Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps

Michaela Wolf, Michaela Wolf

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501313271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This significant new study is concerned with the role of interpreting in Nazi concentration camps, where prisoners were of 30 to 40 different nationalities. With German as the only official language in the lager, communication was vital to the prisoners' survival. While in the last few decades there has been extensive research on the language used by the camp inmates, investigation into the mediating role of interpreters between SS guards and prisoners on the one hand, and among inmates on the other, has been almost nonexistent. On the basis of Primo Levi's considerations on communication in the Nazi concentrationary system, this book investigates the ambivalent role of interpreting in the camps. One of the central questions is what the role of interpreting was in the wider context of shaping life in concentration camps. And in what way did the knowledge of languages, and accordingly, certain communication skills, contribute to the survival of concentration camp inmates and of the interpreting person? The main sources under investigation are both archive materials and survivors' memoirs and testimonials in various languages. On a different level, Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps also asks in what way the study of communication in concentration camps enhances our understanding of the ambiguous role of interpreting in more general terms. And in what way does the study of interpreting in concentration camps shape an interpreting concept which can help us to better understand the violent nature of interpreting in contexts other than the Holocaust?

Part One

The Concentration Camp Universe

1

The Camp Society: Approaches to Social Structure and Ordinary Life in Nazi Concentration Camps

Alexander Prenninger

Introduction

Imre Kertész concludes his novel Fatelessness with the protagonist Gyuri’s following words:

For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps. (Kertész 2004: 452)

Survivors of the Holocaust and the concentration camps were often profoundly traumatized by their experiences in the camps. The disturbing message of Fatelessness, however, is that those who survived the camps do not only remember death, torture, exhausting forced labor, hunger, and diseases, but also experienced moments of leisure time, of friendship and love, and even, as Kertész writes, of happiness. Certainly, these moments were rare compared to the hardships of everyday life and the death of so many.

Beyond the struggle for survival, the reports of survivors also reveal such moments as described by Gyuri, the protagonist of Kertész’s novel. Jakob Maestro, for example, a Greek Jew from Salonica, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 16. In Salonica, he had worked as a shoeshine boy and learned some German words by serving German soldiers. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, he was selected as an interpreter and rapidly advanced to the position of a translator in the Arbeitseinsatz (allocation of labor). He lived in the Prominentenblock, barracks for Kapos in higher positions, and was given a tailor-made suit, shoes, and many things he never had had during his life on the streets of Salonica. In his testimony, he comes to the conclusion: “To tell the truth, I had a better life than at home” (Maestro 2002). Of course, Maestro is telling an extraordinary story, but there are many other examples: Ukrainians, who did not find life in the camp that hard compared to their suffering during the famine of 1932–33; Spanish survivors who are still proud to have constructed Mauthausen, etc.

Experiences like Jakob Maestro’s contrast sharply with a major trend in concentration camp research, which focuses primarily on the struggle for survival, particularly by highlighting the role of solidarity among prisoners, or by presenting the prisoners as a coerced mass which is subjected to the total power of the SS guards. How survival was possible is indeed a key question that is brought up by most survivors in their testimonies. The answers provided by both survivors and researchers are, however, often based on an evaluation of behavior from a point of view guided by moral principles. The question of survival and especially that of strategies for survival ought therefore to be extended and we should rather ask: How was it possible to live in a concentration camp? To what extent could prisoners organize their everyday life in the camps? Was there something that could be described as a camp society? Many researchers have postulated the notion of camp or inmate society. The answers, however, depend by and large on the acceptance or rejection of the idea that something akin to a social life existed under the conditions of a camp.

As a full analysis of social life in the concentration camps is beyond the scope of this chapter, I would like to reflect on three aspects which seem crucial to an attempt to understand the camp society. My reflections are based on an evaluation of concentration camp research from its very beginnings up to the present day. Firstly, it is important to distinguish the type of camp under study; secondly, I will focus on explanations of survival; and thirdly, I will discuss two opposing models of camp society. I will distinguish between two major lines of interpretation: the first, ranging from Hannah Arendt to Wolfgang Sofsky or Giorgio Agamben, denies any social quality with regard to prisoners and guards living together in the concentration camps and leans toward a vertical approach based on total power, reducing the prisoners to a collected mass. In contrast, a different approach suggests that the social space in the camps can be interpreted as being characterized by structures which resembled, by and large, those existing in civilian societies at the time. In addition to the classification of prisoners as imposed by the SS, this viewpoint posits that social life in the camps was also shaped by the prisoners’ divergent cultural, social, religious, ethnic, and political backgrounds.

