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UBC: The Theory and Practice of Hell
Jan. 28th, 2009 09:57 pmKogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. [Der SS-Staat, 1946.] Transl. Heinz Norden. 1950. Introd. Nikolaus Wachsmann. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
But first, a sidenote:
( about Nazis and indirect discourse )
And while I'm throwing out tangents, here's another one:
( about the development of the Final Solution )
The Theory and Practice of Hell was written by an Austrian Catholic who survived Buchenwald from 1939 to the liberation of the camp in 1945. The book is based on the report he wrote for the Allies, explaining the system of concentration camps and extermination camps. It has the defects of its virtues: Kogon is clearly a child of his times, and you can see some of the same ideas about race and class and biology in his thinking that were distorted and exaggerated into monstrosity and genocide by the Nazis. But he is also doing his best to be clear, to explain. He doesn't try to write a hagiography of the prisoners, but instead does his best to explain the way the camp hierarchy and politics worked. And his book is a testament, not only to basic, brute survival (and reading it, you start to wonder how anyone, any single solitary human being, survived the concentration camps, much less survived for years on end), but to the survival of the things that make us more than brutes.
But first, a sidenote:
( about Nazis and indirect discourse )And while I'm throwing out tangents, here's another one:
( about the development of the Final Solution )The Theory and Practice of Hell was written by an Austrian Catholic who survived Buchenwald from 1939 to the liberation of the camp in 1945. The book is based on the report he wrote for the Allies, explaining the system of concentration camps and extermination camps. It has the defects of its virtues: Kogon is clearly a child of his times, and you can see some of the same ideas about race and class and biology in his thinking that were distorted and exaggerated into monstrosity and genocide by the Nazis. But he is also doing his best to be clear, to explain. He doesn't try to write a hagiography of the prisoners, but instead does his best to explain the way the camp hierarchy and politics worked. And his book is a testament, not only to basic, brute survival (and reading it, you start to wonder how anyone, any single solitary human being, survived the concentration camps, much less survived for years on end), but to the survival of the things that make us more than brutes.
