in the docudrama “Ostatni Etap”(“The last Stage”) of 1948 by the Polish director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp. The article contributes to the discussion on the role that translators and interpreters play in extreme and violent situations when the ethics of interpreting and translation loses its power and the generally accepted norms and standards are no longer applicable.

In the article the author discusses the beginnings of Polish camp literature, more precisely: literature referring to the Nazi German concentration camps. For decades it was assumed that the earliest Polish texts of that type were published in 1945. It appears that the first works – reports and memoirs – were published before the outbreak of WWII. In this article, the author discusses them in the historical and historical-literary contexts (mainly in the context of German writings).

In March of 1959, public intellectual, principal of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, and Jewish concentration camp survivor, Bruno Bettelheim published two articles that presented seemingly disparate narratives of autism. One of these narratives, that of the mechanical boy, has become ubiquitous in discussions of autism history. The other article centered on Bettelheim’s posthumous diagnosis of Kamala, who had been known as the Wolf Girl of Midnapore India due to claims that she was raised by wolves, as autistic. Bettelheim compared Kamala to other “wild” autistic children he had worked with, especially Anna, a Polish Jewish refugee who had spent her earliest years hiding in a dugout from Nazi persecution. This article argues that in order to understand Bettelheim’s portrayal of autism, it is necessary to read the narrative of the mechanical boy alongside Bettelheim’s other narratives of autism. Specifically, it is necessary to read it alongside Bettelheim’s narratives of the autistic child as “wild child/wolf girl,” as well as his comparison between autistic children and some of his fellow concentration camp inmates, who he referred to as “moslems.” While seemingly disparate, these narratives are actually deeply intertwined. These narratives of incurable “wild children” and “moslem” concentration camp inmates served as the necessary contrast to the rehabilitation/assimilation/cure narrative of the mechanical boy. Reading these narratives of autism alongside each other helps uncover the often-elided role of race in shaping professional and public understandings of autism. This article problematizes contemporary and historical formations of autism as a white, middle-class, male “disorder” by making explicit the role of race in the construction of early narratives of autism. This article will also argue that in the late 1950s and the 1960s Bruno Bettelheim used narratives of autism to promote a new model of white technocratic masculinity in the United States. The creation of this new model of white masculinity was bound up with the whitening of Ashkenazi Jewish identity. Bettelheim presented whiteness as something that Ashkenazi Jews in America could achieve through a process of rehabilitation/assimilation/cure that rid them of pathological “Jewish” traits.

Szopki, Polish musical nativity puppet plays, were a widespread but relatively unstudied artistic response to Nazi occupation among Polish Catholics in Nazi concentration camps. Polish inmates used the szopki as an opportunity to subvert censorship, as the nativity story is only a small portion of a szopki production. The artist Maja Berezowska and Varsovian actress Jadwiga Kopijowska wrote and performed the Szopka Polska in Ravensbrück in 1942, 1943 and 1944. This article examines the adaption of traditional carols and puppets to facilitate a purposeful recreation of happy and comforting prewar memories in the play. Framing the sharing of positive memories as a form of caretaking builds on scholarship that focuses on less visible resistance, as these activities, especially communal activities led by women, are often overlooked in scholarship in favor of more overt or dramatic actions. The Szopka Polska writers drew strength from representations of childhood and motherhood. Parodied traditional songs and stock szopki scenes promoted Polish heritage and normalcy, using Poland's past triumphs as hope for future liberation. Three puppets, the Soldier, Polish Mother, and Inmate, who attend the nativity, directly address the inmates' World War II experiences, a phenomenon that rarely occurred in other forms of concentration camp theater. These three puppets, the nineteenth-century puppet Wiarus, and a skit for two children who address the puppets on stage promote survival and resistance by modeling productive reactions to oppression.  @font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-size:11.0pt;mso-ansi-font-size:11.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial;mso-hansi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-ansi-language:EN;}.MsoPapDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;line-height:115%;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}

The aim of the article is to indicate a recurring motif in the writings devoted to Nazi concentration camps. In many of the accounts of male and female internees the camp was described as a place “where birds did not sing”. As a territory over which there spun an empty silent sky. “A Birdless Sky”. The author of the study, utilising various sources, attempted to study the phenomenon from different perspectives. The results of scientific ornithological studies conducted by Günther Niethammer, a scientist and an SS guard at KL Auschwitz proved a rather unexpected point of reference for the voices of the internees. The presented article refers to the increasingly lively contemporary research into the topics of Lager and Holocaust literatures. Ecocriticism and environmentalism have been some of the more significant inspirations of the proposed discussion. By introducing a post-anthropocentric perspective, the author was able to expand the historical field to include non-human beings (animals, plants, landscapes).

Probably the most (in)famous Australian teenager of recent times, now-17-year-old Kim Duthie—better known as the “St Kilda Schoolgirl”—first came to public attention when she posted naked pictures of two prominent St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) players on Facebook. She claimed to be seeking revenge on the players’ teammate for getting her pregnant. This turned out to be a lie. Duthie also claimed that 47-year-old football manager Ricky Nixon gave her drugs and had sex with her. She then said this was a lie, then that she lied about lying. That she lied at least twice is clear, and in doing so, she arguably reinforced the pervasive myth that women are prone to lie about rape and sexual abuse. Precisely what occurred, and why Duthie posted the naked photographs will probably never be known. However, it seems clear that Duthie felt herself wronged. Can she therefore be held entirely to blame for the way she went about seeking redress from a group of men with infinitely more power than she—socially, financially and (in terms of the priority given to elite football in Australian society) culturally? The many judgements passed on Duthie’s behaviour in the media highlight the crucial, seldom-discussed issue of how problematic behaviour on the part of women might reinforce patriarchal norms. This is a particularly sensitive issue in the context of a spate of alleged sexual assaults committed by elite Australian footballers over the past decade. Given that representations of alleged rape cases in the media and elsewhere so often position women as blameworthy for their own mistreatment and abuse, the question of whether or not women can and should be held accountable in certain situations is particularly fraught. By exploring media representations of one of these complex scenarios, we consider how the issue of “complicity” might be understood in a rape culture. In doing so, we employ Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential concept of the “grey zone,” which signifies a complex and ambiguous realm that challenges both judgement and representation. Primo Levi’s “Grey Zone,” Patriarchy and the Problem of Judgement In his essay titled “The Grey Zone” (published in 1986), Levi is chiefly concerned with Jewish prisoners in the Nazi-controlled camps and ghettos who obtained “privileged” positions in order to prolong their survival. Reflecting on the inherently complex power relations in such extreme settings, Levi positions the “grey zone” as a metaphor for moral ambiguity: a realm with “ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants. [The ‘grey zone’] possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure, and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge” (27). According to Levi, an examination of the scenarios and experiences that gave rise to the “grey zone” requires a rejection of the black-and-white binary opposition(s) of “friend” and “enemy,” “good” and “evil.” While Levi unequivocally holds the perpetrators of the Holocaust responsible for their actions, he warns that one should suspend judgement of victims who were entrapped in situations of moral ambiguity and “compromise.” However, recent scholarship on the representation of “privileged” Jews in Levi’s writings and elsewhere has identified a “paradox of judgement”: namely, that even if moral judgements of victims in extreme situations should be suspended, such judgements are inherent in the act of representation, and are therefore inevitable (see Brown). While