Tracing Topographies: Revisiting the Concentration Camps Seventy Years after the Liberation of Auschwitz

Joanne Pettitt, Vered Weiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351789653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Seventy years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, the contributions collected in this volume each attempt, in various ways and from various perspectives, to trace the relationship between Nazi-occupied spaces and Holocaust memory, considering the multitude of ways in which the passing of time impacts upon, or shapes, cultural constructions of space.

Accordingly, this volume does not consider topographies merely in relation to geographical landscapes but, rather, as markers of allusions and connotations that must be properly eked out. Since space and time are intertwined, if not, in fact, one and the same, an investigation of the spaces – the locations of horror – in relation to the passing of time might provide some manner of comprehension of one of the most troubling moments in human history. It is with this understanding of space, as fluid sites of memory that the contributors of this volume engage: these are the kind of shifting topographies that we are seeking to trace. This book was originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

Life in space, space in life: Nazi topographies, geographical imaginations, and Lebensraum

Paolo Giaccaria^a and Claudio Minca^b

^aDepartment of Economics, Social Studies Applied Mathematics and Statistics, University of Turin, Turin, Italy; ^bHuman Geography Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the pivotal role the notion of Lebensraum played within the Nazi spatial mindscape. Tracing the complex and contradictory genealogies of Lebensraum, we note how geographers’ engagement with Geopolitik has only made modest reference to the role Lebensraum played in shaping the biopolitical and genocidal machinery implemented by Hitlerism and its followers. Moreover, most of this literature highlights a clear discontinuity between the Lebensraum concept formulated by German academic geographers and the Nazis respectively. Rather than emphasizing the divide between German Geopolitik and Nazi biopolitics, we claim that the Third Reich incorporated Lebensraum by merging its duplicitous meaning, as living/vital space and as life-world. Equality important were both Nazi ‘functionalist’ understandings of Lebensraum as well as its ontological merging of Lebens and Raum in which the racialised German nation is conceived as a spatial organism whose expansion is the essential expression of life. As such, we approach the Nazi Lebensraum grand imagery as a truly geo-bio-political dispositif, in which life and space matched with no gap, no residues. The attempted realisation of this perfect coincidence, we argue, contributed in a crucial way to produce spaces of eviction and displacement and, ultimately, genocide, and annihilation.

The Nazi Weltanschauung, the Nazi “worldview,” was deeply entangled with spatiality and spatial concepts,¹ among which Lebensraum – that is, “living” but also “vital” space – played a particularly significant role. The Third Reich’s plans for racial and ethnic reordering of European space in fact entailed endless classifications of groups and individuals and a series of subsequent (mostly forced) movements in order to fit the population distribution into a stable, hierarchical, racial order that was at the same time biopolitical and geopolitical in nature. While the Nazi grand geographies found their key localization and materialization in the Nazi “concentrationary archipelago” of camps, they entailed a broader set of topographies spanning from the territorial to the Final Solution, from early deportation in 1938 to ghettoization, from mass shooting in Ukraine and Belarus during Operation Barbarossa to the Death Marches in the last weeks of war. All these genocidal moments were topographical, not only in the trivial sense that they happened “somewhere”;² they were intrinsically topographical because space was, at the same time, an objective and a rationale for such practices “to take place.” The Holocaust should then be contextualized within the Nazi search for territorial expansion, their quest for land to respond to the needs of a Volk ohne Raum, a “people with no space,” to recall the title of an influential fiction book penned in 1926 by Völkish author Hans Grimm.³ Space was also a rationale for genocide: spatial segregation in ghettoes and camps “naturally” increased mortality,⁴ they were planned and managed and often integrated with the surrounding cities and regions,⁵ the related forced mobilities accurately routinized,⁶ and turned into additional occasions for torture and murder,⁷ the forests to perform and hide mass shooting.⁸

However, these “topographical imaginations” were at work in German culture decades before the rise of the Third Reich, inside and outside of academic geography, including cognate disciplines⁹ and in popular discourse,¹⁰ spreading a geographical culture that spanned from maps to comics, from propaganda to fiction.¹¹ Lebensraum, conceived by the Nazi ideologues as a specialized Weltanschauung focused on Eastern Europe, together with its “mindscapes,”¹² its literary and artistic imaginations,¹³ and its academic expertise,¹⁴ may thus be a fruitful spatial metaphor to investigate in order to gain new insights into those topographical imaginations that operated as “conditions of possibility” for the genocidal practices implemented by the Third Reich. This article thus focuses on the pivotal role played by the notion of Lebensraum within the Nazi spatial mindscape, and aims at repositioning this notion at the very heart of Hitler’s geographies of ordering, forced eviction, and, eventually, extermination.

