This article by Ramsden examines the deeply ecological dimensions of Smoke over Birkenau, the 1945 Holocaust memoir of Seweryna Szmaglewska, a writer and member of the Polish Resistance who was imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau between October 1942 and January 1945. Through an ecocritical reading of the memoir, it seeks to show how Szmaglewska mobilized an ecological strategy of narration to recount the self and traumatic experience during the Holocaust. Throughout her account, Szmaglewska showed a preoccupation with nature and the earth's non-human actors, vividly invoking the singing larks and crickets, swaying bluebells and trembling ponds of Auschwitz-Birkenau as well as its surrounding woodlands and meadows. Writing and remembering the camp-and herself in it-through its non-human nature, Ramsen demonstrates, not only enabled Szmaglewska to bear witness to and make sense of her own traumatic past, but to write herself both in and out of it in a manner that made possible its retrospective recounting. To uncover and play close critical attention to Smoke over Birkenau's ecological qualities is to glean a more complex understanding of how Szmaglewska responded to the Holocaust in its immediate aftermath. While hers is a unique memoir that blurs the generic boundaries between historical narrative and nature writing, Ramsden reveals that engagement with the role played by non-human nature in Holocaust testimonies, more broadly, has the potential to deepen our knowledge of the ways in which survivors remembered, reimagined and represented their difficult wartime experiences.
Since its release in 2023, The Zone of Interest has generated wide-reaching critical discussion concerning the visual politics of Holocaust cinema, much of it crystalizing around director Jonathan Glazer's decision to represent atrocities taking place at Auschwitz aurally rather than visually. Little attention, however, has been paid to the visual as well as sonic presence of animals in the film, who at times act as surrogates for unseen Jewish victims and at others bear witness to human violence tuned out by perpetrators and accomplices. This includes Dilla, a black Weimaraner and the family pet of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf H & ouml;ss and his wife Hedwig. In this article, Baker asks how Dilla's non-human registering of Holocaust violence, activated by the moving image, complicates anthropocentric conceptions of witnessing and testimony. Drawing on David L. Clark's reflections on animal witnessing in documentary Holocaust footage, she argues that Dilla reconfigures witnessing as an embodied practice of listening as well as looking, exposing both the limits of human-centred paradigms of representation and the ambivalent place occupied by pets and other animal lives within Nazi life and ideology.
The Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) has been a peak religious interest group in Australia since its formation in 1995, playing a key role in debates over social issues. It has maintained access to the highest levels of Australian government over the past twenty-five years, developing relationships with multiple prime ministers and having a reported influence over all. In 2022, the organization was placed on an international list of far-right hate and extremist groups, while the year before it had characterized violence or revolution as 'down the line'. Though ACL had historically been defined as a Christian Right organization, such comments and categorization were both indicative of the major shifts that were occurring under the leadership of its managing director, Martyn Iles, who headed the organization between 2018 and 2023. Watson's article examines ACL over this period in the context of two ideological influences, the Christian Right and paleoconservatism. He draws attention to the early and re-emergent literature on paleoconservatism while highlighting several of its key identifying features. He subsequently proposes a provisional framework for differentiating the two ideologies and applies this framework to ACL by analysing several of its publications, primary among them its broadcast The Truth of It. Watson argues that ACL increasingly has developed the hallmarks of a paleoconservative organization as it has shifted to advocacy for far-right, ethnocentric, anti-globalist and western supremacist political positions.
Burchett's article sheds light on the community of Facebook users who interact with posts by the populist far-right Alternative f & uuml;r Deutschland (AfD), and how they respond to the AfD's contradictory narratives regarding Jews and antisemitism. The AfD uses its online space to construct an everyday reality of victimhood for its political community, which conditionally includes Jews. Jewish victimhood and inclusion are emphasized by the AfD when they fit its political aims, such as focusing on 'Muslim-Arab' antisemitism to underline an anti-immigration stance, but are minimized when Jewish victimhood is perceived to threaten non-Jewish German victimhood, as it is seen to do in the context of Holocaust remembrance. Burchett compares comment threads from these two thematic streams and finds that, regardless of the difference in victimhood framing by the AfD, users in both streams react with similar narratives of defensive, competitive and rejective victimhood, as well as a reluctance to include Jews in their in-group of victims, even when the AfD explicitly includes them. Her paper argues that so-called 'secondary' antisemitism, Jewish exclusion as a result of resistance to Holocaust guilt, also has an effect on contemporary Jewish victimhood.
