Journal articles on the topic 'Buchenwald Concentration Camp'

The article focuses on death zones in concentration camps and those that in themselves were purely death camps. In 1944–1945, in the concentration camp system, these places were spaces of dying, where emaciated and sick prisoners were locked away, thus condemning them to death. Although mass murders were also committed in these places, the majority of the inmates died due to the inaction of camp personnel, who out of their passivity made yet another way of killing prisoners deemed “useless”. The first section of the paper presents the findings of historians, and strives to show on their basis when and why death camps and death zones appeared, how they functioned, and where they were located. In the second part the focus is on a specific death zone: the Little Camp at Buchenwald. This fragment of the article gives the floor above all to former prisoners of this place, as well as inmates of the main camp at Buchenwald who were able to observe from behind the barbed wire the fate of those consigned to the Little Camp.

Abstract Can The Merchant of Venice be performed in Germany after the Holocaust, and if so, how? Is the claim that the play is a touchstone for German-Jewish relations, with a philosemitic tradition – and therefore eligible to be performed today – verifiable? The article begins by briefly surveying this tradition from the Jewish emancipation in the mideighteenth century, which, with a few relapses, continued – especially in productions directed by Jews and/or with Jewish actors in the role of Shylock – until the rise of the Nazi regime, to be resumed after the Second World War. The main part analyses a test case, staged by the Israeli director Hanan Snir at the Weimar National Theatre (1995), and intended rhetorically to avenge the Holocaust on the German audience: Merchant as a viciously antisemitic play with in a play, directed by SS personnel in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp with eventually murdered Jewish inmates compelled to play the Jewish parts.

Can The Merchant of Venice be performed in Germany after the Holocaust, and if so, how? Is the claim that the play is a touchstone for German-Jewish relations, with a philosemitic tradition – and therefore eligible to be performed today – verifiable? The article begins by briefly surveying this tradition from the Jewish emancipation in the mid-eighteenth century, which, with a few relapses, continued – especially in productions directed by Jews and/or with Jewish actors in the role of Shylock – until the rise of the Nazi regime, to be resumed after the Second World War. The main part analyses a test case, staged by the Israeli director Hanan Snir at the Weimar National Theatre (1995), and intended rhetorically to avenge the Holocaust on the German audience: Merchant as a viciously antisemitic play-within-a-play, directed by SS personnel in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp with eventually murdered Jewish inmates compelled to play the Jewish parts.

This article utilises the theoretical perspectives of the forensic turn to further expand our historical understandings and interpretations of the events of the Holocaust. More specifically, it applies a theory of the materialities of dead bodies to historically reconstruct and reinterpret the death march from Buchenwald to Dachau from 7 to 28 April 1945. It focuses on dead bodies as ‘evidence’, but explores how the evidential meanings of corpses along the death-march route evolved and changed during the march itself and in the aftermath of discovery by approaching American military forces. While drawing on theories of the evidential use of dead bodies, it remains firmly grounded in empirical historical research based on archival sources. The archives at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp contain eyewitness accounts and post-war trial testimony that enable a deeply contextualised ‘microhistory’ of the geography, movements, perpetrators, victims and events along this specific death march in April and May 1945. This ‘thick description’ provides the necessary context for a theoretical reading of the changing evidential meanings of dead bodies as the death march wove its way from Buchenwald to Dachau and the war and the Holocaust drew to an end.

“From the ovens we rise with our fists in the air. Now is the time.” My grandfather, Dovid Zisman, was a Yiddish playwright and poet, writing and performing while in the Łódz´ Ghetto and Buchenwald concentration camp. Poetry, song, and performance were his way to speak the unspeakable. A messy assemblage of theories, memoirs, verses, images, and recordings reveal what we can inherit through writing as resistance and through the creative mappings of space and time.

Il y a soixante-quinze ans, André Marie retrouvait la liberté après avoir survécu seize mois en camp de concentration. Homme d’État ayant fortement marqué la vie politique locale et nationale de 1923 à 1974, il était aussi l’auteur d’oeuvres littéraires, dont certaines sont encore inédites. Pour les commémorations de la libération des camps nazis, les Éditions des Falaises font paraître ses Poèmes de Buchenwald. C’est l’occasion de resituer l’héritage de l’un des hommes politiques les plus en vue et influents de la IVe République.

This study is an analysis of Danielle Steel work entitled In His Father's Footsteps that has a historical setting before the World War II, when the Buchenwald concentration camp operated until the three generations of family's life after being liberated from Buchenwald and starting life as an immigrant which is settling in America. This data is the main data source that discusses how Danielle Steel composes the storyline and presents conditions in it. The nature of this study is literary analysis with descriptive qualitative approach to answer the problems posed. In completing the problem formulation in this study, the type of plot using Russell's (1991) theory in the kind of episode plot types. The plot structure using DiYanni's (2006) theory which is classified into exposition, complication, climax, falling action, and resolution. The results of this study discuss how Danielle Steel arranges the plot in a progressive manner as well as the storyline that shows.

In 1949, French intellectual David Rousset publicly called on Nazi camp survivors to bear witness to the existence of a “concentration camp universe” in the Soviet Union. Rousset, a former Buchenwald internee and an influential author, demanded that his fellow survivors identify in unqualified terms with the suffering of Soviet prisoners. Even as he colluded with Cold War governmental agencies, Rousset claimed that the imperative to oppose concentration camps existed “beyond” political or ideological commitments. This essay analyzes the arguments about suffering, politics, and memory made by Rousset and his contemporary critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre. It responds to Rousset's admirers who have overlooked distinctive aspects of his project: his rhetoric of apoliticism, his demand for complete identification with victims, his exclusive interest in limit-case abjection as opposed to injustice in general, his interpretation of the Nazi camps that centered on forced labor rather than on genocide, and his avoidance of the language of human rights.

An analysis of the mnemonic mechanisms at work in the narrative of the concentration camp experience, based on the case of Robert Antelme. This survivor of the Buchenwald camp gave a first spoken version of what was to become his major work, l’Espèce humaine (The Human Species), to his friend Dionys Mascolo. Mascolo’s testimony concerning the narrative that was told to him and his reception, some time later, of the written narrative (with the transition between the two versions marked by forgetting), question the notion of loss — in particular, the loss of a “0” text which is the text of death. This postulate allows us to explore the notion of the ineffable and to reveal its cultural implications; in other words, to approach the concept of survival as a narrative category.

