Finding liberation through literature: Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel

A World of Camps Jonas Kreienbaum Bettina Greiner and Alan Kramer, eds., Die Welt der Lager: Zur “Erfolgsgeschichte” einer Institution (The World of the Camps: The “Success Story” of an Institution). 359 pp. Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 2013. ISBN-13 978-3868542677. €32.00. Internment camps are an essential part of modern history. From the first so-called “concentration camps” during the South African War (1899–1902) to present-day Guantánamo, they span the entire 20th century. They include, among many others, the prisoner-of-war (POW) camps in both world wars and the totalitarian camps in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and China. In consideration of its widespread use, Giorgio Agamben has recently dubbed the camp the “ ‘nomos’ of the modern,” while Zygmunt Bauman views the 20th century as the “century of camps.”1 Considering the omnipresence of camps, Bettina Greiner and Alan Kramer—the editors of the volume Die Welt der Lager under review here—provocatively speak of a “ ‘success story’ of an institution.”2 But, Kramer asks in his introduction, what made it so successful? Which factors contributed to the camp’s longevity and mutability (7)? These questions are the departure point of the collection, which evolved from a major international conference on camps held in Berlin in April 2011.3 [End Page 896] Three sets of subquestions dealing with (1) the origins of camps, (2) the term “camp” itself, and (3) the change in camps’ functions guide the 13 historical essays on “representative examples” (7) of camp systems. Most of the texts, all written by renowned camp specialists, focus on concentration camps, while others deal with POWs, civilian internment, and deportee camps to situate “the phenomenon in a broader context” (9). A section of 34 pictures of camps and internees, from a 1797 painting of the Norman Cross POW camp to a 2004 photo of Chinese prisoners, accompany the articles. In this review I will not discuss every single article but will instead focus on the three big themes—origins, terminology, and functional evolution— addressing only those texts that contribute most significantly to illuminating the problem in question. Looking for the origins of internment camps, both in general and in the case of particular camp systems, is highly important and actually a novelty in camp research. Even existing global histories on camps have asked few questions about processes of learning and information transfer, which may have helped spread the camp idea from one place to another.4 This blind spot in camp research—its neglect of transnational connections—may well have obscured one of the most compelling answers to the question of why internment camps have appeared so frequently in the 20th century: namely, because the camp concept was adopted based on international precedents. A transnational approach, focusing on processes of learning, is especially pronounced in the texts of Alan Kramer, Andreas Stucki, and Bettina Greiner. Kramer, in his overview, looks at different possible connections between colonial, World War I, and subsequent camp systems. For the Soviet camps he notes that the term “concentration camp” had been introduced into Russian during the South African War, while it was mainly the experiences with POW camps during the Great War that shaped the concentration camps of the Russian Civil War that followed (22). Stucki focuses on one particular case and asks whether the process of “reconcentration” on Cuba, whereby more than 400,000 civilians were resettled by Spanish troops during the War of Independence (1895–98), created a precedent that was subsequently followed by other imperial powers, starting with Britain in South Africa? Stucki reveals that it was mainly critics of the British camp policy in South Africa who linked it to the notorious Spanish role model in order to delegitimize it. Those decision makers who established the camps [End Page 897] in South Africa did not refer to Cuba, and it is therefore impossible directly to prove a process of learning, however likely it may seem in hindsight (82–86). Finally, Bettina Greiner highlights the importance of the “import of Soviet legal conceptions and practices” (297), which greatly influenced the way the so called “special camps” were run in the Soviet-occupied part of Germany between 1946...

During August 1942 several women jumped to their deaths from a second story window at the tile factory in the small town of Milles near Aix-en-Provence. Between 1939 and 1942 the factory assumed various roles as internment camp, transit camp and ultimately deportation camp. This book is about the view from the ‘suicide window’ as it is presented within the Camp des Milles memorial museum which opened in 2012. It explores how this view might help us to understand and imagine the world of internment and deportation camps operating in France during the Second World War and their memorial today. The book uses the views framed by the window to think critically about the museography of the memorial within the wider context of France’s relatively late acknowledgment of its role in the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War.

