What William Carlos Williams was prepared in 1929 to call "modernism" had at its "base," he claimed, a commitment to "the reality of the word." 1 His point in calling attention to this reality was above all to insist on the primacy of "language" over "ideas" and so The Embodi-ment of Knowledge urges, for example, that to make ourselves "modern" we take Shakespeare seriously as a writer and "reject" him "as a thinker" (EK, 13). But this preference for language over ideas involved more than a preference for poetry over philosophy; it involved a commitment to what Williams calls "the materials of letters," which are "real" and which "supersede in themselves all ideas, facts, movements which they may under other circumstances be asked to signify" (EK, 17). Even "the spaces between the words" count as an element of language, not because they signify something (since signification is what is being superseded) or even because they have a diacritical function--you might count the spaces "for measurement's sake," Williams says, but you don't need to since they should "properly" "be considered themselves words--of a sort" (EK, 141). The point here is that when signification is eliminated as the criterion of the linguistic, the spaces between words can be seen to be as much a part of the poem as the words are; if what it means to be part of "language" is to be part of the "materials" of the poem, then the white spaces on the page are essentially part of those materials. Hence Williams's famous attention to where those white spaces should be put and to how much of them there should be; in what may constitute the ne plus ultra of the materialist aesthetic in poetry, he is even reported to have weighed his poems, as if once one recognized that the modernity of the modern poem consisted in its claim to be "itself" rather than to mean something else, all the physical features of the poem (what it looked like, what it sounded like, how heavy it was) became its defining characteristics.
The manuscript he put together in 1928 and 1929 under the title The Embodiment of Knowledge testifies in prose to the intensity of his desire to make poems that would in fact count as objects rather than signs--"words," "not symbols" (EK, 18). But the ambition to make such poems is already visible in Spring and All , and especially in that collection's first poem, which is also its most explicit response to the publication the year before of what Williams would call in his Autobiography "the great catastrophe to our letters," Eliot's The Waste Land. 2 Williams identified what he regarded as the failure of The Waste Land with what he called "plagiarism," by which he meant not the copying of other poems but the copying of "reality." Spring and All attacks the "traditionalists of plagiarism" by replacing the copy of reality with "reality itself," by making "the writing have reality." 3 It is significant, for example, that versions of the words "spring," "and," and "all" are distributed through the opening description of "the waste," "brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen / patches of standing water / the scattering of tall trees / All along the road" (SA, 183). "Fallen," "tall," "all" and, elsewhere, "small" and even "hospital" repeat the "reality" of "all," an effect that is even more striking with the repetition of "standing" (which produces both "and" and a version of "spring"), then "scattering," and later "upstanding" and "spring" itself. This deployment of "-ing" takes up quite literally the distinctive participles of The Waste Land's opening lines ("breeding," "mixing," "stirring") in an effort not only to free the words of what Williams contemptuously called "the pleasing wraiths of former masteries" 4 but also to assert the primacy of the "materials" demanded by "modernism." Although "By the road to the contagious hospital" is invariably praised for its precise description of the landscape, there is an important sense in which what these lines do above all is produce the presence on the page of "and," "all" and "-ing." 5 "The thing that saves your work," Pound had written Williams six years earlier, "is opacity"; 6 it is the "opacity" of Williams's words that makes their "reality" as words visible. The reproach to Eliot in Spring and All requires this opacity in order that the "reality" of words like "spring" be made prior to their "meaning."
But Pound went on in the same letter to tell Williams that "Opacity is NOT an American quality," when, in fact, as Spring and All begins to suggest and as The Embodiment of Know-ledge would make entirely clear, a materialist poetics was beginning to occupy in Williams precisely the place not only of a modern but also of a distinctively American aesthetic. The "first American poet" (Poe), Williams writes in Spring and All, "had to be a man of great separation" (SA, 111). In one sense, this is simply a remark about the difficulty of producing literature in what Williams characterizes as the "crudely repressive environment" of the United States in the nineteenth century. But "separation" is a term of art for Williams; it designates the position of the "independent" (SA, 121) painting or poem: "It is not a matter of 'representation'...but of separate existence" (SA, 117). 7 Thus the qualities that Williams thinks of as "typically American" in Poe--his "reality," his "completeness"--are the very qualities that characterize for him the material or "modernist" work of art: it "separates" (SA, 120), it has its own "reality," it is "complete" (SA, 121).