Typologies of the camp

An analysis of concentration camp survivors’ testimonies has to take two important factors into consideration. First, that “the camp” did not exist as one unique type over the whole period of the National Socialist regime, as is often mistakenly suggested in scholarly research. A series of important sociological and psychological investigations published by survivors illustrate very specific, individual experiences of the camps. Bruno Bettelheim’s writing, for instance, which first appeared in 1943, is shaped profoundly by his own imprisonment in Buchenwald in 1938–39. His experience was part of the mass imprisonment of German Jews in November 1938, together with a successive worsening of living standards to a degree that was unknown until then, and he left the camp within a few months in order to emigrate. His analysis is limited by the specific experience of a concentration camp before the war, where only Germans and Austrians were interned. This experience and the resulting perspective do not account for the later period during the war, which saw several significant transformations of the camp system, not least with the arrival of masses of prisoners from the occupied territories all over Europe, the development of huge networks of branch camps in 1942–43, and the overcrowding in the camps in the last phase of the war, including mass deaths of prisoners. These limitations of perspective are also evident in the work of other survivor-researchers such as Elie Cohen (1954), Ernst Federn (1948), or Paul Martin Neurath (1951/2004).

A second strand of concentration camp studies presents the camp as a generic type or ideal without taking into account chronological or typological differences within the concentration camp system. This conception of the camps results from fictional constructions in the minds of both scholars and the broader public and is based neither on history nor on empirical research. Although such an accusation might be seen as somewhat unfair, this approach is evident in German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky’s nonetheless inspiring study (1997). Sofsky does not analyze a “real” camp, but a constructed notion of a camp: he describes the camp as an instrument of terror and mass killing and delivers a sociological model of a community defined by force. However, the fictional camp does have traits pertaining to a specific period and type of camp: it is a “main camp” (Stammlager) for male prisoners in the second half of the war, which was shaped by the national and ethnic heterogeneity of its inmates and the use of prisoners for forced labor (Orth and Wildt 1995).

A further trend, in recent years, is to speak about “camps” in a highly general way without going into detail with regard to the specific functions of specific camps. Philosophical reflections in particular that address the “camps” or even the “century of camps” (Kotek and Rigoulet 2000) tend to fail to clarify what is meant by the term “camp.” In his “homo sacer” project, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben tried to explain the camp as the bio-political paradigm of modernity or the nomós of the modern: “The camp is merely the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized” (Agamben 1998: 166). Agamben is not interested in the “events that took place” and does not interpret the camp “as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living” (Agamben 1998: 166). Agamben’s reflections have been criticized not only for the lack of any definition of the camp but even more for the disregard for differences between concentration camps and extermination camps (e.g., Schwarte 2007, Pelt 2011). Similarly, the notion of “death camps” mixes up a complex amalgamation of annihilation and deportation in both types of camps.

These findings should not be seen as an argument against generalization and comparison. Life in the concentration camps was never a single permanent or stable condition from arrival to liberation. Concentration camps are rather characterized by a fluidity of conditions in relation to chronological, spatial, and typological aspects. Most survivors, in their accounts, accentuate the different experiences they had in different camps. The key question, however, which is raised in almost every account, is why and how they survived.

Survival factors

Survivors proffer a series of different reasons for their survival: God, luck, the support of friends, or international solidarity among the prisoners are some of the most frequent explanations. Approaching the issue from the perspective of academic research, I am going to present two different answers to the question of why some prisoners survived and others died. The two antithetic explanatory models are based on pedagogical-psychological theories on the one hand and biological-genetic theories on the other. The first model was developed by Bruno Bettelheim and followed by others, and is based on Bettelheim’s concept of an “autonomous personality.” According to this concept, human beings develop from a state of total dependency as a child and go through a process of maturing to a personality with “consciousness of freedom,” independent of a given social environment: self-respect and decision-making abilities are “at the heart of man’s autonomous existence” (Bettelheim 1960: 69). In the extreme situation of the concentration camp, “efforts to deprive the prisoners of even the smallest remnants of their autonomy were particularly vicious and all-pervasive” (Bettelheim 1979: 108):