the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections must be kept in mind, the corruptive influences of power at the core of the “grey zone”—along with the associated problems of judgement and representation—are clearly far more prevalent in human nature and experience than the Holocaust alone. Levi’s “grey zone” has been appropriated by scholars in the fields of Holocaust studies (Petropoulos and Roth xv-xviii), philosophy (Todorov 262), law (Luban 161–76), history (Cole 248–49), theology (Roth 53–54), and popular culture (Cheyette 226–38). Significantly, Claudia Card (The Atrocity Paradigm, “Groping through Gray Zones” 3–26) has recently applied Levi’s concept to the field of feminist philosophy. Indeed, Levi’s questioning of whether or not one can—or should—pass judgement on the behaviour of Holocaust victims has considerable relevance to the divisive issue of how women’s involvement in/with patriarchy is represented in the media. Expanding or intentionally departing from Levi’s ideas, many recent interpretations of the “grey zone” often misunderstand the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections. For instance, while applying Levi’s concept to the effects of patriarchy and domestic violence on women, Lynne Arnault makes the problematic statement that “in order to establish the cruelty and seriousness of male violence against women as women, feminists must demonstrate that the experiences of victims of incest, rape, and battering are comparable to those of war veterans, prisoners of war, political prisoners, and concentration camp inmates” (183, n.9). It is important to stress here that it is not our intention to make direct parallels between the Holocaust and patriarchy, or between “privileged” Jews and women (potentially) implicated in a rape culture, but to explore the complexity of power relations in society, what behaviour eventuates from these, and—most crucial to our discussion here—how such behaviour is handled in the mass media. Aware of the problem of making controversial (and unnecessary) comparisons, Card (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 515) rightly stresses that her aim is “not to compare suffering or even degrees of evil but to note patterns in the moral complexity of choices and judgments of responsibility.” Card uses the notion of the “Stockholm Syndrome,” citing numerous examples of women identifying with their torturers after having been abused or held hostage over a prolonged period of time—most (in)famously, Patricia Hearst. While the medical establishment has responded to cases of women “suffering” from “Stockholm Syndrome” by absolving them from any moral responsibility, Card writes that “we may have a morally gray area in some cases, where there is real danger of becoming complicit in evildoing and where the captive’s responsibility is better described as problematic than as nonexistent” (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 511). Like Levi, Card emphasises that issues of individual agency and moral responsibility are far from clear-cut. At the same time, a full awareness of the oppressive environment—in the context that this paper is concerned with, a patriarchal social system—must be accounted for. Importantly, the examples Card uses differ significantly from the issue of whether or not some women can be considered “complicit” in a rape culture; nevertheless, similar obstacles to understanding problematic situations exist here, too. In the context of a rape culture, can women become, to use Card’s phrase, “instruments of oppression”? And if so, how is their controversial behaviour to be understood and represented? Crucially, Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” were primarily motivated by his concern that most historical and filmic representations “trivialised” the complexity of victim experiences by passing simplistic judgements. Likewise, the representation of sexual assault cases in the Australian mass media has often left much to be desired. Representing Sexual Assault: Australian Football and the Media A growing literature has critiqued the sexual culture of elite football in Australia—one in which women are reportedly treated with disdain, positioned as objects to be used and discarded. At least 20 distinct cases, involving more than 55 players and staff, have been reported in the media, with the majority of these incidents involving multiple players. Reports indicate that such group sexual encounters are commonplace for footballers, and the women who participate in sexual practices are commonly judged, even in the sports scholarship, as “groupies” and “sluts” who are therefore responsible for anything that happens to them, including rape (Waterhouse-Watson, “Playing Defence” 114–15; “(Un)reasonable Doubt”). When the issue of footballers and sexual assault was first debated in the Australian media in 2004, football insiders from both Australian rules and rugby league told the media of a culture of group sex and sexual behaviour that is degrading to women, even when consensual (Barry; Khadem and Nancarrow 4; Smith 1; Weidler 4). The sexual “culture” is marked by a discourse of abuse and objectification, in which women are cast as “meat” or a “bun.” Group sex is also increasingly referred to as “chop up,” which codes the practice itself as an act of violence. It has been argued elsewhere that footballers treating women as sexual objects is effectively condoned through the mass media (Waterhouse-Watson, “All Women Are Sluts” passim). The “Code of Silence” episode of ABC television program Four Corners, which reignited the debate in 2009, was even more explicit in portraying footballers’ sexual practices as abusive, presenting rape testimony from three women, including “Clare,” who remains traumatised following a “group sex” incident with rugby league players in 2002. Clare testifies that she went to a hotel room with prominent National Rugby League (NRL) players Matthew Johns and Brett Firman. She says that she had sex with Johns and Firman, although the experience was unpleasant and they treated her “like a piece of meat.” Subsequently, a dozen players and staff members from the team then entered the room, uninvited, some through the bathroom window, expecting sex with Clare. Neither Johns nor Firman has denied that this was the case. Clare went to the police five days later, saying that professional rugby players had raped her, although no charges were ever laid. The program further includes psychiatrists’ reports, and statements from the police officer in charge of the case, detailing the severe trauma that Clare suffered as a result of what the footballers called “sex.” If, as “Code of Silence” suggests, footballers’ practices of group sex are abusive, whether the woman consents or not, then it follows that such a “gang-bang culture” may in turn foster a rape culture, in which rape is more likely than in other contexts. And yet, many women insist that they enjoy group sex with footballers (Barry; Drill 86), complicating issues of consent and the degradation of women. Feminist rape scholarship documents the repetitive way in which complainants are deemed to have “invited” or “caused” the rape through their behaviour towards the accused or the way they were dressed: defence lawyers, judges (Larcombe 100; Lees 85; Young 442–65) and even talk show hosts, ostensibly aiming to expose the problem of rape (Alcoff and Gray 261–64), employ these tactics to undermine a victim’s credibility and excuse the accused perpetrator. Nevertheless, although no woman can be in any way held responsible for any man committing sexual assault, or other abuse, it must be acknowledged that women who become in some way implicated in a rape culture also assist in maintaining that culture, highlighting a “grey zone” of moral ambiguity. How, then, should these women, who in some cases even actively promote behaviour that is intrinsic to this culture, be perceived and represented? Charmyne Palavi, who appeared on “Code of Silence,” is a prime example of such a “grey zone” figure. While she stated that she was raped by a prominent footballer, Palavi also described her continuing practice of setting up footballers and women for casual sex through her Facebook page, and pursuing such encounters herself. This raises several problems of judgement and representation, and the issue of women’s sexual freedom. On the one hand, Palavi (and all other women) should be entitled to engage in any consensual (legal) sexual behaviour that they choose. But on the other, when footballers’ frequent casual sex is part of a culture of sexual abuse, there is a danger of them becoming complicit in, to use Card’s term, “evildoing.” Further, when telling her story on “Code of Silence,” Palavi hints that there is an element of increased risk in these situations. When describing her sexual encounters with footballers, which she states are “on her terms,” she begins, “It’s consensual for a start. I’m not drunk or on drugs and it’s in, [it] has an element of class to it. Do you know what I mean?” (emphasis added). If it is necessary to define sex “on her terms” as consensual, this implies that sometimes casual “sex” with footballers is not consensual, or that there is an increased likelihood of rape. She also claims to have heard about several incidents in which footballers she knows sexually abused and denigrated, if not actually raped, other women. Such an awareness of what may happen clearly does not make Palavi a perpetrator of abuse, but neither can her actions (such as “setting up” women with footballers using Facebook) be considered entirely separate. While one may argue, following Levi’s