Description
For Nazi Germany, the ghetto was a conceptual tool used to facilitate social and political exclusion and further their anti-Jewish campaign. For the Jews who lived in them, the ghettos became the center of their lives-even though they were also sites of immense suffering.
Combining thorough historical research with an interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship between space and violence, Violent Space provides a unique insight into the history and the socio-spatial topography of the Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Warsaw (1939-1943). Using rare archival materials and firsthand accounts, many of which have never been translated into English, Anja Nowak traces out the trauma that the space of the ghetto inflicted on its Jewish inhabitants, and how it alienated, disoriented, and harmed them.
While the physical ghetto-its buildings, boundaries, and streets-has been reabsorbed and redefined by modern-day Warsaw's urban structure, Violent Space shows us that its presence still lingers in the narratives of those who were forced into this first phase of the Holocaust.
Author: Anja Nowak
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 11/07/2023
Pages: 362
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.81d
ISBN13: 9780253067432
ISBN10: 025306743X
BISAC Categories:
- History | Modern | 20th Century | Holocaust
- History | Jewish | General
- History | Europe | Poland
About the Author
Anja Nowak is Lecturer in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is author of a German monograph on Theodor W. Adorno, Elemente einer Ästhetik des Theatralen in Adornos Ästhetischer Theorie. She is editor (with Bożena Karwowska) of The More I Know, The Less I Understand: Young Researchers' Essays on Witnessing Auschwitz.