If he was not murdered, how well a person was able to survive depended on how well he managed to maintain if not some of his autonomy, at least some of his self-respect and the meaning his relations to others had for him. On the other hand, how soon and completely he lost all of his autonomy, and how far the disintegration of his personality went were mainly conditioned by two factors: the severity of traumatization he was subjected to, as objectively evaluated; and how shattering it was experienced subjectively by him. (Bettelheim 1979: 108)

Thus, survival depended on a more or less successful process of adjustment to the camp situation, a process which was greatly influenced by the level of personal autonomy developed in the pre-camp period. However, the development of survival mechanisms from the outset to the final stage, for example, through detachment and denial of the reality of the camp, resulted, in Bettelheim’s analysis, in a “personality structure willing and able to accept SS values and behavior as its own” (Bettelheim 1960: 127). Critique of Bettelheim’s “autonomous personality” concept focused first on this theory of “identification with the aggressor,” secondly on the pathological implications of the prisoners’ “regression into childlike behaviour,” and thirdly, on the moral implications of a theory that is simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive, as seminally formulated by Michael Pollak (2000: 14–15).¹

The second explanatory model is that of Terrence Des Pres, who, along with other authors, represents the viewpoint that prisoners had to adapt to the camp situation from an “initial shock” to “a second stage, characterized by reintegration and recovery of stable selfhood” and that through such adjustments “they emerged from their dream-state to face what had to be faced” (Des Pres 1980: 76–7). However, Des Pres provides a totally different explanation to Bettelheim regarding how prisoners came to that second stage. Concentration camp behavior, for him, cannot be compared with behavior “in civilized circumstances” but “was governed by immediate death-threat” (Des Pres 1980: 56–7). The ability to act derives here from “nature itself”:

Survivors act as if they were prepared for extremity; as if anterior to learning and acculturation there were a deeper knowledge, an elder wisdom, a substratum of vital information biologically instilled and biologically effective. We may at least speculate that through long periods of extremity, survival depends on life literally—life, that is, as the biologists see it, not as a state or condition but as a set of activities evolved through time in successful response to crisis, the sole purpose of which is to keep going. Life continues, defends itself, expands. It does this by answering environmental challenges with countless behavioral patterns designed to deal with disturbance and threat. Behavior which proves successful for any particular species over the long run enters its genotype and becomes “innate.” (Des Pres 1980: 192–3)

The psychological and the biological explanatory models are diametrically opposed to one another and should be seen, in their lopsidedness, as nothing more than the extreme poles in an approach toward explication (Pollak 2000: 258). Nonetheless, some common features can be identified: firstly, that a process of adaption to the camp conditions had to take place; secondly, that this process was fundamentally dependent on specific circumstances which—and here the differences re-appear—were either associated with pre-camp experiences or developed under camp conditions; and thirdly, that adaption was both an individual effort and simultaneously the product of group processes and social bonding.

In Asylums (1961), Erving Goffman showed that inmates in total institutions² “always sought some control over the environment and retained some kind of independent self-concept, resulting in a range of ‘secondary adaptations’ ” (Crew 2007). Goffman’s typology, which has subsequently been adapted by many authors, includes firstly, “retreat from the situation” or “acute depersonalisation”; secondly, an “uncompromising attitude” or resistance against superiors; thirdly, “colonization” or compliance with the system; and fourthly, “conversion” which could be equated with Bettelheim’s “identification with the aggressor.” However, Goffman admits that only a minority of inmates coherently follows these types, while the majority tends “to keep cool,” as he puts it, and consists of more or less opportunistic combinations of different types, depending on the given counterpart, specifically on whether they are superiors or co-inmates, which allows him or her to survive without physical or mental damage (Goffman 1961: 68–9). Goffman, like Des Pres, located the resources required for adjustment inside the institution, for example, prison-specific behavior. This “deprivation” or “indigenous” theory ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps—Challenging the “Order of Terror”?
• Part 1: The Concentration Camp Universe
• Part 2: Language Diversity in the Camps
• Part 3: Interpreting in the Camps
• Part 4: Translating the Legacy of the Holocaust
• Part 5: Limits of Permeability
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Imprint