FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W2143208223> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W2143208223 endingPage "120" @default.
• W2143208223 startingPage "80" @default.
• W2143208223 abstract "Auschwitz: From Architect’s Promise to Inmate’s Perdition Robert-Jan van Pelt* (bio) Already its name seems inassimilable. Before we have recovered from its harsh and repulsive beginning (“Ausch”) we are hit by its violent and sarcastic end (“Witz”). The name itself already suggests the content which, according to Jean-François Lyotard, is “the experience of language that brings speculative discourse to an end.” 1 Staunch Heideggerians, who seek to justify their master’s inability to confront or even name the Holocaust, have declared Auschwitz an unthinkable realm shrouded in silence. Many others also believe that silence serves the pious memory of the victims and shows a deferential respect for the survivors. They declare Auschwitz to be an unintelligible world, a strange universe that cannot and may not be explained. Hochuth called it “Planet Auschwitz,” a forlorn, damned, and desolate world. Banished from the world of description, analysis, and conclusion, Auschwitz has become a myth in which the assumed universality of its impact obscures the contingencies of its beginning. I use the word “myth” here in the sense that Roland Barthes gave to it in his cele-brated essay “Myth Today.” Mythification, he argued, occurs when language empties a narrative of its historical contingency to fill it with an unchanging nature. “In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences...” The result is an account of “bliss-ful clarity” in which there are no contradictions because statements of fact are interpreted as explanations. “Things appear to mean something by themselves.” 2 Today few events can rival the mythic power of “Auschwitz.” Unlike “Hiroshima,” which indeed happened in an unintelligible flash, the story of the atrocity of “Auschwitz” can be depicted in sufficient detail to arouse our fascination. It takes place on a carefully mapped stage that holds our attention. [End Page 80] In this essay I aim to recover some of the historical quality of Auschwitz that, in the words of Barthes, consists in the memory that it once was made. 3 It is characteristic of a mythic site that it has always been, since its significance is assigned at the beginning of Creation, to be redeemed at the end of History. Jewish legend records that the site of Solomon’s Temple marks not only the foundation stone of the world, but also the place where the Messiah will appear to Israel. 4 Auschwitz was not preordained to become the major site of the Holocaust. It actually acquired the role of “major site” almost by accident, and even the very fact that it became the site of mass murder resulted more from the failure to achieve one goal than from the ambition to realize another. To reclaim the reality of Auschwitz we must become attuned to the contradictions of the site, not in order to find reasons to deny what happened, but to square the way it happened with the ways of the world—a world in which the mysterious, mythifiable forces of malevolence seem ludicrously irrelevant com-pared to the profane, utterly intelligible, and very effective tendencies towards insufficiency and expediency. 5 As Jean-Claude Pressac has shown, the contingency of Auschwitz’s evolution even applies to its mythic core: the crematories. 6 In this essay I will concentrate on another contradiction of the site that clashes with an essential aspect of the myth of Auschwitz: the idea that it was quite literally “the end of the world,” that is, a place far away from everywhere else. My choice of subject goes back to a personal experience. The first time I visited Auschwitz I was surprised that a center of extermination was located side by side with a major town. I had seen Lanzmann’s film Shoah and remembered its depiction of the forsaken isolation at the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, the silence of the forests that surrounded them. It was the same seclusion that I knew from the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork, where the weekly trains set out upon their fatal journey eastward. Growing up in Holland, I had always thought that the secret terminus of those trains ought..." @default.
• W2143208223 created "2016-06-24" @default.
• W2143208223 creator A5077592125 @default.
• W2143208223 date "1994-01-01" @default.
• W2143208223 modified "2023-10-17" @default.
• W2143208223 title "Auschwitz: From Architect's Promise to Inmate's Perdition" @default.
• W2143208223 cites W1482770760 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W1508480275 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W1513790711 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W1540437287 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W1576103837 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W1970156568 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W1982613743 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W1990615548 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W2000742375 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W2052148332 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W2061226795 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W2795405428 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W374893144 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W576466464 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W579689314 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W590547827 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W590748755 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W632156602 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W643239042 @default.
• W2143208223 cites W654307738 @default.
• W2143208223 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.1994.0013" @default.
• W2143208223 hasPublicationYear "1994" @default.
• W2143208223 type Work @default.
• W2143208223 sameAs 2143208223 @default.
• W2143208223 citedByCount "4" @default.
• W2143208223 countsByYear W21432082232015 @default.
• W2143208223 countsByYear W21432082232018 @default.
• W2143208223 countsByYear W21432082232021 @default.
• W2143208223 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W2143208223 hasAuthorship W2143208223A5077592125 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C107038049 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C111472728 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C11171543 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C124952713 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C138885662 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C142362112 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C15744967 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C166957645 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C185592680 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C199033989 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C199360897 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C2777146004 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C2778757428 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C2779814899 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C2780362631 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C2780658912 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C2781115785 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C41008148 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C519517224 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C55493867 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C107038049 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C111472728 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C11171543 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C124952713 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C138885662 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C142362112 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C15744967 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C166957645 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C185592680 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C199033989 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C199360897 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C2777146004 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C2778757428 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C2779814899 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C2780362631 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C2780658912 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C2781115785 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C41008148 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C519517224 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C55493867 @default.
• W2143208223 hasConceptScore W2143208223C95457728 @default.
• W2143208223 hasIssue "1" @default.
• W2143208223 hasLocation W21432082231 @default.
• W2143208223 hasOpenAccess W2143208223 @default.
• W2143208223 hasPrimaryLocation W21432082231 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W2045942423 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W2143208223 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W2748952813 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W2899084033 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W3026347973 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W3169430128 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W4246022945 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W584441729 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W652304969 @default.
• W2143208223 hasRelatedWork W81096860 @default.
• W2143208223 hasVolume "1" @default.
• W2143208223 isParatext "false" @default.
• W2143208223 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W2143208223 magId "2143208223" @default.
• W2143208223 workType "article" @default.