Geographies of the Holocaust

Description

Uncovering spatial patterns in Holocaust events

This book explores the geographies of the Holocaust at every scale of human experience, from the European continent to the experiences of individual human bodies. Built on six innovative case studies, it brings together historians and geographers to interrogate the places and spaces of the genocide. The cases encompass the landscapes of particular places (the killing zones in the East, deportations from sites in Italy, the camps of Auschwitz, the ghettos of Budapest) and the intimate spaces of bodies on evacuation marches. Geographies of the Holocaust puts forward models and a research agenda for different ways of visualizing and thinking about the Holocaust by examining the spaces and places where it was enacted and experienced.

1. Geographies of the Holocaust / Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Tim Cole
2. Mapping the SS Concentration Camps / Anne Kelly Knowles and Paul B. Jaskot, with Benjamin Perry Blackshear, Michael De Groot, and Alexander Yule
3. Retracing the "Hunt for Jews": A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy / Alberto Giordano and Anna Holian
4. Killing on the Ground and in the Mind: The Spatialities of Genocide in the East / Waitman W. Beorn, with Anne Kelly Knowles
5. Bringing the Ghetto to the Jew: The Shifting Geography of the Budapest Ghetto / Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano
6. Visualizing the Archive: Building at Auschwitz as a Geographic Problem / Paul B. Jaskot, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Chester Harvey, with Benjamin Perry Blackshear
7. From the Camp to the Road: Representing the Evacuations from Auschwitz, January 1945 / Simone Gigliotti, Marc J. Masurovsky, and Erik Steiner
8. Afterword / Paul B. Jaskot and Tim Cole
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Human Geography
• Atlases
• 20th Century
• Modern
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• The Holocaust
• Modern history
• Regional geography
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 19 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253012319
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 16 Mo