Abstract The Bauhaus not only had the period of its existence in common with the Weimar Republic, but also many of its internal social, cultural and political contradictions. These contradictions become clear through the biographies of two Bauhaus graduates, Franz Ehrlich (1907 –1984) and Fritz Ertl (1908 –1982), who both studied with Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus Dessau. After graduating, Ehrlich joined the KPD and worked with Walter Gropius and Hans Poelzig. In 1934, he was arrested as a resistance fighter and imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the Second World War, he became one of the most distinguished architects and furniture designers in the GDR and worked for the State Security. He died in 1984. Ertl returned to his father’s construction company in Linz after receiving his diploma. In 1938 he joined the NSDAP and the SS and was involved in the planning of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from 1940 onwards. After the end of the war, he worked again as an architect and building contractor in Linz. In 1972 he was charged and acquitted in the Vienna Auschwitz Trial. He died in 1982.

AbstractAlthough Scandinavian neuroscience has a proud history, its status during the Nazi era has been overlooked. In fact, prominent neuroscientists in German-occupied Denmark and Norway, as well as in neutral Sweden, were directly affected. Mogens Fog, Poul Thygesen (Denmark) and Haakon Sæthre (Norway) were resistance fighters, tortured by the Gestapo: Thygesen was imprisoned in concentration camps and Sæthre executed. Jan Jansen (Norway), another neuroscientist resistor, escaped to Sweden, returning under disguise to continue fighting. Fritz Buchthal (Denmark) was one of almost 8000 Jews escaping deportation by fleeing from Copenhagen to Sweden. In contrast, Carl Værnet (Denmark) became a collaborator, conducting inhuman experiments in Buchenwald concentration camp, and Herman Lundborg (Sweden) and Thorleif Østrem (Norway) advanced racial hygiene in order to maintain the “superior genetic pool of the Nordic race.” Compared to other Nazi-occupied countries, there was a high ratio of resistance fighters to collaborators and victims among the neuroscientists in Scandinavia.

On peut penser que le concept de « sale boulot » ait été conceptualisé par E. C. Hughes lors d’un séjour à Francfort en 1948. C’est en véritable moraliste que le sociologue américain s’exprime dans son Journal d’Allemagne de 1948 et donne à son Memorandum (un chapitre introductif destiné à son éditeur) un titre inspiré du livre de Mark Twain traitant du pèlerinage en Terre sainte : Le voyage des Innocents ou comment se comporter en Allemagne occupée. Il y évoque la tentation omniprésente d’absoudre les Allemands et le nazisme de leurs crimes. C’est en écoutant le conférencier allemand Eugen Kogon sur le camp de concentration de Buchenwald que la notion de dirty work dans les camps de concentration s’est imposée à lui. La dualité dans le travail, entre ceux qui peuvent garder la face et ceux qui exercent le « sale boulot », permet de comprendre comment certaines institutions ont pu exister puis persister. Le Memorandum nous permet de voir comment E. C. Hughes a affronté ces problèmes et avec qui.

Abstract Ilse Koch’s trials for her role in atrocities at the Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp served as visual spectacles and primed her portrayal in media and public spaces. Koch’s conduct was credibly rumored to be one of frequent affairs, simultaneous lovers, and the sexual humiliation of prisoners. The gendered construction of her sexual identity played a distortive role in her intersections with law and with post-conflict Germany. Koch’s trials revealed two different dynamics. Koch’s actions were refracted through a patriarchal lens which spectacularized female violence and served as an optical space to (re)establish appropriate feminine mores. Feminist critiques of Koch’s trials furthermore also spun problematic narratives of womanly innocence and victimized powerlessness, or at times ignored her as a perpetrator. In the end Koch’s actual story—‘her’ story—becomes lost amid prurience, politics, and burlesque.

Early in April 1945 a little collection of political prisoners, including a British secret agent, a Russian air force officer and a German general, were driven by their guards across the diminishing face of the Third Reich. Among them was the thirty-nine year old theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was curious company for a German pastor. Bonhoeffer had joined the group at Buchenwald concentration camp on 7 February. In April he and his new friends were moved to Regensburg, and from there to Schönberg. On 8 April 1945 Bonhoeffer was abruptly separated from the other prisoners. As he was about to leave, he turned to the British agent, Captain Payne Best, and said a few words. The next day he was hanged at Flossenburg with the former head of German Military Intelligence, Admiral Canaris, and Colonel Hans Oster. An SS doctor saw the execution, and was struck by the religious devotion, and the spiritual trust, of the victim.

It is a privilege to be able to introduce the readers of Integratus to the life and work of my father, Catholic psychiatrist Conrad Baars. A survivor of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, he became disillusioned with the secular Freudian approach to therapeutic intervention. Through the hand of Providence, he was introduced to the work of Dr. Anna Terruwe, which changed the trajectory of his life and career. Terruwe, a Dutch Catholic psychiatrist, had been successful in pioneering the rational psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas as the foundation for her work with clients with obsessive compulsive symptoms. In addition, she identified a syndrome in adults caused by a deprivation of love in childhood. Terruwe realized that these persons needed the remedy of someone's receptive, affective presence, which she called affirmation. She observed that contrary to some of the more active treatments, it was crucial to simply be with rather than do much with these persons.

Dans l’histoire des relations franco-autrichiennes, Félix Kreissler occupe une place centrale. Né à Vienne en 1917, Kreissler devient militant du parti communiste en 1934 et lutte contre le régime fasciste en Autriche. Quelques années après son émigration en France en 1937, il rejoint la Résistance. Ayant survécu à la déportation au camp de concentration de Buchenwald, Kreissler, après un bref retour en Autriche, embrasse une carrière universitaire en France dans les années 1960. Devenu professeur à l’université de Rouen, il a créé le CERA et fondé la revue semestrielle Austriaca. On doit à Félix Kreissler, entre autres, la publication de livres tels que La Prise de conscience de la nation autrichienne. 1938-1945-1978, une importante contribution à l’historiographie de l’identité autrichienne. Toutes ces activités avaient en commun d’augmenter la compréhension mutuelle entre ce qu’il considérait comme ses deux patries : l’Autriche et la France. Grâce à toutes ses œuvres Félix Kreissler a largement contribué à la transmission auprès des Français d’une image nuancée de l’Autriche.

