Dissertation Topic

The City and the Nazi Concentration Camps: Reading (In)Human Spaces

In my dissertation, I investigate parallels, whether fictitious, perceived or remembered, between the Nazi system of concentration camps and human built environment as filtered through the survivors’ traumatic memory of the camps. By building on existing, albeit unsystematic, research by historians and art historians on the planning and architecture of Nazi concentration camps in relationship to National Socialist city planning and architecture, I analyze the uses and effects of these parallels in French literature and film produced by former political deportees. I further explore their role in establishing a distinctive relationship between reader and text in testimonial literature, as well as their role in shaping the postwar memory of the camps.