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8 Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tłumaczył: Daniel Heller-Roazen, Wydanie 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
the concentration camp barracks, crammed with square bunks measuring 1.9 x 2 meters. Someone has crossed out the initial occupancy estimate of 550 and has scrawled 744 in its place. The math strips away any sense of human identity and diversity: 62 masonry bunks with 4 prisoners on each of the three levels yields a total occupancy of 744 prisoners.6 These occupancy numbers were not respected in real life. More prisoners were crammed into these holding cells as the Nazi regime sped up its machine of death, shipping more Jews and other undesirables to the site to be eliminated.7
Our visit to the bunks did not produce the expected response. Unlike the ruins of the crematoria or the exhibits of prisoner belongings, the barracks show little traces of human occupation. Visitors to the crematoria and the exhibits were visibly discomforted and distressed. Many shed tears, especially when they saw the hair cut from Jewish prisoners. Visitors to the barracks, by contrast, did not seem moved in the same way. We made small talk about the dark and cold interiors, trying to imagine what it would’ve been like to live in such a place. But the mundane architecture of the space made it difficult to resurrect such human connections. People moved quickly as if there was not much to see; the logic here is clear at a glance. These were spaces–cages—of temporary bodily occupation, and the strictly functional architecture reinforced the dehumanization of the intended occupants. Beyond stripping away material comforts and basic shelter, the seemingly endless uniform bunks also make it difficult for later generations to connect with the lives of those who once lived within these walls.
The architectural logics of these bunks remind me of the ships that transported enslaved Africans to the New World, as in Figure Five. The slave ship Brookes expresses these racialized spatial logics of dehumanization and concentration, perfecting them more than two centuries earlier. Every single inch contains human cargo. So too with the bunks at Birkenau. Viewers today, however, often miss the height of each bunk. Only about 2.7 feet of vertical space separates each “shelf” in the ship. The height of each bunk level at Birkenau is 75 centimeters or about 2.5 feet, an eerie resemblance. Here, we also get a sense of how a space’s physicality shapes our experience. The tightness of the quarters speaks to the relative powerlessness of the prisoners. The materials used are also cheap, reinforcing discomfort and betraying the builders’ logic that occupants were never going to stay there for long. The lack of ornamentation—or even insulation— presents another layer of architectural dehumanization. This architectural construction is the minimum that could support what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.”8