In early 1939, after retreat from Catalonia, more than 50 Latvians, former participants of the Spanish Civil War, crossed Spanish–French border and ended up in internment camps in France. The aim of the current article is to give an overview and analyse the experience of Latvian men in internment camps. The article focuses on social activities and mutual relations, living conditions and their differences in internment camps in Saint-Cyprien, Argelès-sur-Mer, Gurs, Le Vernet etc., considering the beginning of the Second World War and the establishment of Vichy regime. Furthermore, the attitude of Latvian authorities towards Latvian citizens and possibilities for Latvian men to depart from the internment camps in France have been considered.

There are clear signs of control and repression in the architecture and layout of most internment camps, but internment camps were not the only form of institutional accommodation present in the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Comparison of a prisoner of war camp and a forestry work camp, both in Scotland, reveals similarities and differences between the two. The similarities highlight issues of control and authority, while the differences reveal issues of repression and punishment. The comparison also reveals much about official mind-set in the United Kingdom during the Second World War.

Reviews 203 The First World War as a Caesura? Demographic Concepts, Population Policy, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Spheres. (Gewaltpolitik und Menschenrechte, vol. 3). Edited by christin pschichholz. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020. 247 pp. €49.90. ISBN 978–3-428–18146–9. This thought-provoking volume is the product of a 2016 conference organized by Christin Pschichholz in conjunction with the University of Potsdam and the Lepsiushaus Potsdam. Its aim is to place the 1915–16 Turkish genocide against the Ottoman Armenians in a broader regional context while also examining the cross-border connectedness of radical population policies during what Ronald Suny, borrowing from Domenico Losurdo and Enzo Traverso, calls the ‘international civil war’ that began in 1914 (p. 13). All of the contributors — with the partial exception of Peter Holquist, who identifies 1905–07 as a significant moment linking Tsarist population policy and revolutionary, classbased violence in Russia in 1917–21 — agree implicitly or explicitly that the First World War was a caesura. Yet by comparing the ‘unprecedented dimensions of demographic engineering’ (p. 7) in the late Ottoman, Tsarist and Habsburg empires, they also tease out important differences between them. For Ottoman Turkey, as both Hans-Lukas Kieser and Oktay Özel show, the year 1913/14 was critical in terms of setting the political goal of ethnic homogenization of Anatolia as the heartland of a new, regenerated empire following the loss of the Sultan’s last remaining territories in North Africa and Europe (with the exception of Edirne, recovered from Bulgaria in July 1913 after the Second Balkan War). Talk of ‘microbes’ that needed to be ‘removed’ from the empire’s territorial ‘body’ emerged in 1913 and fed directly into the 1915–16 genocide. By then the entire Armenian population — women, children and older men as well as younger males — were identified as an internal enemy or ‘fifth column’ (pp. 89–90). In Tsarist Russia, there was no actual genocide, although Holquist mentions the Imperial army’s suppression of the 1916 Central Asian uprising as getting close to this. There were also the mass deportations of various population groups — Jews, Germans, Baltic peoples and others — from the western borderlands to the interior in 1914/15. What this had in common with policy in the Ottoman empire was the identification of particular ethnic communities as a permanent security threat, thereby legitimizing ‘exceptional’ state action, and — in wartime — the extension of violence to the entire ‘enemy’ civilian population, whether that population was to be found in home or occupied territory. This was as much a ‘western’ as an ‘eastern’ phenomenon, as Mark Levene, Arno Barth and other contributors stress. When British diplomats sought to restrain Russian violence against Jews in 1915, this was not a straightforward public-spirited gesture (as western criticisms of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 perhaps had been) but became entangled with narrative strategies that ‘securitized’ the Jewish question, in other words, turned it into a security Reviews 204 issue not just internally for Russia, but internationally too. New demographic concepts of borderland protection, cultural identity and world order — ‘often [expressed] in the most phobic and paranoid terms’, to quote Levene (p. 41) — meant that Jewish (and German) populations globally could now be seen and spoken of as a potential threat to the unity of the Allied cause. A similar dynamic was at work in the anti-German riots that took place in Moscow, in the UK and in many parts of the British empire, again in 1915. Where does this leave Austria-Hungary? Certainly the behaviour of the empire’s military leadership towards border populations in East Galicia and Bukovina, annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina and occupied Serbia, and on the frontiers with the Kingdom of Italy, especially in 1914–15, evinces a similar pattern of sanctioning ethnic violence under the guise of defending imperial territory. Internment camps such as Thalerhof near Graz, mentioned by Serhiy Choliy in his contribution, are a case in point. However, compared to the Ottoman and Russian spheres, there was no drive towards full-scale national/ cultural homogenization in the Dual Monarchy. True, as Hannes Leidinger argues, there was a ‘systematization of hatred’ against Serb ‘terrorists’, Ukrainian ‘russophiles’ and Italian...