<p>Prace Józefa Szajny są niezaprzeczalnie związane z jego niewyobrażalnym doświadczeniem bólu, głodu i traumy, które stały się częścią jego obozowego życia w Auschwitz i Buchenwaldzie. Śmierć wielu ludzi, ich upokorzenie i dehumanizacja sprawiły iż Szajna dorósł szybciej niżby tego oczekiwał. Wszystkie te doświadczenia odbijają się w jego sztuce, zarówno rysunku jak i dramatach. W swoich pracach wielokrotnie używał fragmentów ubrań, butów, lin, ziemi, plastikowych ludzkich korpusów, fotografii. </p><p>Trauma drugiej wojny światowej dotknęła go bardzo mocno ale nie złamała. Swoim życiem i twórczością ukazywał jak się odradzać i "powstawać z kolan" jak sam mówił o swojej twórczości. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest ukazanie siły człowieczństwa i godności ludzkiej w przekraczaniu dehumanizacji obecnej w obozach koncentracyjnych.</p><p><strong>The Experience of Injustice in the Life and Work of Józef Szajna</strong></p>SUMMARY<p>For many people the experience of trauma and injustice leaves a painful imprint with which they have to grapple till the end of their lives; they are unable to move beyond the sphere of their own inner suffering. Depression, aversion to living, bitterness is its frequent symptoms. World War 2 brought people inexpressible torments and sufferings. Everybody saved his/her physical and mental life as best as he/she could. The artists tried to break away from this surrounding nightmare by artistic activity. For some of them, art was a way of keeping their mental skill and psychical balance; for others it was a means for survival (especially for those in concentration camps). Józef Szajna (1922-2008) became a prisoner in KL Auschwitz in July 1941. During his imprisonment in the camp he was engaged in the underground activity, for which he was punished and assigned to a penal company where he contracted typhus. Then he was moved to a newly built camp of Birkenau, where he worked as a cleaner. In August 1943 he tried to escape but was caught and sentenced to death. He was waiting for the execution in a death cell for two weeks. On the way to the place of execution, the sentence was unexpectedly canceled. The death penalty was changed into life imprisonment. For six weeks he stayed in a death cell struggling with all possible inconveniences and the stress resulting from the presence of people who were awaiting the execution. After six weeks he was moved to the concentration camp of Buchenwald; he escaped from Buchenwald three weeks before the end of the war. After the war, Szajna started studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. During his studies he suffered from various illnesses – the result of the years spent in the concentration camps. In 1952 he received a diploma in graphic arts, in 1953 in stage scenery. He graduated from both faculties with distinction. The traumatic experiences of the war, his imprisonment in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald formed his personality. The experience of injustice infl uenced his later artistic output. Szajna, through art, “created himself from the beginning”. The author fi rst acquaints us with the subject matter of Szajna’s works, then analyses his selected works: Nasze życiorysy [Our Life Histories], Mrowisko [Swarms], Sylwety i cienie [Silhouettes and Shadows], Reminiscencje [Reminiscences], Drang nach Osten – Drang nach Western (a space composition). The next issues are: matter painting (implemented in Szajna’s works) and the synthesis of painting and theater ( the integral theater of Szajna). At the end, the author presents the artist’s message. His art formed a metaphorical story on the most important problems of human nature and its condition. The repercussions of the war-camp experiences were present in all his performances and plastic works. The greatness of his art consists in that this motif never acquired a naturalistic form or a form of a personal confession. Even when the artist used an authentic document, he gave it a general, symbolic sense creating a universal record of human fate.</p>

Michael Haneke's 2009 The White Ribbon is set in the village of “Eichwald.” Eichwald cannot be found on any German map. It is an imaginary place in the Protestant North of Eastern Germany in the early twentieth century. What is more, Haneke tells his black-and-white tale as the flashback narration of a voice-over narrator—a series of defamiliarizing techniques that lift the diegetic action out of its immediate sociohistorical context, stripping it of its temporal and topographical coordinates. Against this backdrop, is it possible to hear the name “Eichwald” without being reminded of, on the one hand, Adolf Eichmann, Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the key architects of the Holocaust, and, on the other, the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald? To be sure, Eichwald is not Buchenwald, and no 56,000 humans are being murdered here. Yet why this peculiar terminological fusion? What characterizes Eichwald, this model of a society in which adults have no names but merely function as representatives of a particular class and profession: the Baron, the Pastor, the Teacher, the Steward, the Midwife, etc.? What distinguishes this village that appears to be largely isolated from the outside world, this village that outsiders rarely enter and from which no one seems to be able to escape? What identifies this prison-like community with its oppressive atmosphere, its tiny rooms and low ceilings, its myriad alcoves, niches, windows, and hallways that evoke a general sense of “entrapment” and incarceration? This world in which even the camera appears to be shackled, to never zoom, hardly to pan or tilt, thus depriving the image of any dynamism, any mobility? Who—in this confining milieu—are the guards, who the detainees? And what characterizes the putatively illicit activities that appear to lie at its enigmatic center and around which the entire film seems to revolve?

Abstract: Contemporary Western society has taken its ideas and representations of resistance from the French resistance in World War II. But these are more often evoked than elucidated. Participation in the resistance in France and at Buchenwald and in the Communist underground in Franco's Spain shaped Jorge Semprún. Analysis of what he took from these experiences is revealing. Semprún began with resistance as an existential choice that challenged individuals' identities, a question he explored in the resistance of Jews and, in his case, of a bourgeois man of letters in the making. Semprún came to see that to resist meant to join with others, to put one's life in their hands and to take responsibility for their lives. This is why the torture of resisters to make them reveal information about others is so central to his thought on resistance. When Semprún left the Communist party, he developed his ideas on torture and resistance. After the war, the Communists tortured some of his Communist concentration camp comrades, not to obtain information, but to get those being tortured to learn what they wanted them to recite in show trials. Semprún came to feel that as a former Communist, he developed a resistance to references to the fraternity at the heart of resistance when they were was used as an element of control by the Communist party. He wrote in an effort to spread that immunity.