The idea of Lebensraum has been often presented by academic geographers¹⁵ and scholars of cognate disciplines¹⁶ as key to understanding the relationship between Nazism and German Geopolitik. From Friedrich Ratzel’s path-breaking definition, to Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler’s popular use of the term, passing through Rudolf Kjellen and Karl Haushofer’s different readings of Geopolitik, the concept of Lebensraum is marked by complex and contradictory genealogies that deserve close investigation.¹⁷ Lebensraum, in the context of the German Geopolitik, usually referred to the idea of living space vital to the body of the German Volk, “the German people” understood in both socio-cultural and racial terms. Here, we suggest to approach the Lebensraum concept as a field of tensions between life and space, and to study its Nazi understanding as an ambivalent yet unique field in which a functionalistic geopolitical tradition coexisted with a millennial and ontological understanding of both life and space. From this perspective, the Nazi Lebensraum grand imagery may be read as a geo-bio-political ideology, perhaps even a spatial ontology,¹⁸ according to which life and space should have been made to match.¹⁹ The attempted realization of this perfect coincidence on the part of Nazi ideologues and high ranks, we conclude, contributed in a crucial way to produce spaces of eviction and displacement and, ultimately, genocide and annihilation.

The article is organized into three sections. First, we discuss the genealogy of Lebensraum in reference to the discipline of Geography and to German colonial and imperial imaginations and practices. The second section is accordingly dedicated to the “functionalist” understanding of Lebensraum that consolidated in the intellectual climate of the Weimar Republic: Lebensraum as an actual living/vital space to secure the survival and the prosperity of the German people. In this sense, Hitler’s understanding of Lebensraum seemed entirely in line with a tradition that, on the one hand, appropriates Ratzel’s and Haushofer’s geographical thought – although rather problematically – as well as the actual geographies of the Wilhelmine colonial practice together with the main tenets of the longstanding Ostforschung (literally, research on the East); on the other hand, this understanding of Lebensraum responds to the topographic calculative rationalities of the Nazi state.²⁰ At the same time, as discussed in the third section, Lebensraum was a key expression of Nazi racialized spatial imaginations and the product of an essentially ontological relationship between life and space.²¹

This is why here we propose to move beyond the more conventional philological and historical accounts that highlight the sharp distinction between early interpretations of Lebensraum and its successive “application” by the Nazi regime, pervaded by biological racism.²² What this article tries to show is that “the functional” and “the ontological” understandings of Lebensraum converged in the Third Reich grand geographical imaginations, presenting a rather messy but powerful combination of diverse values, metaphors, meanings, and practices. This makes it difficult if not impossible to operate a distinction between life and space, between biopolitics and geopolitics, since the Third Reich incorporated Lebensraum by merging its duplicitous meaning, as living/vital space and as life-world.

Lebensraum, geography, colonialism

It has been fully acknowledged by now that geographers played a role in inspiring Nazi spatial plans and imaginations,²³ within which the emphasis placed on Lebensraum by the Geopolitik project²⁴ coexisted with visions of order and geometry based on “central place theory,” both part of Hitler’s grand imperialist projections.²⁵ In the English-speaking world, popular and middlebrow policy narratives have traditionally depicted geographer Karl Haushofer as the “evil genius” of Hitlerism.²⁶ This somewhat exaggerated emphasis on Haushofer’s role in the Nazi hierarchy persisted well after the end of the Second World War and projected a stigma of sorts on German Geopolitik and, more broadly, on geopolitics.²⁷ A critical reassessment of German political geography and geopolitics only started in the 1980s thanks to the efforts of a group of German geographers²⁸ and geographer Mark Bassin.²⁹ The relationship between geography and Nazism – and accordingly the concept of Lebensraum – was at the core of a new important debate about a decade later, with new contributions from both historians³⁰ and geographers.³¹ The “Geopolitik debate” of those years was particularly concerned with the presumed affinity (and continuity) between Ratzel’s and Haushofer’s geographies, and this latter’s influence on Rudolf Hess’s and Hitler’s spatial formulations of politics and policy.

Arguably, most of this literature highlights clear elements of discontinuity in how Lebensraum was formulated by German academic geographers and the Nazis respectively, somehow reflecting the fundamental “race contra space” perspective as presented by Bassin in his key 1987 article with the same title.³² Bassin, in fact, places particular emphasis on Ratzel’s environmental determinism and on how this vision of the “man-environment” relationship,”³³ shared also by Haushofer, was irreconcilable with the Nazi obsessions with race:

… the National Socialists were quite willing to acknowledge the connection of man with the environment, for this was entirely in line with the völkish emphasis on the rootedness of the Volk in the natural landscape. However, the suggestion that this relationship might be subject to inflexible laws, and involves human s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Section 1: Geographies of the Holocaust
• Section 2: Remembering and experiencing the concentration camps in the present day
• Section 3: Filmic topographies
• Section 4: Literary topographies
• Afterword
• Index