History of Nazi Germany

Beitrag in: Oliver Werner (Hrsg.), Mobilisierung im Nationalsozialismus. Institutionen und Regionen in der Kriegswirtschaft und der Verwaltung des ›Dritten Reiches‹ 1936 bis 1945 (Nationalsozialistische ›Volksgemeinschaft‹. Studien zu Konstruktion, gesellschaftlicher Wirkungsmacht und Erinnerung, Bd. 3), Paderborn 2013, S. 217-233.

Chapter 1-Introduction "There was no why in Auschwitz; only a was." (Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State) "There only remain 120,000 children of poor parents annually born. The question, therefore, is, how this number shall be reared and provided for." (Swift, "A Modest Proposal") Beginning this project, using the voice of an Auschwitz survivor, a Jewish woman from Poland, and the satirical voice of Jonathan Swift to make the case that because of the language of enlightened reason and positivist science, something as ludicrous as Swift's answer to the overcrowding and domestic horror of seventeenth-century Ireland could have found its fruition in the death camps and laboratories of the Third Reich of Adolph Hitler. The endgame of the enlightenment that Swift parodies ended with the greatest horror of history-the Holocaust. This project will attempt to find answers to what the Jewish survivor mentions in the opening epigram to understand that any attempt at finding the "why" to the Holocaust in any form of art is impossible. However, if scholars, filmmakers, and writers look for the "was," then a more complete and cognizant type of Holocaust representation may be possible.

Beitrag in: Oliver Werner (Hrsg.), Mobilisierung im Nationalsozialismus. Institutionen und Regionen in der Kriegswirtschaft und der Verwaltung des ›Dritten Reiches‹ 1936 bis 1945 (Nationalsozialistische ›Volksgemeinschaft‹. Studien zu Konstruktion, gesellschaftlicher Wirkungsmacht und Erinnerung, Bd. 3), Paderborn 2013, S. 9-26.