Reviewed by: A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe: Unwilling Nomads in the Age of Two World Wars ed. by Bastiaan Willems and Michal Adam Palacz E. A. Hatto Willems, Bastiaan and Palacz, Michal Adam (eds). A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe: Unwilling Nomads in the Age of Two World Wars. Bloomsbury Academic, London, New York and Dublin, 2022. xv + 279 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £85.00; £76.50 (e-book). Bastiaan Willems and Michal Adam Palacz's edited volume, A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe, constitutes a profound, synthesized study of mass population displacement in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Each chapter contributes the examination of a particular refugee movement to this collaborative volume, with a heavy focus on those caused, directly or indirectly, by the World Wars and their ramifications — most notably, the remapping of Europe as these conflicts resulted in the creation of new states following World War One and the shifting of state borders after World War Two. Additional chapters focus on mass displacement resulting from 1930s fascism, in the form of the Spanish Civil War and Nazi Germany's persecution of its Jewish population. The result is a series of snapshots of the European refugee experience in this period. In the volume's introduction, Willems and Palacz identify four key components of diasporic interactions which can be observed within European population displacements in the first half of the twentieth century: those with the host society, homeland, other members of the diaspora and other diasporas within the host society. The first three are well-established within the existing historiography, while the fourth is a new element proposed by Willems and Palacz. They argue that considering the influence of diaspora interactions upon one another, in addition to understanding all four of these components as a spectrum varying on account of factors such as socio-economic circumstances, ethnicity, religion, age and gender, allows for a more complete, multifaceted understanding of European forced migration in this period. The subsequent chapters, however, do not respond rigidly to this theoretical framework in its entirety. Rather, their respective authors focus on those components which they perceive as most noteworthy in terms of their focal [End Page 179] diaspora's experiences. Serhiy Choliy's chapter on the Habsburg Empire's World War One internments of those among its Galician population it perceived as potential enemies — mostly Ruthenians and Jews — places the strongest emphasis upon the volume's proposed four-dimensional model of diaspora interactions. This, along with Egor Lykov's contribution arguing that these Habsburg internment camps exposed all internees, regardless of ethnicity and political affiliation, to the same poor conditions on account of their shared socio-economic background, and Diego Han's work on the Croatian population evacuated inland from strategic port cities on the Istrian coast, illustrate how the artificial and temporary environments of such camps isolated these diasporas from typical host society interactions. These chapters argue that temporary diasporas often did not produce lasting identities; this is particularly evident in the case of the Ruthenian internees, who lacked a recognized Ruthenian region to return to altogether. The snapshot structure allows subsequent chapters to illustrate how this aspect of the internment camp experience was not, however, universal in the first half of the twentieth century. Lennart Onken argues that in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Jewish survivors at Bergen-Belsen built their own diaspora identity through self-organization, in order to address the issue of their post-war statelessness. Onken's contibution can also be viewed as a case of inter-diaspora interaction, in that the establishment of purely Jewish displaced persons camps at Bergen-Belson created one Jewish community from those previously divided between separate European states. A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe's format also allows for the exploration of forced migrant interactions with host societies which would become places of permanent settlement, as well as a variety of thematic approaches and focuses. A particular highlight is Jill Meißner-Wolfbeisser's contribution on the career of New York librarian Stefi Kielser, and the pivotal role she played in both introducing German and...

