Dominic Williams

Joanne Pettitt

Sarah M. Cushman

This handbook examines Auschwitz-Birkenau as both a site and a symbol of Nazi genocide. Scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives consider Auschwitz’s history by engaging with Holocaust historiography and its place in Holocaust memory and representation, illustrating their mutual influence. The chapters bring new insights to topics that other studies of Auschwitz have explored before, such as the Sonderkommando, the Czech family camp, and literary representations of Auschwitz. Other chapters cover recent developments and more neglected areas, such as the experience and memory of Romani prisoners, the fate of Soviet prisoners of war, and Auschwitz’s presence on social media. The handbook also responds to a number of recent trends and new paradigms in Holocaust Studies, including contributions from the fields of Environmental Studies, Spatial Studies, and Gender Studies. As a crucial overview of the topic of Auschwitz-Birkenau and an introduction to its most recent and fruitful scholarly approaches, this handbook will be a valuable resource for undergraduates from second year and up, as well as for graduate students and researchers seeking a survey of the field.

The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau

Fabio A. Durão

For decades, the study of literary and philosophical modernism concerned solitary figures like the flâneur, the exile, and the lonely genius, but recently the group formations that fostered modernist movements have emerged into view. The essays in Modernist Group Dynamics: The Poetics and Politics of Friendship pursue this new direction in modernist scholarship, exploring the ways artists and intellectuals worked in concert and in conflict. Placing group formations, with all their promises and problems, at the centre of our study allows the contributors—scholars from around the world—to reconsider some of the best-known figures of European modernism, to analyze collaborations across national boundaries, and to recover modernist groups in unexpected contexts like the so-called Third World.

The Politics and Poetics of Friendship

Modernist Group Dynamics

A comprehensive and easy-to-use dictionary for each item listing its romaji (phonetic English) and kanji spellings and its English equivalent.

A Dictionary of Japanese Financial Terms

Nicholas Chare

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz

Matters of Testimony

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. They have been central to a number of key topics in post-war debates about the Shoah: collaboration, moral compromise and survival, resistance, representation, and the possibility of bearing witness. Their testimony however has mostly met with a reluctance to engage in depth with it. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olère and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah.

Testimonies, Histories, Representations

The Auschwitz Sonderkommando

The Sonderkommando—the “special squad” of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau—comprise one of the most fascinating and troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts of Holocaust resistance. This interdisciplinary collection assembles careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented—by themselves and by others—both during and after the Holocaust.

Dominic Williams

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