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In 1963, West Germany was gripped by a dramatic trial of former guards who had worked at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. It was the largest and most public trial to take place in the country and attracted international attention. Using the pretrial files and extensive trial audiotapes, Rebecca Wittmann offers a fascinating reinterpretation of Germany’s first major attempt to confront its past.

In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the \"special squads,\" composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these \"Scrolls of Auschwitz,\" which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp's liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

The Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum preserves a number of manuscripts of popular songs arranged by members of the Auschwitz I Men’s Orchestra. These songs, written with great care in black ink on Beethoven Papier brand music paper, often bear highly ironic, but also tragically relevant titles, such as “Letters That Never Arrived,” “Hours That One Can Never Forget,” “Sing a Song When You’re Sad.” In this article I describe the complex process of realizing a 2018 concert performance and recording of one of these songs, “Die schönste Zeit des Lebens” (The Most Beautiful Time of Life), based on a manuscript deposited in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1975. Originally a 1941 popular song composed by the German film composer Franz Grothe with a text by Willi Dehmel, and scored for a jazz ensemble, it was arranged by the Auschwitz I prisoners for four first violins, five second violins, a viola, two clarinets, a trombone and a tuba. Through this dramatic change in orchestration, errors were occasionally introduced; in this article, I detail the analytical processes involved in correcting these errors and making “micro-interventions” in the score.

Developed by the BBPR studio and sponsored by ANED, the Italian Memorial at Auschwitz, which opened in 1980, was intended as a choral and immersive work, featuring a suspended spiral covered in canvases painted by Pupino Samonà, paired with Primo Levi’s narration and Luigi Nono’s music. Since 2008, two projects have been launched to preserve the Memorial: the Glossa Project for minimal restoration, and the subsequent Glossa XX1 project (2010-15) for a more comprehensive intervention. These projects raised questions about what it means to restore the untimely: a monument designed to be inconvenient risked being domesticated. Deemed unsuitable for the didactic aims of the Auschwitz Museum, the exhibition was closed in 2011 and eventually relocated to Florence. The Memorial’s ability to challenge memory as a source of conflict remains a landmark case in the debate over the restoration of modern works. Following its removal, many memorials in Eastern Europe were demolished.

This article is a study of the results of archaeological research conducted at the site of the former German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Jawischowitz forced labour sub-camp attached to it. It discusses historical objects produced from plastics, as a result of chemical modification of natural products or synthesis of products of chemical processing of coal, oil or natural gas. The history of previous archaeological research at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex and its sub-camps is outlined. The scope and regions of research that were carried out by the authors between 2015 and 2022 are discussed. Plastic products have been characterised by grouping them in terms of raw material and function, distinguishing among other things everyday objects and parts of clothing. On this basis, a comparative base was created, which can serve as a basis for applying a preliminary chronological division of plastic products.

This article discusses the analysis of material discovered during archaeological excavations conducted in the areas of former concentration camps, based on the results of work carried out on the site of the former German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The specificity of the sites from the 20th century forces the development of new research methods and procedures, slightly different from those traditionally used in archaeology. One of the significant problems is the mass nature of the discovered artefacts. These items were substantially made of decay-resistant materials such as plastic, glass or metal alloys. In addition to the amount of acquired items, difficulties are also caused due to the way they are classified and processed. The classifications used in traditional archaeology, focusing primarily on the type of raw material used to produce the artefact, have proven to be unsuitable.

Every year around 3000 British school pupils and teachers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as participants on a Lessons from Auschwitz Project organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Each visit ends with a memorial ceremony held at the end of the railway tracks at Birkenau. This article analyses interview and survey data from participating students and educators to explore their experiences of these ceremonies. The research findings indicate that the context and content of the ceremony are significant for both groups, with a general consensus that the ceremony is an important and appropriate way to end the day visit to Poland and the museum. The students’ responses also particularly raise issues around their emotional engagement with the ceremony and the impact it had on them in this way. In conclusion, this article suggests how similar reflective spaces might be created in other educational contexts at similar sites of memory.

This book provides a chronological account of the Auschwitz concentration camp from the camp's beginning in 1940 right up to its liberation in January 1945, and beyond. Chris Webb manages to find a balance between detailing the sufferings of the victims and the actions, characters, and fates of the perpetrators. He gives, in a concise form, a thorough and deeply disturbing overview of all aspects of Auschwitz and its many satellite camps. In addition, the book contains a vast collection of photographs and documents, some of them never shown in public before. It ends with the 2017 recollections by students who visited Auschwitz from Teesside University.

Witnessing Witnessing focuses critical attention on those who receive the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Questioning the notion that traumatic experience is intrinsically unspeakable and that the Holocaust thus lies in a quasi-sacred realm beyond history, the book asks whether much current theory does not have the effect of silencing the voices of real historical victims. It thereby challenges widely accepted theoretical views about the representation of trauma in general and the Holocaust in particular as set forth by Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Berel Lang, and Dori Laub. It also reconsiders, in the work of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, reflections on ethics and aesthetics after Auschwitz as these pertain to the reception of testimony. Referring at length to videotaped testimony and to texts by Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, and Jorge Semprun, the book aims to make these voices heard. In doing so, it clarifies the problems that anyone receiving testimony may encounter and emphasizes the degree to which listening to survivors depends on listening to ourselves and to one another. Witnessing Witnessing seeks to show how, in the situation of address in which Holocaust survivors call upon us, we discover our own tacit assumptions about the nature of community and the very manner in which we practice it.

This article begins with a short reconstruction of the long-forgotten Death of God movement and its development of the concept of a Radical Theology during the 1960s in the United States of America and in Western Germany (The “Death of God” as a Signature of Secular Culture). In my view, protestant theology and the church have thus far failed to discuss Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “Death of God” as a genuine signature of modernity in a constructive way. In refusing the debate, they did not see the theological potential of the diagnostic and ambiguous metaphor “Death of God” as a “tremendous event still on its way”. With regard to a current perspective on Radical Theology (The Rise of Religious Fundamentalism and the Renaissance of Radical Theology), the intention is a creative and radical interpretation of this heretical concept as a step towards a modern religiosity after (the Death of) God which includes a new awareness of the finitude of human life and of its limitations. The theological symbol of the “Death of God” in my concept of “Heretical Religiosity” leads to a new approach to the theology of wisdom as symbolized in the Hebrew Bible by the book of Ecclesiastes (Heretical Religiosity: Radical Theology and Wisdom Literature in the Hebrew Bible).