This article examines photographic representations of an internment camp where the Canadian government held thousands of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. The photographs were illegally taken by internees from the Tashme internment camp and were subsequently donated to the Japanese Canadian National Museum. The representations of the camp are strikingly different. One set of photographs presents the harsh living conditions in Tashme and the other, idyllic scenes of ‘nature’ where the camp was located. With the retrospective knowledge that the internment camps were part of a larger plan to systematically remove ‘all people of the Japanese race’ from Canada, it is difficult not read the ‘nature’ photographs as shocking denials of reality. The article resists this reading and instead explores what each set of representations says about how the internees perceived the camps. A closer analysis of each set of photographs reveals signs of life as well as substitutions for what would have been difficult to bear seeing: the pain, humiliation and dissolution of community life. I argue that the photographs were a means to visually re‐configure the bleak hopeless spaces of incarceration and invoke a future, which is essential in the complex process of psychic survival. Using the work of Christian Metz, the article analyzes both sets of photographs as fetish objects that preserve what has been lost (the pre‐war community) while averting the gaze from painful events (the dissolution of community and family life in the camps). While acknowledging the dangers of averting the gaze and disavowal, the article explores how the photographs can help in the process of mourning loss.

After President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, 110,000 to 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese decent were moved into Internment Camps. Of these internees, roughly 62% were citizens of the United States of America. Because the Sansei (third generation, Japanese Americans) largely did not experience the Internment Camps, Sansei writers have a different perspective from Issei and Nisei writers. Sansei writers have a unique emotional and aesthetic distance that creates a type of literature specifically different from Issei and Nisei literature. The Sansei may not have experienced the Internment Camps, but this generation is still active in artistically preserving this event. The Japanese Internment Camps of World War II is arguably the most important historical event that shaped Japanese-American ethnic and cultural identity. Removed from the event itself, much of Sansei literature explores how the Internment Camps relate to and affect the Sansei generation. Because of this tension, the Sansei feel obligated to retell the experiences of the Internment and/or acknowledge the role of the Internment as it shapes the Sansei a generation later. I call this Sansei obligation to the Internment Camps, "guilt from secondary victimization." This thesis explores this psychological issue as a main factor that motivates Sansei writers to react to and express their feelings regarding the Internment Camp experience.

This chapter looks at the numbers of internees and the places of confinement. It examines internment practices after 1914. The chapter presents an example of the internment camp at Traunstein in Upper Bavaria, which will reveal a snapshot of the complexities and inconsistencies of internment in Germany during the First World War. Then, the case of the Belgian forced labourers is presented because labour played a far more important role in the experience of civilian internment than hitherto acknowledged. Internment camps are also places where history condenses into space, as the example of Traunstein clearly illustrates. The internment camp at Traunstein displays the multifaceted reality of internment in First World War Germany. After the deportation fiasco, the German authorities in the General-Government oriented their labour policies towards an aggressive recruitment drive, which was pursued on an even larger scale. By mid-1918, approximately 130,000 Belgian civilian workers – who were not forced labourers by definition – were working in Germany.

The paper “Black Monasteries”: Hungarian and Italian Literature and Popular Writing in the First World War analyzes War literature and the directly related literature about internment camps, both relating to the First World War, which had a different development in Hungary and Italy; however, similar features can be found in them. Regarding these aspects, this essay examines some works, starting from the Black Monastery [Fekete kolostor] by Aladár Kuncz and other novels and “reportage novels” (Siberian garrison [Szibériai garnizon], by Rodion Markovits) of the same period. Their characteristic traits are peculiar and common with Italian works (i.e. Un anno sull’altipiano, by Emilio Lussu, Taccuino di Caporetto, by Carlo Emilio Gadda), while the final part of the essay concerns popular writing and its role in the literature, based on the experience in internment camps and war literature through studies and research that focus on the correspondence with families and friends of soldiers and internees from many European countries.

Mainstream discourse about Japanese North Americans has been less thoroughly analysed than discourse towards more populous North American minorities. The racist nature of this discourse became obvious during the Second World War and the discourse about their incarceration, despite their being citizens, in internment camps. There are three types of data for this political discourse: (a) the official orders by the US President, the Secretary of War and the US regional Defense Commands; (b) the Congressional hearings to confirm the government decision on the need for internment through testimony by state officials and anti-Asian lobbies; and (c) the report on censorship of internment camp conditions which attempts to justify the censorship of information about Japanese North Americans. This paper shows how this discourse was primarily performative: what began as anti-Japanese North American rhetoric was soon codified as a national policy to remove Japanese North Americans from their homes and businesses and to silence more direct information from Japanese North Americans themselves. The discourse shows two main features: (1) the pragmatics of collusion, in which privately made government decisions are `confirmed' through public discussion or hearings; and (2) the discourse of justification, in which overtly anti-democratic actions are both legalized and justified in the same discourse.

