The führer gives the Jews a town: Impression management, homo dramaticus, and bare life in Theresienstadt

Abstract

In 1941, the Czech garrison town of Terezín (or, in German, Theresienstadt) was selected by the Nazis to serve as a ghetto and transport camp.2 But Theresienstadt is perhaps most well known as the stage upon which the Nazis enacted a massive charade. Imagined as a ‘model ghetto’ since the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, Theresienstadt was eventually ‘beautified’ in preparation for a June 1944 visit by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Danish government, as well as to serve as the set for a documentary about life in the camp, filmed that same year. In this paper, I draw upon Erving Goffman’s (1993/1959) dramaturgy and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990a, 1990b) practice theory to identify various mechanisms of misrepresentation that made possible the adoption of a ‘normalizing performativity’ within Theresienstadt’s carceral space. This theoretical approach serves two purposes. First, it is used to describe the technical details of how the Nazi regime attempted to foster and manage a false impression of Theresienstadt. Second, the performativity of Theresienstadt is argued to offer a compelling frame for understanding contemporary biopolitical life, and therefore is presented as a competing metaphor of ‘camp’, which Agamben (2000: 44.5) describes as the ‘new biopolitical nomos of the planet’. In particular, it is suggested that Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer reduced to bare life fails to capture the persistence of human agency and performativity (homo dramaticus) in even the most regimented and brutal conditions.