AbstractOn September 4, 1939, a special bureau was established within the legal department of the Wehrmacht with the task of ‘ascertaining violations of international law committed by enemy military and civilian persons against members of the German armed forces, and investigating whatever accusations foreign countries should make against the Wehrmacht’. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview of the material collected by the Germans during the war, to test the credibility of the German investigations, review case-studies and inquire into the integrity of the judges carrying out the investigations. The Wehrmacht bureau functioned from the very beginning until the final days of war. It investigated some 10,000 war crimes, of which the files for perhaps some 4,000 have survived. Half the files contain investigations of war crimes in the Soviet Union; the other volumes refer to war crimes allegedly committed by American, British, French, Polish, Yugoslav and other Allied nationals. After a careful review of the bureau's records and methods of operation, the conclusion is warranted that the investigations were carried out in a methodically correct manner and that many of the reports present prima facie cases that deserve further investigation. There remains thefundamental question of the judges' integrity, how it was possible for them to carry out investigations into Allied war crimes, when the German government, the SS, the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht were engaging in various degrees of official criminality. In search of an answer, the author reviews the testimony of numerous witnesses at the Nuremberg trials, including SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who had the commander of Buchenwald arrested on corruption charges, but was prevented from completing investigations into concentration camp killings. Hitler's order no. I concerning secrecy appears to have been largely observed, thus frustrating investigation attempts and keeping knowledge of the Holocaust relatively limited.

Abstract German-language concentration camp poetry has been frequently criticized for its formal failings, particularly its lack of innovation and overreliance on traditional forms. In this article, I undertake close readings of three formally conventional texts: Alfred Kittner’s ‘Molotschna’ (composed in Obodowka, a Transnistrian extermination camp, in 1943), Fritz Löhner-Beda’s ‘Sonett auf das Revier im KZ-Buchenwald’ (composed in Buchenwald in 1940) and Heinrich Steinitz’s ‘Wo bist Du, Gott?’ (composed in Buchenwald between 1938 and 1942). I will demonstrate how traditional forms provided stability in the midst of extremity through their regularity, structure and link to a more stable past and identity. Moreover, I will propose that they were not simply readily available containers for the poet’s suffering, but also enabled the poet to shape their individual depiction of the camps and therefore provide as valid an insight as those works which respond to extremity with fragmentation and innovation.

This essay aims to evaluate some of the similarities and differences in the experiences of two Holocaust survivors, Olga Lengyel and Ellie Wiesel. The essay will explore the experiences of these two survivors in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Buchenwald and examine why some of their experiences may have been different. The purpose of the essay is not to belittle the experiences of one gender or the other, but to identify how gender and sexuality made their experiences different. Wiesel’s and Lengyel's haunting memories of their experiences in these concentration camps offers a lense through which to examine the potential role that gender had on the experiences of the camp inmates. Both authors provide a graphic depiction of life in the concentration camp and the reader is taken into the depths of the hell in which these human beings were forced to live. Lengyel and Wiesel in a sense represent larger groups of people; women in the concentration camp and men in the concentration camp. Their memoirs exemplify the experiences of the millions of men and women who lived in the concentration camps, many of whom’s voices were silenced as a result of their presence in the camps. Therefore one can use the two accounts and the wealth of information within them to draw general conclusions about the experiences of each gender within the camp.

Resumen: Este artículo expone la importancia de la mirada en la novela La escritura o la vida de Jorge Semprún. Tras su estancia en el campo de concentración de Buchenwald, Semprún inicia un recorrido visual a través de los pasajes del horror y la vergüenza del exterminio. Por ello, en el artículo se mostrará cómo la aparente inefabilidad del dolor de la experiencia se vuelve un tránsito de reconocimiento de lo trágico para aproximarse al acontecimiento pasado. De esta forma, la palabra y el silencio articulan un movimiento traducido en el acto de escritura desde la figura del testigo. Aquí se demostrará la mirada como germen de la memoria y la identidad, pero también la ausencia de mirada del verdugo y criminal como génesis del horror y la negación de lo humano.Palabras clave: Semprún, La escritura o la vida, mirada, Holocausto, silencio, memoria.Abstract: This article exposes the importance of the gaze in the novel La escritura o la vida [Literature or Life] by Jorge Semprún. After his stay in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Semprún begins a visual journey through the passages of horror and shame of extermination. Therefore, the article will show how the apparent ineffectiveness of the pain of the experience becomes a transit of recognition of the tragic to approach the past event. In this way, the word and silence articulate a movement translated into the act of writing from the figure of the witness. Here the gaze as the germ of memory and identity will be demonstrated, but also the absence of the gaze from the executioner and the criminal as the genesis of horror and the denial of the human.Keywords: Semprún, La Escritura o la vida, gaze, Holocaust, silence, memory.

En este trabajo de investigación abordamos los mecanismos narrativos de la novela El largo viaje (1963), escrita por Jorge Semprún a modo de cierre vital de su experiencia en el campo de concentración nazi de Buchenwald. De esta manera, identificamos dos elementos fundamentales en la estructuración de la novela y que tienen una dimensión funcional insoslayable: las trampas de la memoria y la clandestinidad en el exilio. Cada uno de ellos, además, orientados hacia desvirtuar continuamente cualquier sentido único o cualquier certeza irrevocable. Por así decirlo, todas las categorías de las escrituras del yo se cumplen en esta magnífica novela, pero Semprún consigue dar un paso más allá. Su potencia literaria radica en la construcción de una narración memorialística, autobiográfica y en diferentes grados ficcional, pero convirtiendo dicha experiencia literaria en una realidad compartida y polifónica en el marco de la experiencia concentracionaria. En definitiva: el uso de la fragmentariedad desde el polo de la emisión del discurso, así como el empleo de la técnica del collage narrativo, no son estrictamente semprunianos, como es natural. Pero sí destacan en esta obra por tener una configuración todavía moderna y marcada por las vicisitudes históricas de toda una generación europea. In this research we tackle the narrative mechanisms of the novel Le Grand Voyage (1963), written by Jorge Semprún as a vital closure of his experience in the Nazi’s concentration camp of Buchenwald. In this way, we identify two fundamental elements in the novel’s structure and which have an unavoidable functional dimension: the traps of memory and the secrecy in exile. Each of them, moreover, oriented towards continually distorting any single meaning or any irrevocable certainty. In other words, all the categories of the scriptures of the self correspond in this magnificent novel, but Semprún manages to go a step further. Its literary power lies in the construction of a memorial, autobiographical and different fictional storytelling, but turning said literary experience into a shared and polyphonic reality within the framework of the concentration experience. In short: the use of fragmentarity from the pole of speech issuance, as well as the use of the narrative collage technique, are not strictly Semprunian, as is natural. But they do stand out in this work for having a still modern configuration, marked by the historical vicissitudes of an entire European generation.