The arrival of Japanese immigrants, especially karayuki-san, traders, and farmers in Sarawak between the 1880s and1940s, has rarely been given sufficient attention by scholars. For the most part, not only did the Japanese immigrants successfully integrate into the economic eco-system, but they also assimilated with the locals through inter-marriages. Archival records, primarily obtained from the Sarawak State Archives, suggests that families of inter-ethnic marriages went through a life of hardship, especially when Japanese spouses or relatives were imprisoned in the internment camps soon after World War Two ended. For the most part, the research mainly focuses on Seiji Kuno or otherwise known as Mohamed Towpik Kuno, who married a local Malay woman and embraced Islam. The life of Kuno depicts the extent to which a Japanese immigrant became absorbed into the dominant culture of the mainstream Sarawak society. Kuno’s general attitude towards the local society, his service to the community in various capacities, his attitude towards political matters and finally, his religious inclination showcased the extent to which assimilation had taken place voluntarily. Apart from Kuno, the research also examines other personalities’ lives, like Sunao Miyaji, who was married to Lamah Binti Bakar, and Maria Osaichi and Oasa, who were Japanese immigrants married to Chinese Sarawakians. It is against this background that this research argues that marriages between Japanese immigrants and locals in Sarawak before World War Two was indeed a cause for further assimilation into the host culture between spouses, family members and the broader community. At the same time, the research posits that cemeteries involving Japanese immigrants should be promoted as tourist destinations as they reflect Sarawak’s rich multicultural heritage and history of assimilation with foreigners.

Camp Hood and North Camp Hood were two Second World War internment camps for German Prisoners of War (PoWs) located within the boundaries of Fort Hood, Texas. Since the end of the war, the structures assigned to temporary Second World War functions have been mostly destroyed. One camp was eradicated by the continual growth of the Fort Hood cantonment area. The location of the razed second camp is presently vacant and overgrown, but endangered by Fort Hood’s future growth. Limited excavations of North Camp Hood Internment Camp and extensive scrutiny of archival documentation have recovered the requisite information to advise that the site is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. The present military situation of reduced cultural resource funding and the expansion of training facilities, however, threaten to elide this important component of American military heritage. This chapter presents the results of the archaeological investigation of the PoW camp at Fort Hood, and examines the challenges to preserving this vestige of the American Home Front of the Second World War.

During the First World War, German and British citizens in British and German colonies in East Africa were placed in internment camps. Men, women and children were separated and transferred over imperial boundaries to keep enemy citizens apart from their erstwhile colonial lives. Amongst the interned were many Protestant missionaries and their families, who had not expected to be affected by the European war and believed themselves above worldly politics. This article examines reports from British and German missionaries, focusing on the narratives of three men interned and deported from East Africa: a German in British East Africa; a British man in German East Africa; and a German in German East Africa. By attending to this array of voices, the article can demonstrate how religious figures adopted a political stand in their denunciation of enemy policy towards missionaries. The prewar Anglo-German relationship between Protestant missions in East Africa had been characterized by collaboration, and offers of assistance were made in the early months of the war. Once missionaries had been interned, however, the relationship was severely damaged, and it remained so in the decades after the First World War.

Throughout the Second World War, the United States took part in a series of personnel exchanges with the Third Reich and other belligerent nations. These delicate operations initially focused on diplomatic personnel and other prominent individuals trapped on both sides of the Atlantic when the U.S. entered the war. However, the evolving series of exchanges rapidly expanded to include civilians who had been interned by both sides, including ordinary men, women, and children. American officials were eager to repatriate U.S. citizens who had been caught up in the Reich or occupied countries, while they also proved eager to expel German Americans who had been detained on U.S. soil at the outbreak of war and now languished in internment camps. Many of these individuals and families would consequently end up being sent to the Reich, including in some cases American citizens. This article examines the development and dynamics of the U.S.-German civilian exchange program during the war and immediately after to explore how and why both governments were willing to take part, the domestic political calculations and geopolitical factors that impacted its direction, and the human impact of internment, detention, and repatriation in the midst of a world war.