reflections, that judgement of a “grey zone” figure such as Palavi should be suspended, it is significant that Four Corners’s representation of Palavi makes implicit and simplistic moral judgements. The introduction to Palavi follows the story of “Caroline,” who states that first-grade rugby player Dane Tilse broke into her university dormitory room and sexually assaulted her while she slept. Caroline indicates that Tilse left when he “picked up that [she] was really stressed.” Following this story, the program’s reporter and narrator Sarah Ferguson introduces Palavi with, “If some young footballers mistakenly think all women want to have sex with them, Charmyne Palavi is one who doesn’t necessarily discourage the idea.” As has been argued elsewhere (Waterhouse-Watson, “Framing the Victim”), this implies that Palavi is partly responsible for players holding this mistaken view. By implication, she therefore encouraged Tilse to assume that Caroline would want to have sex with him. Footage is then shown of Palavi and her friends “applying the finishing touches”—bronzing their legs—before going to meet footballers at a local hotel. The lighting is dim and the hand-held camerawork rough. These techniques portray the women as artificial and “cheap,” techniques that are also employed in a remarkably similar fashion in the documentary Footy Chicks (Barry), which follows three women who seek out sex with footballers. In response to Ferguson’s question, “What’s the appeal of those boys though?” Palavi repeats several times that she likes footballers mainly because of their bodies. This, along with the program’s focus on the women as instigators of sex, positions Palavi as something of a predator (she was widely referred to as a “cougar” following the program). In judging her “promiscuity” as immoral, the program implies she is partly responsible for her own rape, as well as acts of what can be termed, at the very least, sexual abuse of other women. The problematic representation of Palavi raises the complex question of how her “grey zone” behaviour should be depicted without passing trivialising judgements. This issue is particularly fraught when Four Corners follows the representation of Palavi’s “nightlife” with her accounts of footballers’ acts of sexual assault and abuse, including testimony that a well-known player raped Palavi herself. While Ferguson does not explicitly question the veracity of Palavi’s claim of rape, her portrayal is nevertheless largely unsympathetic, and the way the segment is edited appears to imply that she is blameworthy. Ferguson recounts that Palavi “says she was able to put [being raped] out of her mind, and it certainly didn’t stop her pursuing other football players.” This might be interpreted a positive statement about Palavi’s ability to move on from a rape; however, the tone of Ferguson’s authoritative voiceover is disapproving, which instead implies negative judgement. As the program makes clear, Palavi continues to organise sexual encounters between women and players, despite her knowledge of the “dangers,” both to herself and other women. Palavi’s awareness of the prevalence of incidents of sexual assault or abuse makes her position a problematic one. Yet her controversial role within the sexual culture of elite Australian football is complicated even further by the fact that she herself is disempowered (and her own allegation of being raped delegitimised) by the simplistic ideas about “assault” and “consent” that dominate social discourse. Despite this ambiguity, Four Corners constructs Palavi as more of a perpetrator of abuse than a victim—not even a victim who is “morally compromised.” Although we argue that careful consideration must be given to the issue of whether moral judgements should be applied to “grey zone” figures like Palavi, the “solution” is far from simple. No language (or image) is neutral or value-free, and judgements are inevitable in any act of representation. In his essay on the “grey zone,” Levi raises the crucial point that the many (mis)understandings of figures of moral ambiguity and “compromise” partly arise from the fact that the testimony and perspectives of these figures themselves is often the last to be heard—if at all (50). Nevertheless, an article Palavi published in Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph (19) demonstrates that such testimony can also be problematic and only complicate matters further. Palavi’s account begins: If you believed Four Corners, I’m supposed to be the NRL’s biggest groupie, a wannabe WAG who dresses up, heads out to clubs and hunts down players to have sex with… what annoys me about these tags and the way I was portrayed on that show is the idea I prey on them like some of the starstruck women I’ve seen out there. (emphasis added) Palavi clearly rejects the way Four Corners constructed her as a predator; however, rather than rejecting this stereotype outright, she reinscribes it, projecting it onto other “starstruck” women. Throughout her article, Palavi reiterates (other) women’s allegedly predatory behaviour, continually portraying the footballers as passive and the women as active. For example, she claims that players “like being contacted by girls,” whereas “the girls use the information the players put on their [social media profiles] to track them down.” Palavi’s narrative confirms this construction of men as victims of women’s predatory actions, lamenting the sacking of Johns following “Code of Silence” as “disgusting.” In the context of alleged sexual assault, the “predatory woman” stereotype is used in place of the raped woman in order to imply that sexual assault did not occur; hence Palavi’s problematic discourse arguably reinforces sexist attitudes. But can Palavi be considered complicit in validating this damaging stereotype? Can she be blamed for working within patriarchal systems of representation, of which she has also been a victim? The preceding analysis shows judgement to be inherent in the act of representation. The paucity of language is particularly acute when dealing with such extreme situations. Indeed, the language used to explore this issue in the present article cannot escape terminology that is loaded with meaning(s), which quotation marks can perhaps only qualify so far. Conclusion This paper does not claim to provide definitive answers to such complex dilemmas, but rather to highlight problems in addressing the sensitive issues of ambiguity and “complicity” in women’s interactions with patriarchal systems, and how these are represented in the mass media. Like the controversial behaviour of teenager Kim Duthie described earlier, Palavi’s position throws the problems of judgement and representation into disarray. There is no simple solution to these problems, though we do propose that these “grey zone” figures be represented in a self-reflexive, nuanced manner by explicitly articulating questions of responsibility rather than making simplistic judgements that implicitly lessen perpetrators’ culpability. Levi’s concept of the “grey zone” helps elucidate the fraught issue of women’s potential complicity in a rape culture, a subject that challenges both understanding and representation. Despite participating in a culture that promotes the abuse, denigration, and humiliation of women, the roles of women like Palavi cannot in any way be conflated with the roles of the perpetrators of sexual assault. These and other “grey zones” need to be constantly rethought and renegotiated in order to develop a fuller understanding of human behaviour. References Alcoff, Linda Martin, and Laura Gray. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation.” Signs 18.2 (1993): 260–90. 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If iconophobia is defined as the suspicion and anxiety towards the power exerted by images, its history is an ancient one in all of its Platonic, Christian, and Judaic forms. At its most radical, iconophobia results in an act of iconoclasm, or the total destruction of the image. At the other end of the spectrum, contemporary iconophobia may be more subtle. Images are simply withdrawn from circulation with the aim of eliminating their visibility. In his book Images in Spite of All, French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman questions the tradition of suspicion and denigration governing visual representations of the Holocaust, arguing we have abdicated our ethical obligation to try to imagine. This essay will argue that disruptions to traditional modes of spectatorship shift the terms of viewing from suspicion to ethical participation. By building on Didi-Huberman’s discussion of images and the spectatorial gaze, this essay will consider Laura Waddington’s 2002 documentary film Border. Waddington spent six months hiding with asylum seekers in the area surrounding the Red Cross refugee camp at Sangatte in northern France. I will argue that Waddington proposes a model of spectatorship that implicates the viewer into the ethical content of the film. By seeking to restore the dignity and humanity of the asylum seekers rather than viewing them with suspicion, Border is an acute reminder of our moral responsibility to bear witness to that which lies beyond the boundaries of conventional representations of asylum seekers.The economy managing the circulation of mainstream media images is a highly suspicious mechanism. After the initial process of image selection and distribution, what we are left with is an already homogenised collection of predictable and recyclable media images. The result is an increasingly iconophobic media gaze as the actual content of the image is