KZ Dachau

This dissertation project breathes life into the sensate worlds of the National Socialist Konzentrationslager (KZ) system in Germany and Austria—particularly the camps of Dachau (1933, expanded in 1937), Buchenwald (1937), and Mauthausen (1938).

Like many sensory historians, I ensconce that the senses are vivid and potent points of departure to any social, cultural, or political critique on any given historical period or context. Therefore, by dovetailing historical methods and literary criticism with approaches from related social disciplines, I attune the senses of inmates and perpetrators as heuristic leitmotifs to orchestrate a deep sensory history of activity, entropy, modernity, humanity, and anti-humanity in the KZ system. Accordingly, I focus on the following comprehensive issues that lead to meaningful implications: the writing and reconsidering of concentration camp histories that prioritize the senses; the entangled processes of construction, operation, collaboration, and friction of the senses in the camps—particularly how inmates and perpetrators made sense of their everyday lives, how their senses informed their emotions, behaviors, decisions, and engagement not only with each other but also with material objects, architectural and artificial structures, stray spaces, and the natural environment; how the senses experienced multifurcation, democratization, augmentation, alteration, manipulation, repression, politicization, and perhaps even transmogrification inside the camps; and lastly, how the events of war, Nazi bureaucracy, industrial modernity and technology, systems of totalitarian power, patterns of dehumanization, everyday violence and sadism, human putrescence and environmental decay, racialized discrimination (specifically, antisemitism), and other facets of Nazism sensorially manifested within the thorny boundaries of the camps. Taken altogether, this also encourages worthwhile dialogue in framing the camps as necrotic ecological sites in concert with ideologies, slogans, and policies that speak to the Nazi Weltanshcauung such as, but not limited to, the Blut und Boden (“blood and soil”), Lebensraum (“living space”), and the utopian Volkgemeinschaft (“people’s community”).

A counterhistory grounded primarily on egodocuments, vernacular histories, and material remains of ordinary people, my project attempts to rupture official and popular metanarratives and show how an attendance to the social, political, and cultural life and afterlife of the sensoria reveals the textured dynamics and spectral echoes of Konzentrationslager experience. “Sensing Death-Worlds,” therefore, is a deep, contrapuntal, and sentient history of the concentration camps that accounts for the full human experience of Nazi terror. It strives to enrich how we perceive and engage with the histories and memories of the Holocaust today.