Abstract
Inside Concentration Camps wades deeply into the foul waters of life inside the Nazi concentration camps. Its title is therefore slightly misleading; it is not about life in all concentration camps, but only about those constructed by the Nazis. This elision is a significant matter, however; the reader might be expected to assume that the analysis will apply to all kinds of concentration camps, but the discussion focuses exclusively on life in Nazi camps, as recounted by survivors who have written about the experience, such as Primo Levi, Eugen Kogon, Tadeusz Borowski, Charlotte Delbo, and others. Those who object that the case of the Nazis gets undue attention as compared to other cases of atrocities and human malevolence will again have good cause for complaint. The issue here is the generalizability of the experiences of those who endured the misery of the Nazis’ special hells.
Yet one might also object to the author’s explanandum. Maja Suderland starts from the premise that she wants to ascertain the “basic concepts” of human society by examining social life in the camps. This is a bit like Durkheim choosing Australian aboriginal society as the locus in which to find the “elementary forms of religious life.” The notion is that an extreme instance of human society—extremely inhumane, in one case; extremely “primitive,” in the other—will yield insight into the fundamental structures of human sociality (the German title, in fact, was Ein Extremfall des Sozialen). For this premise she advances as support Zygmunt Bauman’s claim that the Holocaust was a “test of the hidden possibilities of modern society” (p. 3). In this passage Bauman is already narrowing the range of societies that could have produced the Holocaust; many have argued that such systematic killing of a single ethnoreligious group could only have occurred on the basis of modern rationalistic conceptions of human groups and the technical means for eliminating them. So the Holocaust was, even for Bauman, a possibility within modern society only.
Others, however, have insisted that the Nazis could only have done what they did by reversing the progress achieved by modern societies and stripping all human dignity from those they deemed “life unworthy of life” (lebensunwertes Leben). Suderland agrees that there was plenty of that kind of degradation in the camps; in response, she finds, “the highest priority is placed on the idea of human dignity” (p. 241) in memoirs of the camp experience. Yet that stress on “human dignity” sounds curiously like Durkheim’s ideas about the nature of modern society, in which “man had become a god for man.” Hence these camps may not afford a transhistorically valid view of the basic features of human social life.
In keeping with a more general tendency to want to “give a voice to the voiceless,” in any case, Suderland wants to refute those who have claimed that the prisoners were forced to submit to an utterly alien world divorced completely from their previous “normal” lives. “The main goal of my study is to understand the points of view of the concentration camp prisoners . . . and to reconstruct and describe them” (p. 6, emphasis in the original). In particular, she mobilizes Bourdieu to argue that, far from being tabulae rasae on which the camp power-holders could write whatever they wished, the prisoners brought with them their habitus (the cumulative past experiences that individuals bring to bear on their current situation), their prejudices, and their many social differences in creating the “prisoner society” of which they were a part. These differences and prejudices played a crucial role in the ways that prisoners navigated the minefield in which they found themselves, shaping their responses to a context in which misunderstanding or miscalculation could mean immediate death.
Suderland reminds us that the camps often brought together a heterogeneous group of humanity, distinguished by nationality, language, religion, ethnicity, and more. On the basis of her analysis of the memoirs of camp life, she concludes that the “basic concepts” of society are gender, class, “ethnicity,” and caste, as described by Max Weber. Feminists may be disheartened to learn that Suderland finds gender to be the most fundamental of these “basic concepts,” ineradicable and stimulating extensive efforts to uphold these differences by persons whose anonymity and androgyny grew with the length of their survival in the camp. Women lost their hair, their curves, their periods; men lost their strength, their ability to fight back against mistreatment, their virility. Eventually, men and women became barely distinguishable from one another. Hence they often took any available opportunity to reassert their masculinity or femininity.
Class mattered less in the camps, given their sharp leveling effects, but it was still apparent in people’s responses to their circumstances: some people, especially criminals, might even climb the social ladder in the camps if they went along with what the guards ordered. The notion of “ethnicity” is cast broadly to refer to ethnicity, nationality, and other distinctions. The category of caste is included because, Suderland argues, all societies include groups who are regarded as “beyond the pale” and are identifiable by ethnic and occupational distinctions. In the camps, it was the Jews and the Gypsies who met—or, more precisely, generated—this category by virtue of the fact that they were characterized, by themselves or others, as stereotypically carrying out certain functions or behaving in certain ways, thereby placing themselves outside the frame of other groups. In the case of the Jews, of course, it also meant the expectation that they were to die, sooner or later, no matter what they did or did not do.
Aside from these more straightforwardly sociological issues, the book raises the perennial question of how we are to judge the behavior of those who found themselves in these awful circumstances. Notwithstanding the recent scholarly and public inclination to lionize victims, people behaved better or worse, as the case might be, under circumstances that they could scarcely have chosen. Those who sought to maintain their dignity by acting virtuously were more likely to die. Primo Levi was haunted by the question of why some people died while others, including himself, survived. The book’s impulse to give agency to the prisoners is admirable, but one wonders. Suderland understands that misbehavior as defined by the camp overseers could lead to immediate death, and that is very different from a situation in which someone in normal life behaves immorally because they feel themselves under financial pressure, for example. Mark Twain’s regard for “normal” society was clarified when he paraphrased a biblical adage and wrote, “The lack of money is the root of all evil.” But in the camps, money was only one of many potential sources of evil; prisoners were constantly forced to make Goffman’s “secondary adjustments” to align their moral outlooks with the horrifying situation in which they found themselves.
In sum, whether life in the camps is a good guide to the “basic concepts” of social life—Suderland’s basic premise—is not so clear. On the other hand, Inside Concentration Camps does provide a thoughtful, theoretically informed analysis of the experience of the Nazi camps from the perspective of the people forced to suffer it.