And this conjunction is not in Williams a merely contingent one, by which I mean it is not merely the case that the qualities he admires in poetry also happen to be qualities that he thinks of as characteristically American as opposed, say, to characteristically French or English. Rather the criteria of poetic ambition in Williams are indistinguishable from the conditions of national identity as he and others understood them. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge had told the Annual Meeting of the American Classical League in 1921. 8 Insofar as the point of the poem in Williams is to be itself (rather than to represent some other thing), and insofar as the self the poem must be is American, the poetic goal is what Williams calls "the American thing." This is insisted upon by the title page of The Embodiment of Knowledge which juxtaposes the epigraphs "The book as a whole is a whole" and "My country, right or wrong." The wholeness of the book is the mark of its existence as a "separate," "complete," "independent" entity; it is the primacy of this auton-omy that Williams means to emphasize when he calls the writing he admires "pure" and dis-tinguishes it from writing which has compromised its independence: "There is pure writing and writing which is made to be the horse of any one who has a burden to carry" (EK, 117). The commitment to country, "right or wrong," is produced according to the same logic; by eliminating the appeal to any external criteria of justification (i.e., rightness or wrongness), it makes one's identity into one's justification. The material poetics of embodiment is matched by the desire "to embody America" (EK, 47). 9
From this standpoint, Williams's modernism is inextricably connected not exactly to American nationalism but, more precisely, to American nativism, the conversion of national identity to racial identity. "Our country," as Lothrop Stoddard put it in The Rising Tide of Color , has been "invaded by hordes of immigrant Alpines and Mediterraneans, not to mention Asiatic elements like Levantines and Jews." 10 The efforts to "Americanize" these "hordes" that had played so large a role in the national discourse of the Progressive Era were now thought to have failed, indeed to have been doomed to failure right from the start, since they ignored "the truth that the basic factor in human affairs is not politics but race" (RTC, 5). So the new response to this invasion was a series of attempts, culminating in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, to limit immigration and, giving up the impossible task of turning aliens into Americans, to foster among the native-born a proper appreciation of their own Americanness. It is in this context that Coolidge told the American Classical League, "We do not wish to be Greek, we do not wish to be Roman. We have a great desire to be supremely American." 11 And although this desire to affirm one's Americanness was often linked to assertions of the superiority of so-called "Old Stock" Americans (the full title of Stoddard's book is The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy), it was, in the wake of the passage of Johnson-Reed, more characteristically associated with the commitment to identity as such, a commitment that in Williams is associated with the demand for "pure writing" and that is identified by him as a form of "pluralism" (EK, 149).
In Williams, this "pluralism" derives from the principle that since "every individual, every place, every opportunity of thought is both favored and limited by its emplacement in time and place," the "old cultures" of Europe "can never, without our history, our blood or climate, our time of flowering in history--can never be the same as we" (EK, 150). The point here is that "reality" is "plural" (EK, 150), different for different cultures, and it is this assertion of difference rather than any claim to superiority that lies at the heart of nativist logic. Thus Gino Speranza in Race or Nation denies that "what is excellent...for one people is necessarily excellent...for a totally different people." "What is important," he says, "is to see and stress the fact that there is a difference." 12 And even Stoddard, who in 1920 had produced detailed rankings of racial quality, maintains in 1927 that "No theoretical questions of 'superiority' or 'inferiority' need be raised." 13 This is the meaning, after all, of "My country, right or wrong"; the attachment to country, irrespective of rightness and wrongness, affirms the primacy of identity over any other category of assessment. Hence, whether or not Stoddard had personally given up his belief in white supremacy, he had absolutely disarticulated it from his opposition to immigration: "The really important point is that even though America (abstractly considered) may not be nearly as good as we think it is, nevertheless it is ours.... That is the meat of the matter, and when we discuss immigration we had better stop theorizing about superiors and inferiors and get down to the bedrock of difference" (RFA, 102).