Far-right movements in the West increasingly portray immigrants as 'colonizers' threatening supposedly 'indigenous' national majorities. These narratives are nevertheless complicated by long-settled minorities with legitimate claims to protection who resist colonization and assimilation by hegemonic majorities, including the self-victimized far right. Carlsson's article examines how three Swedish far-right movements construct autochthony-the idea of being native to the soil-in relation to long-settled indigenous and national minorities. Through an interpretive analysis of ideological manifestos, parliamentary motions and media statements by the Sweden Democrats, Alternative for Sweden and the Nordic Resistance Movement, it identifies three distinct discourses of autochthony: (1) transborder autochthony, which extends national belonging beyond Sweden's borders to groups abroad imagined as belonging to the nation-building project; (2) indigenous autochthony, where Swedes are framed as an indigenous people alongside the S & aacute;mi, whose belonging is confined to the far north; and (3) autochthonous Otherness, where Roma and Jews are cast as racialized outsiders or genocidal threats to serve the movements' broader exclusionary goals. The article argues that autochthony operates as a proxy for race, and that long-settled minorities disrupt far-right claims to belonging, revealing how migrant exclusion functions as a central logic shaping contemporary far-right ideologies towards other minorities.
Routt & eacute;'s paper presents an ethnographic case study of an unaccompanied refugee minor from Nigeria throughout his first year in the care of the United States Office of Refugee Resettlement. In tracing various interactions with 'care'-based institutions and practitioners, the paper questions how US social welfare systems insist on specific ways of placing certain bodies and what that placing means to personhood. Attention is paid in particular to the ways in which the US resettlement industry and stakeholder care agencies inflict violence on young black bodies. Based on a literature of care, the paper traces how violence is woven into overlapping welfare systems. The processes of racialization and anti-Blackness present in the United States are framed within the awareness of a peculiar violence of care that emerges through bio-space, ambivalence and spatial understandings across time and location. This paper offers implications for future research for those working with black African diasporic youth who have experienced migration and resettlement. It further suggests how scaled integration practices and policies might be centred in the possibilities held in critical black geographies.
Many of Germany's institutional practices and routines-which help to shape and perpetuate notions of social cohesion-have long been criticized as exclusive and discriminatory during the decades of struggles against racism. This article by Grauert and Gukelberger explores the state's response to such longstanding civil society criticism amid the rise of right-wing populism, focusing on the formulation and implementation of diversity and anti-discrimination strategies. The authors examine how bureaucratic practice creates-or limits-spaces within institutions in which allegations of racism can be formally raised, recognized and addressed. Drawing on ethnographic research and a social-theoretical perspective combining diversity and critical race studies with organizational sociology, Grauert and Gukelberger analyse how anti-discrimination and diversity bodies navigate the tension between making racism 'complainable' and pursuing social cohesion. Accordingly, they examine the affective processing of racism complaints within the complaints procedures of German city administrations and public order offices. Their article aims to deepen understanding of the advancement of diversity agendas alongside the frequent sidelining of racism in institutional practice, as well as the situational ambivalence that emerges when addressing racism in bureaucratic contexts.
In the months following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than one million Ukrainian refugees fled to Germany, including members of the Roma minority. Shortly after the first arrivals, reports of antiziganist discrimination emerged. In Munich, an important arrival destination, these concerned the segregation of Roma migrants in initial reception centres, the withholding of services and the open rejection of Roma groups by neighbouring municipalities. Arnold and Neuburger's article uses ethnographic research to understand the attitudes and structural conditions that facilitated this kind of discrimination. It analyses whether this discrimination can be perceived as a form of institutionally enabled racism and-if so-how it was enabled. Through qualitative interviews with administrative staff, social workers, community organizations and volunteers at initial reception centres, the authors identify three different approaches regarding the arrival of Roma refugees: a 'problematizing' approach; a 'colour-blind' approach; and a 'discrimination-sensitive' approach. Drawing on the example of Ukrainian Roma refugees in Munich, Arnold and Neuberger illustrate the interlinking of two sets of practices: a racially biased application of rules at the level of everyday institutional practice; and a supposedly race-neutral strategy at the level of administrative decision-making. In effect, these practices institutionally perpetuate a structure of race-based inequality and enable a form of colour-blind racism.
Skolarski's article investigates the influence of intergroup contacts, social networks, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) on both the perception of racism and the denial of racism among public service staff in Germany. Using data from the 2023 INRA staff survey, which includes responses from 12,833 employees across four federal agencies, Skolarski examines how these factors shape attitudes towards racism. The findings indicate that both RWA and SDO significantly predict a lower perception and a higher denial of racism. Notably, workplace contacts have a more substantial impact than private contacts on reducing racism perception and denial. Using structural equation modelling (SEM), Skolarski validates the relationships between these predictors and latent variables. The results highlight the critical role of different forms of contact and the critical role of personal attitudes in shaping views on racism.
The article by Reichle and Riese investigates the institutionalization of racism through a qualitative study of local welfare administrations and police departments. To do so, it analyses how racism is treated by local state institutions. It shows that local state institutions respond to racism either through denial or selective professionalization, a term that the authors use to describe the limited effects of singular anti-discrimination measures. Both contribute to the reproduction of racist routines. Denial and selective professionalization depend on individual and organizational factors, such as the institutional and individual understanding of racism, hierarchies and their informal bypassing, and institutional culture. Furthermore, the institutional approach to racism is shaped by the local political climate and the economic context. As a consequence, all of these factors must be addressed in order to challenge institutional racism.
