Heterotopia, Utopia, and the Extermination Camps of Operation Reinhard

ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: DARK MIRROR: HETEROTOPIA, UTOPIA, AND THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS OF OPERATION REINHARD Sarah Wanenchak, Doctor of Philosophy, 2019 Dissertation directed by: Professor Roberto P. Korzeniewicz, Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland In Michel Foucault's body of work, the notion of heterotopia stands out as both particularly intriguing and particularly underdeveloped. Introduced in the introduction of The Order of Things (first published 1966) and further described in the lecture “Of Other Spaces” (1967), heterotopia has been used by scholars in a variety of fields, from social theory to architecture. Of special interest is the way Foucault describes the relationship between heterotopia and utopia, one defined by its liminal nature and the other by its unreality. This work seeks to shed new light on that relationship, by focusing on heterotopias as threshold spaces between the real social world and the perfected but unreal world to come. I approach the concept of utopia with an eye toward its eliminationist implications, and use three extermination camps established as part of the Nazi regime’s Operation Reinhard as cases through which to explore significant features of a heterotopia, how those features manifest in these cases, and what connects these spaces to the world that can be glimpsed in the mirror they create. Although I primarily use historical cases as a way to expand existing theory, I aim to build upon that expansion by pointing the way toward the development of new theoretical tools for historical-comparative analysis of spaces of both extermination and detention. Finally, I suggest that work might be done focusing on embodied identities as themselves forms of heterotopia, which introduces possibilities for additional analysis of the roles of bodies and identity in cases of certain kinds of mass violence and death. DARK MIRROR: HETEROTOPIA, UTOPIA, AND THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS OF OPERATION REINHARD by Sarah Wanenchak Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 Advisory Committee: Professor Roberto P. Korzeniewicz, Chair Professor Meyer Kestnbaum Professor Lee Konstantinou Professor Jeffrey Lucas Professor Reeve D. Vanneman © Copyright by Sarah Wanenchak 2019 Preface A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead. — Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless This all began, believe it or not, with mice. I was in junior high school. I don't recall now what year it was; what I do recall is that I was a strange and inward-looking kid, ill-suited to a social life for which I had been ill-prepared. Many if not most people recall feelings of awkward isolation as children, but some of us experience it in greater degrees of intensity than others, and my experience was intense. This wasn't the fault of any person in particular; it's what you should probably expect when you cross the emotional upheaval of adolescence with burgeoning mental illness. Not long before, I had been diagnosed with both Attention Deficit Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (a delightful symptom of which was compulsively gouging wounds in my skin) What happened on this day—which I swear I'm going to return to, the day with the mice— wasn't a direct result of those things, but to the extent that mental illness shapes the disposition of children as a whole, I have to think it played a part. Okay. Let’s get back to the mice. A lot of my classmates spent free time outside. I tended to spend mine in the computer lab—or, even better, in the library. I was attending a private Quaker school by then, and I guess the collection must not have been as closely curated as a public school’s might have been (I found some fairly scandalous stuff now and then in terms ii of sexual content) because frequently I stumbled on things that a lot of people would likely deem too adult for a kid at the tender age of ten or eleven, not in terms of sexual content so much as in terms of violence. In terms of depictions of just how cruel human beings can be to one another. So that afternoon, I found Art Spiegelman’s masterwork Maus. You see it, right? Kid finds comic book (I had no idea what a graphic novel was and if I had known I would have had no idea why the distinction matters), kid has this kid-idea of what comic books are, kid sees anthropomorphic mice on the cover (kid has always loved anthropomorphic animals), kid picks up the book and cracks it open. Kid’s life is never the same. * * * I knew what the Holocaust was. We do teach it in schools. But my memory of that teaching is that it was somewhat abstract, distant, and vague. Lots of people died, yes, and they died because of who they were and nothing more, and they were killed by monstrous human beings as part of an insane project that those monsters believed would make the world a better place. I don't recall much about that last part; the emphasis was on the evil, not on what motivated the evil or what served as its relatively mundane seeds. I don't blame elementary school teachers for not taking a deep dive into the political, cultural, and economic forces that propelled Nazi Germany and its people past the lethal point of no return. Children can understand a lot—they can often understand a great deal more than we give them credit for—but there are still places one should probably be reluctant to go. iii Millions of people died. Right, got it. Except what kind of number is “a million”, let alone multiple millions? There's a point beyond which numbers lose their meaning and we cease being able to conceive of relative size. It's all simply huge. “Million” is a stand in for “we cannot express or understand how many”. When examining mass atrocity, you can go top-down through the lens of those unfathomable numbers, or you can approach bottom-up from the perspective of individual people and what they experienced. People usually adopt both, though both present their own unique difficulties. My teachers must surely have done so. But what I recall, prior to that day with the mice, was the top-down. It was the numbers, which were essentially meaningless to me. Everyone reads The Diary of Anne Frank, but what I remember are the mice. I suppose we all have to find our own routes to the truth. Some of those routes will necessarily be strange ones. * * * What I found in the library that day was actually the second volume in Spiegelman’s two volume work, And Here My Troubles Began. The book details the day to day existence of Spiegelman’s father after he arrives at the gates of Auschwitz, from those gates themselves to liberation and the war’s end. The story basically concludes there; unusually, it's the first volume—My Father Bleeds History—that covers more of the war’s aftermath, and delves into Spiegelman’s strained relationship with his father and the past suicide of his mother. While Spiegelman’s father concludes his tale with a kind of happily-ever-after, it's clear from both volumes that no end to this kind of trauma is happy, and in fact such trauma doesn't iv even end. It carries across generations. It's knitted into the DNA of those who inherit their parents’ and grandparents’ memories. I think it was some time before I read the first volume, which also describes the German invasion of Poland and the run-up to the Final Solution’s implementation. So it was that I came to the foundations of the Final Solution after the fact. That first day, I was plunged into the individual level details of life and death in the camps—the horror of the trains, the beatings, the abuse, the terror, the rampant sickness, the shootings and the gas chambers. It wasn't about numbers anymore; instead, it was about the story of one man and his desperate struggle for survival in the face of overwhelming odds. Which, although accurate, sounds too much like a movie poster; it was about suffering, presented in the most immediate and explicit possible way. I remember being both entranced and shaken to the core. I was stunned by the gut-punch of the story, not least because of how it made sense of itself, or rather how it didn't. There was no point to this suffering, no redemption for the people involved. Again, survival was not a happy ending. What happened was fundamentally absurd and yet on a deep level I was haunted by the idea that it was indeed explicable. That it was comprehensible. It was a puzzle to which there was an answer. (I should note that this was the same year and the same library in which I first encountered Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, his semi-autobiographical manga that tells the story of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the immediate aftermath. Extreme suffering became something of an obsession of mine.) From that point on, atrocity and mass death haunted me. In another year in junior high school, I read and wrote about ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In v high school I wrote a lengthy and impassioned term paper about the American press’s failure in adequately covering the genocide in Rwanda, and the associated failure of the American government in responding to it, and I discovered the torture and murder committed by the Khmer Rouge in their concentration camps.

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