depleted. In her essay “Precarious Life,” Judith Butler describes this economy in terms of the “normative processes” of control exercised by the mainstream media, arguing that the structurally unbalanced media representations of the ‘other’ result in creating a progressively dehumanised effect (Butler 146). This process of disidentification completes the iconophobic circle as the spectator, unable to develop empathy, views the dehumanised subject with increasing suspicion. Written in the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror, Butler’s insights are important as they alert us to the possibility of a breach or rupture in the image economy. It is against Butler’s normative processes that Didi-Huberman’s critique of Holocaust iconoclasm and Waddington’s Border propose a slippage in representation and spectatorship capable of disrupting the homogeneity of the mass circulation of images.Most images that have come to represent the Holocaust in our collective memory were either recorded by the Nazis for propaganda or by the Allies on liberation in 1945. Virtually no photographs exist from inside the concentration camps. This is distinct from the endlessly recycled images of gaunt, emaciated survivors and bulldozers pushing aside corpses which have become critical in defining Holocaust iconography (Saxton 14). Familiar and recognisable, this visual record constitutes a “visual memory bank” that we readily draw upon when conjuring up images of the Holocaust. What occurs, however, when an image falls outside the familiar corpus of Holocaust representation? This was the question raised in a now infamous exhibition held in Paris in 2001 (Chéroux). The exhibition included four small photographs secretly taken by members of the Sonderkommando inside the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944. The Sonderkommando were the group of prisoners who were delegated the task of the day-to-day running of the crematoria. The photographs were smuggled out of the camps in a tube of toothpaste, and eventually reached the Polish Resistance.By evading the surveillance of the SS the photographs present a breach in the economy of Holocaust iconography. They exist as an exception to the rule, mere fragments stolen from beneath the all-seeing eye of the SS Guards and their watch towers. Despite operating in an impossible situation, the inmate maintained the belief that these images could provide visual proof of the existence of the gas chambers. The images are testimony produced inside the camp itself, a direct challenge to the discourse emphasising the prohibition of representation of the Holocaust and in particular the gas chambers. Figure 1 The Auschwitz crematorium in operation, photograph by Sonderkommando prisoners August 1944 © www.auschwitz.org.plDidi-Huberman’s essay marks a point of departure from the iconophobia which has stressed the unimaginable (Lanzmann), unknowable (Lyotard), and ultimately unrepresentable (Levinas) nature of the Holocaust since the 1980s. Denigrated and derided, images have been treated suspiciously by this philosophical line of thought, emphasising the irretrievable gap between representation and the Holocaust. In a direct assault on the tradition of framing the Holocaust as unrepresentable, Didi-Huberman’s essay becomes a plea to the moral and ethical responsibility to bear witness. He writes of the obligation to these images, arguing that “it is a response we must offer, as a debt to the words and images that certain prisoners snatched, for us, from the harrowing Real of their experience” (3). The photographs are not simply archival documents, but a testament to the humanity of the members of the Sonderkommando the Nazis sought to erase.Suspicion towards the potential power exerted by images has been neutralised by models of spectatorship privileging the viewer’s mastery and control. In traditional theories of film spectatorship, the spectator is rendered in terms of a general omnipotence described by Christian Metz as “an all-powerful position which is of God himself...” (49). It is a model of spectatorship that promotes mastery over the image by privileging the unilateral gaze of the spectator. Alternatively, Didi-Huberman evokes a long counter tradition within French literature and philosophy of the “seer seen,” where the object of the spectator’s gaze is endowed with the ability to return the gaze resulting in various degrees of anxiety and paranoia. The image of the “seer seen” recurs throughout the writing of Baudelaire, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Barthes, negating the unilateral gaze of an omnipotent spectator (Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons).Didi-Huberman explicitly draws upon Jacques Lacan’s thinking about the gaze in light of this tradition of the image looking back. In his 1964 seminars on vision in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan dedicates several chapters to demonstrate how the visual field is structured by the symbolic order, the real, symbolic and the imaginary. Following Lacan, Didi-Huberman introduces two terms, the veil-image and the tear-image, which are analogous with Lacan’s imaginary and the real. The imaginary, with its connotations of illusion and fantasy, provides the sense of wholeness in both ourselves and what we perceive. For Didi-Huberman, the imaginary corresponds with the veil-image. Within the canon of Holocaust photography, the veil-image is the image “where nobody really looks,” the screen or veil maintaining the spectator’s illusion of mastery (81). We might say that in the circulation of Holocaust atrocity images, the veil serves to anaesthetise and normalise the content of the image.Lacan’s writing on the gaze, however, undermines the spectator’s mastery over the image by placing the spectator not at the all-seeing apex of the visual field, but located firmly within the visual field of the image. Lacan writes, “in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am the picture...I am photo-graphed” (Lacan 106). The spectator is ensnared in the gaze of the image as the gaze is reciprocated. For Didi-Huberman, the veil-image seeks to disarm the threat to the spectator being caught in the image-gaze. Lacan describes this neutralisation in terms of “the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting. Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze” (101). Further on, Lacan expresses this in terms of the dompte-regarde, or a taming of the gaze (109). The veil-image maintains the fiction of the spectator’s ascendency by subduing the threat of the image-gaze. In opposition to the veil-image is the tear-image, in which for Didi-Huberman “a fragment of the real escapes” (81). This represents a rupture in the visual field. The real is presented here in terms of the tuché, or missed encounter, resulting in the spectator’s anxiety and trauma. As the real cannot be represented, it is the point where representation collapses, rupturing the illusion of coherency maintained by the veil-image. Operating as an exception or disruption to the rule, the tear-image disrupts the image economy. No longer neutralised, the image returns the gaze, shattering the illusion of the all-seeing mastery of the spectator. Didi-Huberman describes this tearing exception to the rule, “where everyone suddenly feels looked at” (81).To treat the Sonderkommando photographs as tear-images, not veil-images, we are offered a departure from classic models of spectatorship. We are forced to align ourselves and identify with the “inhuman” gaze of the Sonderkommando. The obvious response is to recoil. The gaze here is not the paranoid Sartrean gaze, evoking shame in the spectator-as-voyeur. Nor are these photographs reassuring narcissistic veil-images, but will always remain the inimical gaze of the Other—tearing, ripping images, which nonetheless demand that we do not turn away. It is an ethical response we must offer. If the power of the tear-image resides in its ability to disrupt traditional modes of representation and spectatorship, I would like to discuss this in relation to Laura Waddington’s 2004 film Border. Waddington is a Brussels based filmmaker with a particular interest in documenting the movement of displaced peoples. Just as the Sonderkommando photographs were taken clandestinely from beneath the gaze of the SS, Waddington evaded the surveillance of the French police and helicopter patrols as she bore witness to the plight of asylum seekers trying to reach England. Border presents her stolen testimony, operating outside the familiar iconography of mainstream media’s representation of asylum seekers. If we were to consider the portrayal of asylum seekers by the Australian media in terms of the veil-image, we are left with a predictable body of homogenised and neutralised stock media images. The myth of Australia being overrun by boat people is reinforced by the visual iconography of the news media. Much like the iconography of the Holocaust, these types of images have come to define the representations of asylum seekers. Traceable back to the 2001 Tampa affair images tend to be highly militarised, frequently with Australian Navy patrol boats in the background. The images reinforce the ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric exhibited on both sides of politics, paradoxically often working against the grain of the article’s editorial content. Figure 2 Thursday 16 Apr 2009 there was an explosion on board a suspected illegal entry vessel (SIEV) 36 in the vicinity of Ashmore Reef. © Commonwealth of Australia 2011Figure 3 The crew of HMAS Albany, Attack One, board suspected illegal entry vessel (SIEV) 38 © Commonwealth of Australia 2011 The media gaze is structurally unbalanced against the suffering of asylum seekers. In Australia asylum seekers are detained in mandatory detention, in remote sites such as Christmas Island and Woomera. Worryingly, the Department of Immigration maintains strict control over media representations of the conditions inside the camps, resulting in a further abstraction of representation. Geographical isolation coupled with a lack of transparent media access contributes to the ongoing process of dehumanisation of the asylum seekers. Judith Butler describes this as “The erasure of that suffering through the prohibition of images and representations” (146). In the endless recycling of images of leaky fishing boats and the perimeters of detention centres, our critical capacity to engage becomes progressively eroded. These images fulfil the function of the veil-image, where nobody really looks as there is nothing left to see. Figure 4 Asylum seekers arrive by boat on Christmas Island, Friday, July 8, 2011. AAP Image/JOSH JERGA Figure 5 Woomera Detention Centre. AAP Image/ROB HUTCHISON By reading Laura Waddington’s Border against an iconophobic media gaze, we are afforded the opportunity to reconsider this image economy and the suspicious gaze of the spectator it seeks to solicit. Border reminds us of the paradoxical function of the news image—it shows us everything, but nothing at all. In a subtle interrogation of our indifference to the existence of asylum seekers and their suffering, Border is a record of the six months Waddington spent hidden in the fields surrounding the French Red Cross camp at Sangatte in 2002. Sangatte is a small town in northern France, just south of Calais and only one and a half hours’ drive from Paris. The asylum seekers are predominantly Afghan and Iraqi. Border is a record of the last stop in their long desperate journey to reach England, which then had comparatively humane asylum seeking policies. The men are attempting to cross the channel tunnel, hidden in trucks and on freight trains. Many are killed or violently injured in their attempts to evade capture by the French police. Nevertheless they are sustained by the hope that England will offer them “a better life.” Figure 6 Still from Border showing asylum seekers in the fields of Sangatte ©Laura Waddington 2002Waddington dedicates the film, “for those I met.” It is an attempt to restore the humanity and dignity of the people who are denied individual identities. Waddington refuses to let “those who I met” remain nameless. She names them—Omar, Muhammad, Abdulla—and narrates their individual stories. Border is Waddington’s attempt to return a voice to those who have been systematically dehumanised, by-products of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his classic account of documentary, Bill Nichols describes six modes of documentary representation (99–138). In Border, Waddington is working in the participatory mode, going into the field and participating in the lives of others (115). It is via this mode of representation that Waddington is able to heighten the ethical encounter with the asylum seekers. Waddington was afforded no special status as a filmmaker, but lived as a refugee among the asylum seekers during the six months of filming. At no point are we granted visible access to Waddington, yet we are acutely aware of her presence. She is physically participating in the drama unfolding before her. At times, we become alert to her immediate physical danger, as she too runs through the fields away from the police and their dogs.The suspicious gaze is predicated on maintaining a controlled distance between the spectator and the subject. Michele Aaron (82–123) has recently argued for a model of spectatorship as an intrinsically ethical encounter. Aaron demonstrates that spectatorship is not neutral but always complicit—it is a contract between the spectator and the film. Particularly relevant to the purposes of this essay is her argument concerning the “merging gaze,” where the gaze of the filmmaker and spectator are collapsed. This has the effect of folding the spectator into the film’s narrative (93). Waddington exploits the documentary medium to implicate the spectator into the structure of the film. It is in Waddington’s full participatory immersion into the documentary itself that undermines the conventional distance maintained by the spectator. The spectator can no longer remain neutral as the lines of demarcation between filmmaker and spectator collapse.Waddington was shooting alone with a small video camera at night in extremely low-light conditions. The opening scene is dark and grainy, refusing immediate entry into the film. As our eyes gradually adjust to the light, we realise we are looking at a young man, concealed in the bushes from the menacing glare of the lights of oncoming traffic. Waddington does not afford us the all-perceiving spectatorial mastery over the image. Rather, we are crouching with her as she records the furtive movements of the man. The background sound, a subtle and persistent hum, adds to a growing disquiet, a looming sense of apprehension concerning the fate of these asylum seekers. Figure 7 Grainy still showing the Red Cross camp in Border ©Laura Waddington 2002Waddington’s commentary has been deliberately pared back and her voice over is minimal with extended periods of silence. The camera alternates from meditative, lingering shots taken from the safety offered by the Red Cross camp, to the fields where the shots are truncated and chaotically framed. The actions of the asylum seekers jerk and shudder, producing an image akin to the flicker effect of early silent cinema because the film is not running at the full rate of 24 frames per second. Here the images become blurred to the point of unintelligibility. Like the Sonderkommando photographs, the asylum seekers exist as image-fragments, shards stolen by Waddington’s camera as she too works hard to evade capture. Tension gradually increases throughout the film, cumulating in a riot scene after a decision to close the camp down. The sweeping search lights of the police helicopter remind us of the increased surveillance undertaken by the border patrols. Without the safety of the Red Cross camp, the asylum seekers are offered no protection from the increasing police brutality. With nowhere else to go, the asylum seekers are forced into the town of Sangatte itself, to sleep in the streets. They are huddled together, and there is a faintly discernible chant repeating in the background, calling to the UN for help. At points during the riot scene, Waddington completely cuts the sound, enveloping the film in a haunting silence. We are left with a mute montage of distressing still images recording the clash between the asylum seekers and police. Again, we are reminded of Waddington’s lack of immunity to the violence, as the camera is deliberately knocked from her hand by a police officer. Figure 8 Clash between asylum seekers and police in Border ©Laura Waddington 2002It is via the merged gaze of the camera and the asylum seekers that Waddington exposes the fictional mastery of the spectator’s gaze. The fury of the tear-image is unleashed as the image-gaze absorbs the spectator into its visual field. No longer pacified by the veil, the spectator is unable to retreat to familiar modes of spectatorship to neutralise and disarm the image. With no possible recourse to desire and fantasy, the encounter becomes intrinsically ethical. Refusing to be neutralised by the Lacanian veil, the tear-image resists the anaesthetising effects of recycled and predictable images of asylum seekers.This essay has argued that a suspicious spectator is the product of an iconophobic media gaze. In the endless process of recycling, the critical capacity of the image to engage the viewer becomes progressively disarmed. Didi-Huberman’s reworking of the Lacanian gaze proposes a model of spectatorship designed to disrupt this iconophobic image economy. The veil-image asks little from us as spectators beyond our complicity. Protected by the gaze of the image, the fiction of the all—perceiving spectator is maintained. By abandoning this model of spectatorship as Didi-Huberman and Waddington are asking us to do, the unidirectional relationship between the viewer and the image is undermined. The terms of spectatorship may be relocated from suspicion to an ethical, participatory mode of engagement. We are laying down our weapons to receive the gaze of the Other. ReferencesAaron, Michele. Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. London: Wallflower, 2007.Border. Waddington, Laura. Love Stream Productions, 2004.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.London: Verso, 2004.Chéroux, Clément, ed. Mémoires des Camps. Photographies des Camps de Concentration et d'Extermination Nazis, 1933-1999. Paris: Marval, 2001.Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Trans. Lillis, Shane B. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.Didi-Huberman, Georges. Ce Que Nous Voyons, Ce Qui Nous regarde.Critique. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1992.Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.Trans. Sheridan, Alan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.Levinas, Emmanuel. "Reality and its Shadow." The Levinas Reader. Ed. Hand, Seán. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 130–43.Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1982.Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2001.Saxton, Libby. Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London: Wallflower, 2008.

