Members' Research Report Archive
Cultural Fantasies, Ideological Goals, and Political Economic Realities: The Built Environment at Auschwitz
Paul B. Jaskot, DePaul University
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow, September 1–October 31, 2012
Few subjects are less suited to the aesthetic and intellectual considerations of art-historical debate than the banal everyday architecture of the SS concentration camp at Auschwitz. Although the camp has had a central position in historical studies, it has, with rare exceptions, rated no more than a mention in art history as a backdrop to postwar memorialization. And yet, the archive of the camp’s architectural office is one of the largest depositories of evidence we have of a single building office’s activity during the Nazi regime. Looking at both the archival record and a digital reconstruction of the design of the space that also visualizes construction patterns over time, my project asks what these varied spaces and structures, which may be considered to represent an urban vernacular, tell us about the perpetrators and their architectural goals as well as the victims and their experience of the built environment.
To get to this question, the study focuses particularly on the relatively little-analyzed period after the finalization of what the SS considered its ideal comprehensive plan in early 1943. Much of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other key sites of the Auschwitz environment were vast construction zones at this time. Building activity shifted between the long-term goals of the ideal plan and the short-term needs of both genocide and forced labor. This project uses the analysis of architectural plans related to Auschwitz, changes in what may be considered its urban design, and realized SS structures to investigate spatial relationships, cultural values, and political realities as they developed both before and after spring 1943. In addition, with my collaborator, the historical geographer Anne Kelly Knowles, I will investigate these problems not only through archival evidence but also through the visualization of that archive through geographic information systems (GIS) and other digital means.
At CASVA, I was able to further this work by expanding my historical analysis in two ways. First, I had access through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the archival record of the SS Zentralbauleitung (central building administration), which extended the primary source materials at the base of our study. Second, I began to synthesize these results with fundamental aspects of art-historical thought. In broad terms, the question was, how can digital-humanities concepts of scale and a systemwide (network) analysis be suggestively brought into dialogue with art history? The work of Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) on the social history of art proved especially fruitful in exploring this question. Hauser’s key book, The Philosophy of Art History, as well as his myriad essays, both well known and obscure, available in the National Gallery of Art Library, provided a crucial means of expanding on what is art
Center 33 (includes image not shown here)
Paul B. Jaskot, DePaul University
Andrew W. Mellon Professor, 2014–2016
Mapping the Construction Industry in Interwar Germany (1914–1945): Digital Methods and Architectural Historical Sources
Paul B. Jaskot, DePaul University
Andrew W. Mellon Professor, 2015–2016