What's striking here about Stoddard's effort to set aside his ethnocentrism--his bracketing the question of whether America is really as good as we think it is--is not that he in fact gets rid of the ethnocentrism but that he recognizes its irrelevance to his nativism, or rather, that he recognizes that the power of nativism depends upon its pluralism, its transcendence of questions about superiority and inferiority. The point of suspending the question of America's goodness is to make clear the fact that our attachment to it is based only on our identification with it; even if, Stoddard says, "it could be conclusively shown that a certain stock was superior to us in some ways...we should still refuse to receive it, on grounds of self-preservation" (RFA, 257-58). Where the assertion of racial superiority requires a primary commitment to certain universal values (the ones according to which some races are deemed superior and some inferior) and thus a merely secondary commitment to whichever race happens to rank the highest, the denial of the relevance of superiority and inferiority makes the race as such into the cathected object. This is what it means for Americans to want to be not supremely good or supremely powerful or supremely rich but "supremely American." This is what it means for difference to be bedrock; it is only for the pluralist that identity--the difference of oneself from others--is absolutely crucial since only the pluralist, suspending the question of better or worse, understands the different as merely different.
It's in this context not only that miscegenation, the breaking down of difference, becomes the privileged sex crime of nativist modernism 14 (and incest, the insistence on identity, becomes its privileged form of sexual expression 15 ) but also that assimilation--the great desideratum of Progressive social policy--becomes a threat both to those who would assimilate and to those who would be assimilated. Nativist writers derided the ideal of the "Melting-Pot" and the projects of "Americanization" developed to produce it. No "environmental influence," wrote the "Cultural Pluralist" Horace Kallen, can take "different races" and "remold them into an indifferent sameness." 16 Thus, according to Speranza, even a "people" as "fine and loyal" as the Mexicans of the Southwest could only remain "culturally and historically unadapted and ill at ease in the body-politic of the republic" (RN, 64). The "lesson" of New Mexico "to our 'Americanizers' and our theorists," Speranza thought, was that "racial characteristics"--"especially those subtler qualities of mind and character which profoundly differentiate the culture and the spirit of one people from those of another"--"do not die out" (RN, 31).
Of course, Speranza and Kallen had different affective relations to this lesson (Kallen hopefully anticipating a "national fellowship of cultural diversities" [CDUS, 32], Speranza fearfully anticipating the same thing), but the difference in affect presupposes the shared commitment to the identity through time of "racial characteristics"; if New Mexico is a "tragic example" of the failure of assimilation, it is also a triumphant tribute to the impos-sibility of assimilation. In New Mexico, as Willa Cather put it in Death Comes for the Arch-bishop , "The Mexicans were always Mexicans, the Indians were always Indians." 17 Indeed, in the context of a novel explicitly concerned with the possibility of transforming people--that is, after all, what the missionary Father Latour has come to New Mexico for--the persistence of race marks the point beyond which no transformation is possible. Replacing Americanization with conversion, Cather will imagine the Catholic Church as an institution committed to preserving rather than obliterating Speranza's subtle differences "of mind and character." Set in a moment before the problem of Americanization had even been conceived, the novel depicts conversion as the solution to that problem.