Al terminar en 1939 la Guerra Civil española, centenares de miles de republicanos se refugiaron en Francia, muchos de ellos lucharon después contra las tropas de ocupación nazis y contra el régimen de Vichy, muchos de ellos fueron detenidos y deportados a campos de concentración alemanes (caso de Max Aub, internado en Le Vernet primero y en Djelfa en Argelia después). Como hicieron otros republicanos españoles en esas circunstancias, Semprún reconstruyó su permanencia en Buchenwaid en varios de sus libros pero especialmente en Aquel domingo con el propósito de transmitir un testimonio histórico de la lucha contra el nazismo y de los horrores increíbles de esos campos a las nuevas generaciones. Max Aub, por su parte, también ha descrito en varias de sus obras sus atroces experiencias tanto en Le Vernet como en Djelfa, pero de forma especial en Diario de Djelfa, campo equiparable a los peores de exterminio nazi. Esas dos obras de Semprún y de Aub son una contribución de indudable valor histórico para reconstruir las inimaginables experiencias de los republicanos españoles en los campos de concentración de Alemania y Francia.At the end of the Spainsh Civil War in 1939, hundreds of thousands of republicans fled to France, many of them later fought against the nazi occupation forces and the Vichy regime, many of them were arrested and deported to German concentration camps (as was the case of Jorge Semprún, who was taken to Buchenwaid) or French internment camps (such as Max Aub, who was internad first at Le Vernet and later at Djelfa, Algeria). Like other republicans who lived through the same circumstances, Semprún revived the time he had to spent in Buchenwaid in several of his books, but especially in Aquel domingo with the aim of bearing testimony to the new generations of the struggle against nazism and the incredible horrors committed in those camps. Max Aub has described in several of his works the terrible experiencias he had both at Le Vernet and at Djelfa, but especially in Diario de Djelfa, a camp comparable to the worst nazi extermination camps. These two books of Semprún and Aub are a contribution of unquestionable historial value to keep alive the memory of the unimaginable sufferings Spainsh republicans had to live through in German and French concentration camps.

Despite serious attention to the issues of war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed on an unprecedented scale in concentration camps in Nazi Germany, the problem of medical experiments on prisoners appears to be one of the least-studied in modern Russian historiography. Moreover, no special attention was paid to testing chemical weapons on humans. The aim of this work is to review the history of the development and testing of chemical warfare agents (CWA) in Germany in 1933–1945. During the First World War, Germany was one of the leading countries in the sphere of military chemistry in the world. After the Versailles treaty this potential was largely lost as a result of the restrictions. After the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) came to power, Germany not only restored, but also increased its military power and achieved a qualitative superiority over its opponents in the field of chemical weapons. The tests of CWA, as well as the study of the effectiveness of the means and protocols for the treatment of the lesions caused by CWA, were carried out both by the military structures of the Wehrmacht and the SS, and by civilian research and academic institutions. Experiments on prisoners were carried out in the concentration camps of Dachau, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler-Struthof, Neuengamme, etc. Basically, the damaging effects of sulfur mustard and phosgene was investigated. In Auschwitz-Birkenau «a study of the action of various chemical preparations was carried out on the orders of German firms». After the war several SS doctors, who performed involuntary experiments on humans, were convicted by military tribunals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Seven doctors were sentenced to death and executed on June 2, 1948, at the prison for war criminals in Landsberg, Bavaria. As a result of the Nuremberg trials, the Nuremberg Code was drawn up. It was the first international document that introduced ethical standards for scientists engaged in experiments on humans. It consisted of 10 principles, including the necessity of voluntary informed consent of the patient for the participation in medical experiments after providing him with full information about the nature, duration and purpose of the experiment; on the methods of its implementation; about all the perceived inconveniences and dangers associated with the experiment, and, finally, the possible consequences for the physical or mental health of the subject, which may arise as a result of his participation in the experiment.

