Global History of the Concentration Camps - Detailseite

Zygmunt Bauman called the 20th century the „Century of the Camps“. Explicitly he noted that the catastrophes of the century were not an aberration of the path of modernity, but that they are an inseparable part of it. In the Übung we are going to check how this grand narrative is helpful for the explanation of different historical examples starting from colonial camps to modern refugee camps and Guantanamo. Part of the Übung will be an English language guided tour in the memorial place of the former concentration camp and Speziallager Sachsenhausen.

Zygmunt Bauman, A Century of Camps, in: Beilharz (ed.), Bauman Reader; Dan Stone, Concentration Camps, Oxford 2017; Nikolaus Wachsmann, Kl. A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, New York 2015; Klaus Mühlhahn, The Concentration Camp in Global Historical Perspective, in: History Compass (2010), pp. 543-61; Bülent Diken/Carsten Bagge Laustsen, The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp, Abingdon 2005; Bjørn Møller, Refugees, Prisoners and Camps: A Functional Analysis of the Phenomenon of Encampment, Basingstoke 2015.