A political minimalism? That would obviously go against the grain of our current political ideology → in fact, we are in an era of political maximalisation (Roland Barthes 200, arrow in original).Barthes’ comment is found in the ‘Annex’ to his 1978 lecture course The Neutral. Despite the three decade difference I don’t things have changed that much, certainly not insofar as academic debate about the cultural and social is concerned. At conferences I regularly hear the demand that the speaker or speakers account for the ‘political intent’, ‘worth’ or ‘utility’ of their work, or observe how speakers attempt to pre-empt and disarm such calls through judicious phrasing and citing. Following his diagnosis Barthes (201-206) proceeds to write under the title ‘To Give Leave’. Here he notes the incessant demand placed upon us, as citizens, as consumers, as representative cultural subjects and as biopolitical entities and, in this context, as academics to have and to communicate our allegiances, views and opinions. Echoing the acts, (or rather the ‘non-acts’), of Melville’s Bartleby, Barthes describes the scandalous nature of suspending the obligation of holding views; the apparent immorality of suspending the obligation of being interested, engaged, opinionated, committed – even if one only ever suspends provisionally, momentarily even. For the length of a five thousand word essay perhaps. In this short, unfortunately telegraphic and quite speculative essay I want pause to consider a few gestures or figures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. What follows is in three parts. First a comment on the nature of the ‘demand to communicate’ identified by Barthes and its links to longer running moral and practical imperatives within Western understandings of the subject, the social and the political. Second, the most substantial section but still an all too brief account of the apparent ‘passivity’ of the narrator of Imre Kertész’s novel Fatelessness and the ways in which the novel may be read as a reflection on the nature of agency and determination. Third, a very brief conclusion, the question directly; what politics or what apprehension of politics, could a reflection on stillness and its ‘political minimalism’ offer? 1.For Barthes, (in 1978), one of the factors defining the contemporary intellectual scene was the way in which “politics invades all phenomena, economic, cultural, ethical” coupled with the “radicalization” of “political behaviors” (200), perhaps most notably in the arrogance of political discourse as it assumes the place of a master discourse. Writing in 1991 Bill Readings identified a similar phenomenon. For Readings the category of the political and politically inspired critique were operating by encircling their objects within a presupposed “universal language of political significance into which one might translate everything according to its effectivity”, an approach which has the effect of always making “the political […] the bottom line, the last instance where meaning can be definitively asserted” (quoted in Clark 3) or, we may add, realized. There is, of course, much that could be said here, not least concerning the significant differences in context, (between, for example, the various forms of revolutionary Marxism, Communism and Maoism which seem to preoccupy Barthes and the emancipatory identity and cultural politics which swept through literature departments in the US and beyond in the last two decades of the twentieth century). However it is also possible to suggest that a general grammar and, moreover, a general acceptance of a telos of the political persists.Barthes' (204-206) account of ‘political maximalisation’ is accompanied by a diagnosis of its productivist virility, (be it, in 1978, on the part of the increasingly reduced revolutionary left or the burgeoning neo-liberal right). The antithesis, or, rather, the outside of such an arrangement or frame would not be another political program but rather a certain stammering, a lassitude or dilatoriness. A flaccidness even; “a devirilized image” wherein from the point of view of the (political) actor or critic, “you are demoted to the contemptible mass of the undecided of those who don’t know who to vote for: old, lost ladies whom they brutalize: vote however you want, but vote” (Barthes 204). Hence Barthes is not suggesting a counter-move, a radical refusal, a ‘No’ shouted back to the information saturated market society. What is truly scandalous he suggests, is not opposition or refusal but the ‘non-reply’. What is truly scandalous, roughish even, is the decline or deferral and so the provisional suspension of the choice (and the blackmail) of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the ‘this’ or the ‘that’, the ‘with us’ or ‘against us’.In Literature and Evil Georges Bataille concludes his essay on Kafka with a comment on such a decline. According to Bataille, the reason why Kafka remains an ambivalent writer for critics, (and especially for those who would seek to enrol his work to political ends), lays precisely in his constant withdrawal; “There was nothing he [Kafka] could have asserted, or in the name of which he could have spoken. What he was, which was nothing, only existed to the extent in which effective activity condemned him” (167). ‘Effective activity’ refers, contextually, to a certain form of Communism but more broadly to the rationalization or systematization intrinsic to any political program, political programs (or ideologies) as such, be they communist, liberal or libertarian. At least insofar as, as implied above, the political is taken to coincide with a certain metaphysics and morality of action and the consequent linking of freedom to work, (a factor common to communist, fascist and liberal political programs), and so to the labour of the progressive self-realization and achievement of the self, the autos or ipse (see Derrida 6-18). Be it via, for example, Marx’s account of human’s intrinsic ‘capacity for work’ (Arbeitskraft), Heidegger’s account of necessary existential (and ultimately communal) struggle (Kampf), or Weber’s diagnoses of the (Protestant/bourgeois) liberal project to realize human potentiality (see also Agamben Man without Content; François 1-64). Hence what is ‘evil’ in Kafka is not any particular deed but the deferral of deeds; his ambivalence or immorality in the eyes of certain critics being due to the question his writing poses to “the ultimate authority of action” (Bataille 153) and so to the space beyond action onto which it opens. What could this space of ‘worklessness’ or ‘unwork’ look like? This non-virile, anti-heroic space? This would not be a space of ‘inaction’, (a term still too dependent, albeit negatively, on action), but of ‘non-action’; of ‘non-productive’ or non-disclosive action. That is to say, and as a first attempt at definition, ‘action’ or ‘praxis’, if we can still call it that, which does not generate or bring to light any specific positive content. As a way to highlight the difficulties and pitfalls, (at least with certain traditions), which stand in the way of thinking such a space, we may highlight Giorgio Agamben’s comments on the widespread coincidence of a metaphysics of action with the determination of both the subject, its teleology and its orientation in the world:According to current opinion, all of man’s [sic] doing – that of the artist and the craftsman as well as that of the workman and the politician – is praxis – manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect. When we say that man has a productive status on earth, we mean, that the status of his dwelling on the earth is a practical one […] This productive doing now everywhere determines the status of man on earth – man understood as the living being (animal) that works (laborans), and, in work, produces himself (Man without Content 68; 70-71 original emphasis).Beyond or before practical being then, that is to say before and beyond the determination of the subject as essentially or intrinsically active and engaged, another space, another dwelling. Maybe nocturnal, certainly one with a different light to that of the day; one not gathered in and by the telos of the ipse or the turning of the autos, an interruption of labour, an unravelling. Remaining still, unravelling together (see Harrison In the absence).2.Kertész’s novel Sorstalanság was first published in his native Hungary in 1975. It has been translated into English twice, in 1992 as Fateless and in 2004 as Fatelessness. Fatelessness opens in Budapest on the day before György Köves’ – the novel’s fourteen year old narrator – father has to report for ‘labour service’. It goes on to recount Köves’ own detention and deportation and the year spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald and Zeitz. During this period Köves’ health declines, gradually at first and then rapidly to a moment of near death. He survives and the novel closes with his return to his home town. Köves is, as Kertész has put it in various interviews and as is made clear in the novel, a ‘non-Jewish Jew’; a non-practicing and non-believing Hungarian Jew from a largely assimilated family who neither reads nor speaks Hebrew or Yiddish. While Kertész has insisted that the novel is