A political minimalism? That would obviously go against the grain of our current political ideology → in fact, we are in an era of political maximalisation (Roland Barthes 200, arrow in original).Barthes’ comment is found in the ‘Annex’ to his 1978 lecture course The Neutral. Despite the three decade difference I don’t things have changed that much, certainly not insofar as academic debate about the cultural and social is concerned. At conferences I regularly hear the demand that the speaker or speakers account for the ‘political intent’, ‘worth’ or ‘utility’ of their work, or observe how speakers attempt to pre-empt and disarm such calls through judicious phrasing and citing. Following his diagnosis Barthes (201-206) proceeds to write under the title ‘To Give Leave’. Here he notes the incessant demand placed upon us, as citizens, as consumers, as representative cultural subjects and as biopolitical entities and, in this context, as academics to have and to communicate our allegiances, views and opinions. Echoing the acts, (or rather the ‘non-acts’), of Melville’s Bartleby, Barthes describes the scandalous nature of suspending the obligation of holding views; the apparent immorality of suspending the obligation of being interested, engaged, opinionated, committed – even if one only ever suspends provisionally, momentarily even. For the length of a five thousand word essay perhaps. In this short, unfortunately telegraphic and quite speculative essay I want pause to consider a few gestures or figures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. What follows is in three parts. First a comment on the nature of the ‘demand to communicate’ identified by Barthes and its links to longer running moral and practical imperatives within Western understandings of the subject, the social and the political. Second, the most substantial section but still an all too brief account of the apparent ‘passivity’ of the narrator of Imre Kertész’s novel Fatelessness and the ways in which the novel may be read as a reflection on the nature of agency and determination. Third, a very brief conclusion, the question directly; what politics or what apprehension of politics, could a reflection on stillness and its ‘political minimalism’ offer? 1.For Barthes, (in 1978), one of the factors defining the contemporary intellectual scene was the way in which “politics invades all phenomena, economic, cultural, ethical” coupled with the “radicalization” of “political behaviors” (200), perhaps most notably in the arrogance of political discourse as it assumes the place of a master discourse. Writing in 1991 Bill Readings identified a similar phenomenon. For Readings the category of the political and politically inspired critique were operating by encircling their objects within a presupposed “universal language of political significance into which one might translate everything according to its effectivity”, an approach which has the effect of always making “the political […] the bottom line, the last instance where meaning can be definitively asserted” (quoted in Clark 3) or, we may add, realized. There is, of course, much that could be said here, not least concerning the significant differences in context, (between, for example, the various forms of revolutionary Marxism, Communism and Maoism which seem to preoccupy Barthes and the emancipatory identity and cultural politics which swept through literature departments in the US and beyond in the last two decades of the twentieth century). However it is also possible to suggest that a general grammar and, moreover, a general acceptance of a telos of the political persists.Barthes' (204-206) account of ‘political maximalisation’ is accompanied by a diagnosis of its productivist virility, (be it, in 1978, on the part of the increasingly reduced revolutionary left or the burgeoning neo-liberal right). The antithesis, or, rather, the outside of such an arrangement or frame would not be another political program but rather a certain stammering, a lassitude or dilatoriness. A flaccidness even; “a devirilized image” wherein from the point of view of the (political) actor or critic, “you are demoted to the contemptible mass of the undecided of those who don’t know who to vote for: old, lost ladies whom they brutalize: vote however you want, but vote” (Barthes 204). Hence Barthes is not suggesting a counter-move, a radical refusal, a ‘No’ shouted back to the information saturated market society. What is truly scandalous he suggests, is not opposition or refusal but the ‘non-reply’. What is truly scandalous, roughish even, is the decline or deferral and so the provisional suspension of the choice (and the blackmail) of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the ‘this’ or the ‘that’, the ‘with us’ or ‘against us’.In Literature and Evil Georges Bataille concludes his essay on Kafka with a comment on such a decline. According to Bataille, the reason why Kafka remains an ambivalent writer for critics, (and especially for those who would seek to enrol his work to political ends), lays precisely in his constant withdrawal; “There was nothing he [Kafka] could have asserted, or in the name of which he could have spoken. What he was, which was nothing, only existed to the extent in which effective activity condemned him” (167). ‘Effective activity’ refers, contextually, to a certain form of Communism but more broadly to the rationalization or systematization intrinsic to any political program, political programs (or ideologies) as such, be they communist, liberal or libertarian. At least insofar as, as implied above, the political is taken to coincide with a certain metaphysics and morality of action and the consequent linking of freedom to work, (a factor common to communist, fascist and liberal political programs), and so to the labour of the progressive self-realization and achievement of the self, the autos or ipse (see Derrida 6-18). Be it via, for example, Marx’s account of human’s intrinsic ‘capacity for work’ (Arbeitskraft), Heidegger’s account of necessary existential (and ultimately communal) struggle (Kampf), or Weber’s diagnoses of the (Protestant/bourgeois) liberal project to realize human potentiality (see also Agamben Man without Content; François 1-64). Hence what is ‘evil’ in Kafka is not any particular deed but the deferral of deeds; his ambivalence or immorality in the eyes of certain critics being due to the question his writing poses to “the ultimate authority of action” (Bataille 153) and so to the space beyond action onto which it opens. What could this space of ‘worklessness’ or ‘unwork’ look like? This non-virile, anti-heroic space? This would not be a space of ‘inaction’, (a term still too dependent, albeit negatively, on action), but of ‘non-action’; of ‘non-productive’ or non-disclosive action. That is to say, and as a first attempt at definition, ‘action’ or ‘praxis’, if we can still call it that, which does not generate or bring to light any specific positive content. As a way to highlight the difficulties and pitfalls, (at least with certain traditions), which stand in the way of thinking such a space, we may highlight Giorgio Agamben’s comments on the widespread coincidence of a metaphysics of action with the determination of both the subject, its teleology and its orientation in the world:According to current opinion, all of man’s [sic] doing – that of the artist and the craftsman as well as that of the workman and the politician – is praxis – manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect. When we say that man has a productive status on earth, we mean, that the status of his dwelling on the earth is a practical one […] This productive doing now everywhere determines the status of man on earth – man understood as the living being (animal) that works (laborans), and, in work, produces himself (Man without Content 68; 70-71 original emphasis).Beyond or before practical being then, that is to say before and beyond the determination of the subject as essentially or intrinsically active and engaged, another space, another dwelling. Maybe nocturnal, certainly one with a different light to that of the day; one not gathered in and by the telos of the ipse or the turning of the autos, an interruption of labour, an unravelling. Remaining still, unravelling together (see Harrison In the absence).2.Kertész’s novel Sorstalanság was first published in his native Hungary in 1975. It has been translated into English twice, in 1992 as Fateless and in 2004 as Fatelessness. Fatelessness opens in Budapest on the day before György Köves’ – the novel’s fourteen year old narrator – father has to report for ‘labour service’. It goes on to recount Köves’ own detention and deportation and the year spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald and Zeitz. During this period Köves’ health declines, gradually at first and then rapidly to a moment of near death. He survives