Extrait

GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HOLOCAUST
THE SPATIAL HUMANITIES David J. Bodenhamer John Corrigan Trevor M. Harris editors
Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place Edited by Julia Hallam and Les Roberts
The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship Edited by David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris
Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History Edited by Ian N. Gregory and Alistair Geddes
Troubled Geographies: A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland Ian N. Gregory, Niall A. Cunningham, C. D. Lloyd, Ian G. Shuttleworth, and Paul S. Ell
GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HOLOCAUST
Edited by ANNE KELLY KNOWLES TIM COLE ALBERTO GIORDANO
Cover and chapter-opening graphics by Erik B. Steiner
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East Tenth Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2014 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in Korea
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geographies of the Holocaust / edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano.
pages cm.-(The spatial humanities)
ISBN 978-0-253-01211-1 (hard-back)-ISBN 978-0-253-01231-9 (eb) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-History-Case studies. 2. Historical geography-Europe-Case studies. 3. World War, 1939-1945-Atrocities-Case studies. I. Knowles, Anne Kelly, editor of compilation.
D804.348.G46 2014 940.53 18-dc23
2013046355
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
For our families
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Geographies of the Holocaust Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Tim Cole
2. Mapping the SS Concentration Camps Anne Kelly Knowles and Paul B. Jaskot, with Benjamin Perry Blackshear, Michael De Groot, and Alexander Yule
3. Retracing the Hunt for Jews : A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy Alberto Giordano and Anna Holian
4. Killing on the Ground and in the Mind: The Spatialities of Genocide in the East Waitman Wade Beorn, with Anne Kelly Knowles
5. Bringing the Ghetto to the Jew: Spatialities of Ghettoization in Budapest Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano
6. Visualizing the Archive: Building at Auschwitz as a Geographic Problem Paul B. Jaskot, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Chester Harvey, with Benjamin Perry Blackshear
7. From the Camp to the Road: Representing the Evacuations from Auschwitz, January 1945 Simone Gigliotti, Marc J. Masurovsky, and Erik B. Steiner
8. Afterword Paul B. Jaskot and Tim Cole
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
We owe much to a number of people at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, particularly Robert Ehrenreich, Director of University Programs, and Michael Haley Goldman, Director of Global Classroom and Evaluation. Center staff facilitated our meetings at the Museum-starting with the 2007 summer research workshop that brought us together for the first time-and they provided data and critical feedback and made us feel welcome. Vital funding for this project was provided by National Science Foundation Award nos. 0820487 and 0820501. At NSF, we thank in particular program officers Tom Baerwald and Antoinette Winklerprins for their patient assistance and for their support for an unusual interdisciplinary project that stretched the bounds of GIScience.
Each of us has benefited from the support of our home institutions in various ways since we began working together. We would like to thank especially the Geography Department at Texas State University, in particular Phil Suckling, Chair of the department (2005-2013), for his strong support, and Jessica Schneider, who administered the NSF grant. At Middlebury College, Franci Farnsworth helped Anne navigate federal funding, and department coordinators Ann McLean and Susan Perkins made things run smoothly. Our work has also been supported by individual research and travel grants from Texas State University; Middlebury College; DePaul University College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences; Victoria University, Wellington; and the University of Bristol. Funding for publishing in full color was generously provided by the Stanford Spatial History Lab; the Department of Geography at Texas State University; and Middlebury College. Funding for the index and cover design was provided by the DePaul University Research Council.
Scholars at the annual conferences of Lessons and Legacies, the Social Science History Association, the Association of American Geographers, and the American Historical Association have offered extremely helpful comments and criticisms on our work as it developed. Each of our projects benefited as well from responses to our presentations at various universities and other institutions. Our students contributed to this project by honing our thinking about what it means to study the geographies of the Holocaust and how we can most effectively convey what we have learned in this project. Thanks to all the staff at Indiana University Press, particularly project manager Darja Malcolm-Clarke, copy editor Annette Wenda, designer Jamison Cockerham, Assistant Sponsoring Editor Jenna Lynn Whittaker, and Editor-in-Chief Robert Sloan. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for Indiana University Press for their critiques.
Finally, we thank our partners, spouses, children, and all the friends who have shared our excitement and endured our absence while this project was taking shape. Scholarship is never a solitary venture; it can t be done without the love and support of those who know us best. To all of them, our deepest thanks.
GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HOLOCAUST
1
Geographies of the Holocaust
Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Tim Cole
THE HOLOCAUST DESTROYED COMMUNITIES, DISPLACED millions of people from their homes, and created new kinds of places where prisoners were concentrated, exploited as labor, and put to death in service of the Third Reich s goal to create a racially pure German empire. We see the Holocaust as a profoundly geographical phenomenon, though few scholars have analyzed it from that perspective. 1 We hope this book will change that by demonstrating how much insight and understanding one can gain by asking spatial questions and employing spatial methods to investigate even the most familiar subjects in the history of the Holocaust.
At its most fundamental, a geographical approach to the Holocaust starts with questions of where . Print atlases of the Holocaust, for example, have focused on the location of major concentration camps and Jewish ghettos, the routes of train lines used to transport prisoners to the camps, and the journeys of individual survivors, such as Primo Levi s path as he sought his way home after being liberated from Auschwitz. 2 Other examples include maps of where people were arrested, where they were sent, where they were murdered. The facts of location are basic to understanding any historical event. In the case of the Holocaust, such facts are exceedingly voluminous, because the Nazis kept detailed records of their operations and because many people who were caught up in the events as victims or bystanders recorded where their experiences took place.
Although location is the crucial substrate of the many geographies of the Holocaust, it is just one of the many spatial facets of Holocaust history. Our geographical studies have mainly focused on the spaces and places that people created, occupied, passed through, and endured-the material landscapes that were essential to the implementation of the Holocaust and inseparable from people s experience of it. While other scholars are currently theorizing the spaces and places of victimization in the Holocaust-work that we see as strongly complementary to our project 3 -we have sought to understand them by making them more visible. This is why choosing the scales of analysis was the first step in our project.
Scale, 4 one of the overarching geographical concepts that bind together our diverse case studies, is a key concept in human and physical geography, 5 where it is investigated with qualitative and quantitative methods. In our work, scale is operationalized primarily as a conceptual device, a way of framing particular aspects of the physical and social world in order to render its structure and meaning intelligible. In anchoring our perspective in this understanding of scale, we are aware that the term has a multitude of meanings for scholars today, particularly in geography, and that it has become much more than a quantitative construct, such as the scale of a map. Some regard scale as the material product of political, social, and economic processes: others debate its ontological status-does scale really exist?-or its metaphorical meanings. 6 For us, scale has great value as an analytical framework, as we hope the case studies in this book will demonstrate.
At what scale could one perceive, describe, and analyze the expansion of the SS concentration camp system? Ghettoization in Budapest? The mass murder of civilians