Bracke's article revisits population 'replacement' ideologies from an analytical vantage point of coloniality and takes this as a point of departure for a psychosocial exploration of 'replacement' anxieties. The article first attends to three prominent instances in the modern genealogy of population 'replacement' thinking: Le Grand Remplacement by Renaud Camus in the 2010s; the notion of Umvolkung in Nazi ideology in the late 1920s; and the concept of 'race suicide' in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. For each of these distinct articulations of 'replacement' ideology, the question of European (settler) colonialism is further investigated and its significance for population 'replacement' anxieties demonstrated. This significance is subsequently brought to bear on the subject of 'replacement' anxieties, that is, subjects who fear they are being replaced. These subjects can be approached as 'dethroned' (Wendy Brown), that is, shaped by a sense of losing power to which they feel entitled. Studies of the far right, moreover, have consistently noted the 'victim-perpetrator reversal' (Ruth Wodak) in which these subjects engage. By considering the significance of coloniality, this reversal can be understood, with Frantz Fanon, as a projection of violence on to the Other inflicted by the Self, a projection fuelled by imperial paranoia (Anne McClintock) that pertains to an inaugural scene of colonial conquest.
This article by Balint explores the idea of a history of animals during the Holocaust, identifying what such a history looks like, how it can be researched and constructed and what it contributes to our understanding of the event. It charts where animals can be found in archival material and builds an analytical approach for incorporating animals into the history of the Holocaust. It argues that animals hold multiple positions in the history of the Holocaust: as tools of persecution; elements of the human experience; and points of memory. Although animals have not been viewed as a category of analysis for the Holocaust before, recent trends in Holocaust studies have developed the idea of an environmental history, paying close attention to nature and the relationship between humans and their environment. Balint's article reveals how animals are also a part of this environment. It explores the use of animals and their relationship with both perpetrators and victims. As a result, it reveals how studying animals enhances our understanding of the human experience of the Holocaust.
Like race, gender and other categorizations, animals and their various speciesist labels such as useful (Nutztier) or pestilent animals (Sch & auml;dling) are anthropocentrically constructed. This article by Arnds examines how four animal species are poeticized and elevated to what he calls the & Uuml;bertier: the animal that gets anthropomorphized into the more-than-animal (also in reference to the concept of & Uuml;bermensch) in contemporary literature about the Holocaust. How does the US author Marc Estrin reimagine the entanglement between humans and the cockroach in his novel Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), a fictional sequel to Franz Kafka's famous 1915 novella Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis). How does the German Nobel Laureate G & uuml;nter Grass disentangle the rat from its literary and biopolitical past in his novel The Rat (1986)? How does the German author Norbert Scheuer contextualize bees, their flower dance and the hive, with forced migration and the Holocaust in the novel The Winter Bees (2019)? And how does the Belgian writer Misha Defonseca, in her contested memoir/novel Surviving with Wolves (1998), deconstruct the negative image of wolves for the author's (fictional) survival in a silvan sanctuary? Arnds's article delineates the different anthropomorphic features of these species-based metaphors in the context of the Holocaust and how the four authors liberate them from a blighted political past in the context of antisemitism, imperialism and the politics of dehumanization. Specifically, it demonstrates four anthropomorphic, speciesist features of these animals: Gregor Samsa as a human-cockroach hybrid superhero; the bee as a protector species for Jewish refugees; the rat as survivor in a posthuman world; and the wolf as a mother and protector figure.
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.