and the novel closes with his return to his home town. Köves is, as Kertész has put it in various interviews and as is made clear in the novel, a ‘non-Jewish Jew’; a non-practicing and non-believing Hungarian Jew from a largely assimilated family who neither reads nor speaks Hebrew or Yiddish. While Kertész has insisted that the novel is precisely that, a novel, a work of literature and not an autobiography, we should note that Kertész was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and Zeitz when fourteen.Not without reservations but for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only one theme in the novel; determination and agency, or what Kertész calls ‘determinacy’. Writing in his journal Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló) in May 1965 Kertész suggests ‘Novel of Fatelessness’ as a possible title for his work and then reflects on what he means by ‘fate’, the entry is worth quoting at length.The external determinacy, the stigma which constrains our life in a situation, an absurdity, in the given totalitarianism, thwarts us; thus, when we live out the determinacy which is doled out to us as a reality, instead of the necessity which stems from our own (relative) freedom – that is what I call fatelessness.What is essential is that our determinacy should always be in conflict with our natural views and inclinations; that is how fatelessness manifests itself in a chemically pure state. The two possible modes of protection: we transform into our determinacy (Kafka’s centipede), voluntarily so to say, and I that way attempt to assimilate our determinacy to our fate; or else we rebel against it, and so fall victim to our determinacy. Neither of these is a true solution, for in both cases we are obliged to perceive our determinacy […] as reality, whilst the determining force, that absurd power, in a way triumphs over us: it gives us a name and turns us into an object, even though we were born for other things.The dilemma of my ‘Muslim’ [Köves]: How can he construct a fate out of his own determinacy? (Galley Boat-Log 98 original emphasis).The dilemma of determinacy then; how can Köves, who is both determined by and superfluous to the Nazi regime, to wider Hungarian society, to his neighbours and to his family, gain some kind of control over his existence? Throughout Fatelessness people prove repeatedly unable to control their destinies, be it Köves himself, his father, his stepmother, his uncles, his friends from the oil refinery, or even Bandi Citrom, Köves’ mentor in the camps. The case of the ‘Expert’ provides a telescoped example. First appearing when Köves and his friends are arrested the ‘Expert’ is an imposing figure, well dressed, fluent in German and the director of a factory involved in the war effort (Fatelessness 50). Later at the brickworks, where the Jews who have been rounded up are being held prior to deportation, he appears more dishevelled and slightly less confident. Still, he takes the ‘audacious’ step of addressing a German officer directly (and receives some placatory ‘advice’ as his reward) (68-69). By the time the group arrives at the camp Köves has difficulty recognising him and without a word of protest, the ‘Expert’ does not pass the initial selection (88).Köves displays no such initiative with regard to his situation. He is reactive or passive, never active. For Köves events unfold as a series of situations and circumstances which are, he tells himself, essentially reasonable and to which he has to adapt and conform so that he may get on. Nothing more than “given situations with the new givens inherent in them” (259), as he explains near the end of the novel. As Köves' identity papers testify, his life and its continuation are the effect of arbitrary sets of circumstances which he is compelled to live through; “I am not alive on my own account but benefiting the war effort in the manufacturing industry” (29). In his Nobel lecture Kertész described Köves' situation:the hero of my novel does not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his time nor his language, not even his own person, is really his. He doesn’t remember; he exists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity, and cannot shake off the painful details. Instead of a spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he has to live through everything, which is oppressive and offers little variety, like life itself (Heureka! no pagination).Without any wilful or effective action on the part of the narrator and with only ‘the dreary trap of linearity’ where one would expect drama, plot, rationalization or stylization, Fatelessness can read as an arbitrarily punctuated series of waitings. Köves waiting for his father to leave, waiting in the customs shed, waiting at the brick works, waiting in train carriages, waiting on the ramp, waiting at roll call, waiting in the infirmary. Here is the first period of waiting described in the book, it is the day before his father’s departure and he is waiting for his father and stepmother as they go through the accounts at the family shop:I tried to be patient for a bit. Striving to think of Father, and more specifically the fact that he would be going tomorrow and, quite probably, I would not see him for a long time after that; but after a while I grew weary with that notion and then seeing as there was nothing else I could do for my father, I began to be bored. Even having to sit around became a drag, so simply for the sake of a change I stood up to take a drink of water from the tap. They said nothing. Later on, I also made my way to the back, between the planks, in order to pee. On returning I washed my hands at the rusty, tiled sink, then unpacked my morning snack from my school satchel, ate that, and finally took another drink from the tap. They still said nothing. I sat back in my place. After that, I got terribly bored for another absolute age (Fatelessness 9). It is interesting to consider exactly how this passage presages those that will come. Certainly this scene is an effect of the political context, his father and stepmother have to go through the books because of the summons to labour service and because of the racial laws on who may own and profit from a business. However, the specifically familial setting should not be overlooked, particularly when read alongside Kertész’s other novels where, as Madeleine Gustafsson writes, Communist dictatorship is “portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the camp – which in turn [...] is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of a joyless childhood” (no pagination, see, for example, Kertész Kaddish). Time to turn back to our question; does Fatelessness provide an answer to the ‘dilemma of determinacy’? We should think carefully before answering. As Julia Karolle suggests, the composition of the novel and our search for a logic within itreveal the abuses that reason must endure in order to create any story or history about the Holocaust […]. Ultimately Kertész challenges the reader not to make up for the lack of logic in Fatelessness, but rather to consider the nature of its absence (92 original emphasis).Still, with this point in mind, (and despite what has been said above), the novel does contain a scene in which Köves appears to affirm his existence.In many respects the scene is the culmination of the novel. The camps have been liberated and Köves has returned to Budapest. Finding his father and step-mother’s apartment occupied by strangers he calls on his Aunt and Uncle Fleischmann and Uncle Steiner. The discussion which follows would repay a slower reading, however again for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only a few short excerpts. Köves suggests that everyone took their ‘steps’ towards the events which have unfolded and that prediction and retrospection are false perspectives which give the illusion of order and inevitability whereas, in reality, “everything becomes clear only gradually, sequentially over time, step-by-step” (Fatelessness 249): “They [his Uncles] too had taken their own steps. They too […] had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later has squabbled about whether I should take the train or the suburban bus to Auschwitz” (260). Fleischmann and Steiner react angrily, claiming that such an understanding makes the ‘victims’ the ‘guilty ones’. Köves responds by saying that they do not understand him and asks they see that:It was impossible, they must try to understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent (260-261).Karolle (93-94) suggests that Köves' discussion with his uncles marks the moment where he accepts and affirms his existence and, from this point on begins to take control of and responsibility. Hence for Karolle the end of the novel depicts an ‘authentic’ moment of self-affirmation as Köves steps forward and refuses to participate in “the factual historical narrative of Auschwitz, to forget what he knows, and to be unequivocally categorized as a victim of history” (95). In distinction to Karolle, Adrienne Kertzer argues that Köves' moment of self-affirmation is, in fact, one of self-deception. Rather than acknowledging that it was “inexplicable luck” and a “series of random acts” (Kertzer 122) which saved his life or that his near death was due to an accident of birth, Köves asserts his personal freedom. Hence – and following István Deák – Kertzer suggests that we should read Fatelessness as a satire, ‘a modern Candide’. A satire on the hope of finding meaning, be it personal or metaphysical, in such experiences and events, the closing scenes of the novel being an ironic reflection on the “desperate desire to see […] life as meaningful” (Kertzer 122). So, while Köves convinces himself of his logic his uncles say to each other “‘Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Leave him be!’ And talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently” (Fatelessness 259). Which are we to choose then? The affirmation of agency (with Karolle) or the diagnosis of determination (with Kertzer)? Karolle and Kertzer give insightful analyses, (and ones which are certainly not limited to the passages quoted above), however it seems to me that they move too quickly to resolve the ‘dilemma’ presented by Köves, if not of Fatelessness as a whole. Still, we have a little time before having to name and decide Köves’ fate. Kertész’s use of the word ‘hero’ to describe Köves above – ‘the hero of my novel…’ – is, perhaps, more than a little ironic. As Kertész asks (in 1966), how can there be a hero, how can one be heroic, when one is one’s ‘determinacies’? What sense does it make to speak of heroic actions if “man [sic] is no more than his situation”? (Galley Boat-Log 99). Köves’ time, his language, his identity, none are his. There is no place, no hidden reservoir of freedom, from which way he set in motion any efficacious action. All resources have already been corrupted. From Kertész’s journal (in 1975): “The masters of thought and ideologies have ruined my thought processes” (Galley Boat-Log 104). As Lawrence Langer has argued, the grammar of heroics, along with the linked terms ‘virtue’, ‘dignity’, ‘resistance’ ‘survival’ and ‘liberation’, (and the wider narrative and moral economies which these terms indicate and activate), do not survive the events being described. Here the ‘dilemma of determinacy’ becomes the dilemma of how to think and value the human outside or after such a grammar. How to think and value the human beyond a grammar of action and so beyond, as Lars Iyer puts it, “the equation of work and freedom that characterizes the great discourses of political modernity” (155). If this is possible. If such a grammar and equation isn’t too all pervasive, if something of the human still remains outside their economy. It may well be that our ability to read Fatelessness depends in large part on what we are prepared to forsake (see Langar 195). How to think the subject and a politics in contretemps, beyond or after the choice between determination or autonomy, passive or active, inaction or action, immoral or virtuous – if only for a moment? Kertész wonders, (in 1966), ”perhaps there is something to be savaged all the same, a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail that may be a sign of the will to live and still awakens sympathy” (Galley Boat-Log 99). Something, perhaps, which remains to be salvaged from the grammar of humanism, something that would not be reducible to context, to ‘determinacies’, and that, at the same time, does not add up to a (resurrected) agent. ‘A tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail’. The press release announcing that Kertész had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature states that “For Kertész the spiritual dimension of man lies in his inability to adapt to life” (The Swedish Academy no pagination). Despite the difficulties presented by the somewhat over-determined term ‘spiritual’, this line strikes me as remarkably perspicuous. Like Melville’s Bartleby and Bataille’s Kafka before him, Kertész’s Köves’ existence, insofar as he exists, is made up by his non-action. That is to say, his existence is defined not by his actions or his inaction, (both of which are purely reactive and functional), but rather by his irreducibility to either. As commentators and critics have remarked, (and as the quotes given from the text above hopefully illustrate), Köves has an oddly formal and neutral ‘voice’. Köves’ blank, frequently equivocal tone may be read as a sign of his immaturity, his lack of understanding and his naivety. However I would suggest that before such factors, what characterizes Köves’ mode of address is its reticence to assert or disclose. Köves speaks, he speaks endlessly, but he says nothing or almost nothing - ‘to no avail and even a little incoherently’. Hence where Karolle seeks to recover an ‘intoned self-consciousness’ and Kertzer the repressed determining context, we may find Köves' address. Where Karolle’s and Kertzer’s approaches seek in some way to repair Köves words, to supplement them with either an agency to-come or an awareness of a context and, in doing so, pull his words fully into the light, Köves, it seems to me, remains elusive. His existence, insofar as we may speak of it, lies in his ‘inability to adapt to life’. His reserves are not composed of hidden or recoverable sources of agency but in his equivocality, in the way he takes leave of and remains aside from the very terms of the dilemma. It is as if with no resources of his own, he has an echo existence. As if still remaining itself where a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail.3.Is this it? Is this what we are to be left with in a ‘political minimalism’? It would seem more resignation or failure, turning away or quietism, the conceit of a beautiful soul, than any type of recognisable politics. On one level this is correct, however any such suspension or withdrawal, this moment of stillness where we are, is only ever a moment. However it is a moment which indicates a certain irreducibility and as such is, I believe, of great significance. Great significance, (or better ‘signifyingness’), even though – and precisely because – it is in itself without value. Being outside efficacy, labour or production, being outside economisation as such, it resides only in its inability to be integrated. What purpose does it serve? None. Or, perhaps, none other than demonstrating the irreducibility of a life, of a singular existence, to any discourse, narrative, identity or ideology, insofar as such structures, in their attempt to comprehend (or apprehend) the existent and put it to use always and violently fall short. As Theodor Adorno wrote;It is this passing-on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner grasped the particular than it reduces it to a thought-station, and finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death (74 emphasis added).This moment of stillness then, of declining and remaining aside, represents, for me, the anarchical and all but silent condition of possibility for all political strategy as such (see Harrison, Corporeal Remains). A condition of possibility which all political strategy carries within itself, more or less well, more or less consciously, as a memory of the finite and corporeal nature of existence. A memory which may always and eventually come to protest against the strategy itself. Strategy itself as strategy; as command, as a calculated and calculating order. And so, and we should be clear about this, such a remaining still is a demonstration.A demonstration not unlike, for example, that of the general anonymous population in José Saramago’s remarkable novel Seeing, who ‘act’ more forcefully through non-action than any through any ends-directed action. A demonstration of the kind which Agamben writes about after those in Tiananmen Square in 1989:The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be the struggle for control of the state, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity) […] [who] cannot form a societas because they do not poses any identity to vindicate or bond of belonging for which to seek recognition (Coming Community 85-67; original emphasis).A demonstration like that which sounds through Köves when his health fails in the camps and he finds himself being wheeled on a handcart taken for dead;a snatch of speech that I was barely able to make out came to my attention, and in that hoarse whispering I recognized even less readily the voice that has once – I could not help recollecting – been so strident: ‘I p … pro … test,’ it muttered” (Fatelessness 187 ellipses in original).The inmate pushing the cart stops and pulls him up by the shoulders, asking with astonishment “Was? Du willst noch leben? 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