Johannes Schwartz. Violence and Gender: Agency of Female Concentration Camp Guards in Ravensbrück

Johannes Schwartz (City of Hannover, Culture Department, Germany). Violence and Gender: Agency of Female Concentration Camp Guards in Ravensbrück from a Micro-historical and Narratological Perspective

Presentation at 27th Bathhouse Readings (May 23, 2021): https://www.nlobooks.ru/events/konferentsii/27th-bathhouse-readings-anthropology-of-violence-state-society-culture/

Ravensbrück, the biggest concentration camp for women under SS administration in Nazi controlled Europe, was a place of extreme violence: around 28.000 prisoners died in the camp. However, the acts of violence of the female SS guards in Ravensbrück have never been analysed from a violence theory perspective. Although Ravensbrück was in the centre of Gender History in Germany since the 1990s, the Gender concepts of the female SS guards have never been examined.

In my paper, I will distinguish different forms of violence (structural, symbolic, soft, and autotelic violence and cruelty) and I will analyze how these forms of violence overlap, interconnect and relate with each. I will ask what kinds of Gender concept are visible in the everyday practices of the female SS guards. Can we discover a “pervasive imagery of manhood” (Jane Caplan) in their behavior or did they maintain their femininity in their actions?

I will reply to these questions in exploring post war juridical testimonies by survivors and former female SS guards. According to Eliane Scarry, “pain causes a reversion to the pre-language”. That is why she thinks that testifying about violence is “the birth of language itself”. In my paper, I will ask under which circumstances concentration camp survivors could create such a language? How could they express themselves before post war trials? How did former female SS guards defend themselves? What are the possibilities and “limits of the sayable dictated by the archives” (Saidiya Hartmann)?

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