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Fig. 1. Site plan of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Cywiński, p. 69)
In this essay, I offer a perspective on the “power of place” in a program that seeks to provoke dialogue around ethics among junior professionals—FASPE. The program’s method immerses participants in the history and physical sites of Nazi Germany, sites key in the murder of millions of Jewish and other minoritized victims. In reflections on the program’s approach, participants often mention the “power of place.” Site visits are moving experiences; they move us to experience and reflect. There is power there, but the question is how they do so. The essentialist view suggests that something inheres in the physicality of memorials, that sites have power in an almost mystical way. The social constructivist view scoffs at this idea; little is done by merely putting people in places. People are not moved because they visit a memorial but because of how their immersion is guided and choreographed. How people are introduced to the site, which moments of historical significance are highlighted, how these experiences are arranged, and so on—all these shape how visitors understand a site, how the place moves those present. In technical parlance, it’s the process of interpretation that drives “power of place.” It is a social semiotic process of telling stories about the site from which the program derives its efficacy.
My training in architecture orients me toward a middle ground. Insofar as these places are products of design—that is, there was a call to shape the site and there were processes for determining how to shape it—there exists a specificity in how they affect participants beyond the stories told about them. This specificity is material, not metaphysical. Ambling in silence through the forest of concrete steles of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe feels different than doing so down the platform of Track 17.
I suggest that attending to the “behind-the-scenes” social processes of design gives us a different way of accessing “power of place.” On the one hand, it offers us a way of understanding why sites impact visitors differently. On the other hand, exploring the dialectic of intention/effect opens new ethical grounds for reflecting on and in the Holocaust’s aftermath. In exploring three projects—Track 17, the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the unrealized first proposal for the Topography of Terror—against the architectural logics of the Final Solution, I argue that attending to the relationship between architectural intent and site experience not only enriches our ethical engagements with the history of the Holocaust but it also helps us to better understand (and feel) our specific ethical relations to this history and thus, to ethics in our own professions.
Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Architecture of Dehumanization
In Auschwitz Bauleitung: Designing a Death Camp, historian and director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum Piotr Cywiński describes the notorious site as a “machine of death,” a “well-organised, constantly expanded and redesigned, large-scale operation [that] encompassed the concepts of concentration and extermination with the industrial development of a frontline supply system as well as a model lifestyle amenities for SS personnel.”1 The compendium of architectural drawings, ranging in scale from the reading lamp for the Reichsführer’s bed to the urban plan of the camp and entire zone of interest around the town of Oświęcim, illustrates the logic of dehumanization behind this machine of death. Carefully designed (with the forced participation of prisoner architects and engineers) the camp was an immense complex comprised of former Polish army barracks, factories, residential areas for SS officers and personnel, and the famed concentration and extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Figure One illustrates the scale of this “machine,” a grid of densely packed barracks. The grid reveals a planning logic of infinite expansion and confinement. Itis a flexible architecture that accommodates the expansionist logic of the Third Reich. Here, the only question is how many undesirable bodies can be accommodated. While people sometimes discuss the dehumanization of Jews and others sent to the camp at a medical and anthropological scale, often in terms of racial science and eugenics,3 the process of dehumanization takes place at an architectural scale as well. Contrast the grids of prisoner barracks with the organic curves of the single-family plots for SS personnel in Figure Two. There is a community square with shops and a fountain, a garden, and even a sports area in the lower right for SS recreation.4 The plan captures the logic of Lebensraum, in which the growth and spatial expansion of the “master race” justifies the removal of Jews and other lesser races from where they had been living.5 The removal of Jews, Poles, and others from their homes was key to the larger project of Aryan expansion, and the architectural language formalizes this extension of “Aryan” racial ideology through the homes of SS personnel built in stolen territory.
The logic of the grid is embedded into the design of the individual barracks as well. Here, human lives were reduced to mere occupancy numbers. Figure Three shows the floor plan, elevation, and cross section of the concentration camp barracks, crammed with square bunks measuring 1.9 x 2 meters.
1 Piotr M. A. Cywiński, Auschwitz Bauleitung: Projektowanie Obozu Śmierci (Oświęcim: Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2023), p. 7.
2 Cywiński, p. 8.
3 Alexandra Minna Stern, “Cautions About Medicalized Dehumanization,” AMA Journal of Ethics 23, nr 1 (2021): E64-69.
4 Cywiński, str. 52.
5 Doris Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p. 52.