precisely that, a novel, a work of literature and not an autobiography, we should note that Kertész was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and Zeitz when fourteen.Not without reservations but for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only one theme in the novel; determination and agency, or what Kertész calls ‘determinacy’. Writing in his journal Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló) in May 1965 Kertész suggests ‘Novel of Fatelessness’ as a possible title for his work and then reflects on what he means by ‘fate’, the entry is worth quoting at length.The external determinacy, the stigma which constrains our life in a situation, an absurdity, in the given totalitarianism, thwarts us; thus, when we live out the determinacy which is doled out to us as a reality, instead of the necessity which stems from our own (relative) freedom – that is what I call fatelessness.What is essential is that our determinacy should always be in conflict with our natural views and inclinations; that is how fatelessness manifests itself in a chemically pure state. The two possible modes of protection: we transform into our determinacy (Kafka’s centipede), voluntarily so to say, and I that way attempt to assimilate our determinacy to our fate; or else we rebel against it, and so fall victim to our determinacy. Neither of these is a true solution, for in both cases we are obliged to perceive our determinacy […] as reality, whilst the determining force, that absurd power, in a way triumphs over us: it gives us a name and turns us into an object, even though we were born for other things.The dilemma of my ‘Muslim’ [Köves]: How can he construct a fate out of his own determinacy? (Galley Boat-Log 98 original emphasis).The dilemma of determinacy then; how can Köves, who is both determined by and superfluous to the Nazi regime, to wider Hungarian society, to his neighbours and to his family, gain some kind of control over his existence? Throughout Fatelessness people prove repeatedly unable to control their destinies, be it Köves himself, his father, his stepmother, his uncles, his friends from the oil refinery, or even Bandi Citrom, Köves’ mentor in the camps. The case of the ‘Expert’ provides a telescoped example. First appearing when Köves and his friends are arrested the ‘Expert’ is an imposing figure, well dressed, fluent in German and the director of a factory involved in the war effort (Fatelessness 50). Later at the brickworks, where the Jews who have been rounded up are being held prior to deportation, he appears more dishevelled and slightly less confident. Still, he takes the ‘audacious’ step of addressing a German officer directly (and receives some placatory ‘advice’ as his reward) (68-69). By the time the group arrives at the camp Köves has difficulty recognising him and without a word of protest, the ‘Expert’ does not pass the initial selection (88).Köves displays no such initiative with regard to his situation. He is reactive or passive, never active. For Köves events unfold as a series of situations and circumstances which are, he tells himself, essentially reasonable and to which he has to adapt and conform so that he may get on. Nothing more than “given situations with the new givens inherent in them” (259), as he explains near the end of the novel. As Köves' identity papers testify, his life and its continuation are the effect of arbitrary sets of circumstances which he is compelled to live through; “I am not alive on my own account but benefiting the war effort in the manufacturing industry” (29). In his Nobel lecture Kertész described Köves' situation:the hero of my novel does not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his time nor his language, not even his own person, is really his. He doesn’t remember; he exists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity, and cannot shake off the painful details. Instead of a spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he has to live through everything, which is oppressive and offers little variety, like life itself (Heureka! no pagination).Without any wilful or effective action on the part of the narrator and with only ‘the dreary trap of linearity’ where one would expect drama, plot, rationalization or stylization, Fatelessness can read as an arbitrarily punctuated series of waitings. Köves waiting for his father to leave, waiting in the customs shed, waiting at the brick works, waiting in train carriages, waiting on the ramp, waiting at roll call, waiting in the infirmary. Here is the first period of waiting described in the book, it is the day before his father’s departure and he is waiting for his father and stepmother as they go through the accounts at the family shop:I tried to be patient for a bit. Striving to think of Father, and more specifically the fact that he would be going tomorrow and, quite probably, I would not see him for a long time after that; but after a while I grew weary with that notion and then seeing as there was nothing else I could do for my father, I began to be bored. Even having to sit around became a drag, so simply for the sake of a change I stood up to take a drink of water from the tap. They said nothing. Later on, I also made my way to the back, between the planks, in order to pee. On returning I washed my hands at the rusty, tiled sink, then unpacked my morning snack from my school satchel, ate that, and finally took another drink from the tap. They still said nothing. I sat back in my place. After that, I got terribly bored for another absolute age (Fatelessness 9). It is interesting to consider exactly how this passage presages those that will come. Certainly this scene is an effect of the political context, his father and stepmother have to go through the books because of the summons to labour service and because of the racial laws on who may own and profit from a business. However, the specifically familial setting should not be overlooked, particularly when read alongside Kertész’s other novels where, as Madeleine Gustafsson writes, Communist dictatorship is “portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the camp – which in turn [...] is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of a joyless childhood” (no pagination, see, for example, Kertész Kaddish). Time to turn back to our question; does Fatelessness provide an answer to the ‘dilemma of determinacy’? We should think carefully before answering. As Julia Karolle suggests, the composition of the novel and our search for a logic within itreveal the abuses that reason must endure in order to create any story or history about the Holocaust […]. Ultimately Kertész challenges the reader not to make up for the lack of logic in Fatelessness, but rather to consider the nature of its absence (92 original emphasis).Still, with this point in mind, (and despite what has been said above), the novel does contain a scene in which Köves appears to affirm his existence.In many respects the scene is the culmination of the novel. The camps have been liberated and Köves has returned to Budapest. Finding his father and step-mother’s apartment occupied by strangers he calls on his Aunt and Uncle Fleischmann and Uncle Steiner. The discussion which follows would repay a slower reading, however again for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only a few short excerpts. Köves suggests that everyone took their ‘steps’ towards the events which have unfolded and that prediction and retrospection are false perspectives which give the illusion of order and inevitability whereas, in reality, “everything becomes clear only gradually, sequentially over time, step-by-step” (Fatelessness 249): “They [his Uncles] too had taken their own steps. They too […] had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later has squabbled about whether I should take the train or the suburban bus to Auschwitz” (260). Fleischmann and Steiner react angrily, claiming that such an understanding makes the ‘victims’ the ‘guilty ones’. Köves responds by saying that they do not understand him and asks they see that:It was impossible, they must try to understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent (260-261).Karolle (93-94) suggests that Köves' discussion with his uncles marks the moment where he accepts and affirms his existence and, from this point on begins to take control of and responsibility. Hence for Karolle the end of the novel depicts an ‘authentic’ moment of self-affirmation as Köves steps forward and refuses to participate in “the factual historical narrative of Auschwitz, to forget what he knows, and to be unequivocally categorized as a victim of history” (95). In distinction to Karolle, Adrienne Kertzer argues that Köves' moment of self-affirmation is, in fact, one of self-deception. Rather than acknowledging that it was “inexplicable luck” and a “series of random acts” (Kertzer 122) which saved his life or that his near death was due to an accident of birth, Köves asserts his personal freedom. Hence – and following István Deák – Kertzer suggests that we should read Fatelessness as a satire, ‘a modern Candide’. A satire on the hope of finding meaning, be it personal or metaphysical, in such experiences and events, the closing scenes of the novel being an ironic reflection on the “desperate desire to see […] life as meaningful” (Kertzer 122). So, while Köves convinces himself of his logic his uncles say to each other “‘Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Leave him be!’ And talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently” (Fatelessness 259). Which are we to choose then? The affirmation of agency (with Karolle) or the diagnosis of determination (with Kertzer)? Karolle and Kertzer give insightful analyses, (and ones which are certainly not limited to the passages quoted above), however it seems to me that they move too quickly to resolve the ‘dilemma’ presented by Köves, if not of Fatelessness as a whole. Still, we have a little time before having to name and decide Köves’ fate. Kertész’s use of the word ‘hero’ to describe Köves above – ‘the hero of my novel…’ – is, perhaps, more than a little ironic. As Kertész asks (in 1966), how can there be a hero, how can one be heroic, when one is one’s ‘determinacies’? What sense does it make to speak of heroic actions if “man [sic] is no more than his situation”? (Galley Boat-Log 99). Köves’ time, his language, his identity, none are his. There is no place, no hidden reservoir of freedom, from which way he set in motion any efficacious action. All resources have already been corrupted. From Kertész’s journal (in 1975): “The masters of thought and ideologies have ruined my thought processes” (Galley Boat-Log 104). As Lawrence Langer has argued, the grammar of heroics, along with the linked terms ‘virtue’, ‘dignity’, ‘resistance’ ‘survival’ and ‘liberation’, (and the wider narrative and moral economies which these terms indicate and activate), do not survive the events being described. Here the ‘dilemma of determinacy’ becomes the dilemma of how to think and value the human outside or after such a grammar. How to think and value the human beyond a grammar of action and so beyond, as Lars Iyer puts it, “the equation of work and freedom that characterizes the great discourses of political modernity” (155). If this is possible. If such a grammar and equation isn’t too all pervasive, if something of the human still remains outside their economy. It may well be that our ability to read Fatelessness depends in large part on what we are prepared to forsake (see Langar 195). How to think the subject and a politics in contretemps, beyond or after the choice between determination or autonomy, passive or active, inaction or action, immoral or virtuous – if only for a moment? Kertész wonders, (in 1966), ”perhaps there is something to be savaged all the same, a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail that may be a sign of the will to live and still awakens sympathy” (Galley Boat-Log 99). Something, perhaps, which remains to be salvaged from the grammar of humanism, something that would not be reducible to context, to ‘determinacies’, and that, at the same time, does not add up to a (resurrected) agent. ‘A tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail’. The press release announcing that Kertész had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature states that “For Kertész the spiritual dimension of man lies in his inability to adapt to life” (The Swedish Academy no pagination). Despite the difficulties presented by the somewhat over-determined term ‘spiritual’, this line strikes me as remarkably perspicuous. Like Melville’s Bartleby and Bataille’s Kafka before him, Kertész’s Köves’ existence, insofar as he exists, is made up by his non-action. That is to say, his existence is defined not by his actions or his inaction, (both of which are purely reactive and functional), but rather by his irreducibility to either. As commentators and critics have remarked, (and as the quotes given from the text above hopefully illustrate), Köves has an oddly formal and neutral ‘voice’. Köves’ blank, frequently equivocal tone may be read as a sign of his immaturity, his lack of understanding and his naivety. However I would suggest that before such factors, what characterizes Köves’ mode of address is its reticence to assert or disclose. Köves speaks, he speaks endlessly, but he says nothing or almost nothing - ‘to no avail and even a little incoherently’. Hence where Karolle seeks to recover an ‘intoned self-consciousness’ and Kertzer the repressed determining context, we may find Köves' address. Where Karolle’s and Kertzer’s approaches seek in some way to repair Köves words, to supplement them with either an agency to-come or an awareness of a context and, in doing so, pull his words fully into the light, Köves, it seems to me, remains elusive. His existence, insofar as we may speak of it, lies in his ‘inability to adapt to life’. His reserves are not composed of hidden or recoverable sources of agency but in his equivocality, in the way he takes leave of and remains aside from the very terms of the dilemma. It is as if with no resources of his own, he has an echo existence. As if still remaining itself where a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail.3.Is this it? Is this what we are to be left with in a ‘political minimalism’? It would seem more resignation or failure, turning away or quietism, the conceit of a beautiful soul, than any type of recognisable politics. On one level this is correct, however any such suspension or withdrawal, this moment of stillness where we are, is only ever a moment. However it is a moment which indicates a certain irreducibility and as such is, I believe, of great significance. Great significance, (or better ‘signifyingness’), even though – and precisely because – it is in itself without value. Being outside efficacy, labour or production, being outside economisation as such, it resides only in its inability to be integrated. What purpose does it serve? None. Or, perhaps, none other than demonstrating the irreducibility of a life, of a singular existence, to any discourse, narrative, identity or ideology, insofar as such structures, in their attempt to comprehend (or apprehend) the existent and put it to use always and violently fall short. As Theodor Adorno wrote;It is this passing-on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner grasped the particular than it reduces it to a thought-station, and finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death (74 emphasis added).This moment of stillness then, of declining and remaining aside, represents, for me, the anarchical and all but silent condition of possibility for all political strategy as such (see Harrison, Corporeal Remains). A condition of possibility which all political strategy carries within itself, more or less well, more or less consciously, as a memory of the finite and corporeal nature of existence. A memory which may always and eventually come to protest against the strategy itself. Strategy itself as strategy; as command, as a calculated and calculating order. And so, and we should be clear about this, such a remaining still is a demonstration.A demonstration not unlike, for example, that of the general anonymous population in José Saramago’s remarkable novel Seeing, who ‘act’ more forcefully through non-action than any through any ends-directed action. A demonstration of the kind which Agamben writes about after those in Tiananmen Square in 1989:The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be the struggle for control of the state, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity) […] [who] cannot form a societas because they do not poses any identity to vindicate or bond of belonging for which to seek recognition (Coming Community 85-67; original emphasis).A demonstration like that which sounds through Köves when his health fails in the camps and he finds himself being wheeled on a handcart taken for dead;a snatch of speech that I was barely able to make out came to my attention, and in that hoarse whispering I recognized even less readily the voice that has once – I could not help recollecting – been so strident: ‘I p … pro … test,’ it muttered” (Fatelessness 187 ellipses in original).The inmate pushing the cart stops and pulls him up by the shoulders, asking with astonishment “Was? Du willst noch leben? [What? You still want to live?] […] and right then I found it odd, since it could not have been warranted and, on the whole, was fairly irrational (187).AcknowledgmentsMy sincere thanks to the editors of this special issue, David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, for their interest, encouragement and patience. Thanks also to Sadie, especially for her comments on the final section. ReferencesAdorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso, 1974.Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.———. The Man without Content. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1999.Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. New York: Columbia U P, 2005.Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. London: Marion Boyars, 1985.Clarke, Timothy. The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Late Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2005.Deák, István. "Stranger in Hell." New York Review of Books 23 Sep. 2003: 65-68.Derrida, Jacques. Rogues. 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