It is for this reason that the problem of identity dominates Death Comes for the Archbishop, whether in the form of Father Vaillant's ship-of-Theseus-like wagon, "repaired so often and so extensively that long before he abandoned it there was none of the original structure left" (DCA, 258), or in the thematically more central form of the inability of the missionaries to get the Indians to give up "their own beliefs" (DCA, 135). Or rather, it is for this reason that identity in Death Comes for the Archbishop never actually registers as a problem; after all, the trick of the ship of Theseus is that the gradual replacement of even every piece doesn't really seem to raise an identity problem until it is revealed that all the discarded pieces have been used to assemble another ship--which one is the ship of Theseus?--and, in Cather, the wagon has no competitors so it is left standing as an example of how identity can be maintained in the face of the eventual disappearance of all the materials which seemed to constitute it. And, more importantly, Catholicism doesn't seem finally to be in competition with what the Bishop approvingly describes as the Indians' "veneration for [their] old customs" (DCA, 135). When a trader tells him, "he might make good Catholics among the Indians, but he would never separate them from their own beliefs" (DCA, 135), the point seems to be that there is no necessary contradiction between being a good Catholic and clinging to one's own beliefs. "The Mexicans were always Mexicans, the Indians were always Indians" (DCA, 286); the point of Father Latour's Catholicism seems to be that it encourages rather than disputes this maintenance of identity.
As we know, the Bishop's equanimity in the face of New Mexican cultural differences was not shared by all observers. Speranza, admiring the "native people" of New Mexico as a "people with old traditions and customs, and a civilization of their own," nevertheless regarded them as "a deeply tragic example" (RN, 64) of the impossibility of making good American citizens out of aliens. The tragedy consists not in the New Mexicans' refusal to accept American rule; on the contrary, not only have they accepted it, they have been, by Speranza's own admission, "splendidly loyal to the stars and stripes" which they have "stoutly defended on every occasion" (RN, 64). The tragedy consists rather in the inability of New Mexico's natives to adapt "culturally and historically" to "American institutions"; despite their political loyalty and precisely because of their veneration for "old traditions and customs," they constitute "an unassimilated and culturally alien element" "in our midst" (RN, 64).
Speranza separates politics from "culture" as Cather separates religion from "beliefs"; the point in each case is to imagine a form of identity immune to the transformations of Americanization or conversion. The missionary Bishop's relation to his Indian guide Jacinto is in this respect exemplary:
The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn't think it polite and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him. (DCA, 92)
It is the representation of European civilization as existing in the Bishop's memory and the representation of Indian tradition as Jacinto's experience that elevates the impolite to the useless. For insofar as European civilization is imagined as something one remembers instead of as something one learns, it is clearly impossible to "transfer" it; Jacinto might conceivably learn about European civilization but he will never remember it. And insofar as the Indian's tradition is identified as a story of experience, the Bishop can have, in principle, no access to it; meanings may be translatable but experiences surely are not. This is what it means for identity to be displayed in Death Comes for the Archbishop as a problem that has been solved. If to belong to a culture you must be able to encounter it in the form of memory, as a tradition that is already yours, then no one can ever cease to belong to his culture or begin to belong to some other culture. The assimilating ambitions of, say, the Jew Louie Marsellus in Cather's earlier The Professor's House (or of Jimmy Gatz in The Great Gatsby [1925] or Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises [1926]) are imagined in Death Comes for the Archbishop as ontological impossibilities.
In this respect, at least, Death Comes for the Archbishop represents an advance over The Professor's House. Insofar as struggles like the Professor's to defend his family are abandoned in Death Comes for the Archbishop, that is only because they have become unnecessary: there is no Rosamond St. Peter to try to rescue from miscegenation in the later novel. In fact, as Cather herself somewhat hyperbolically put it, Death Comes for the Archbishop is "a story with no woman in it but the Virgin Mary." 18 Removing temptation from the paths of the priesthood, Cather guarantees that, just as the Mexicans are always Mexicans and the Indians always Indians, the Europeans will always be Europeans. 19 Indeed she locates this principle of cultural self-identity through celibacy in the "story" of the Indian "experience" itself: the "life-force" of the "best" young men in the "tribe" is said to be "sapped" in the service of "a ceremonial fire" that is never "allowed to go out" (DCA, 122). Thus their refusal to give up "their own beliefs" (DCA, 135) is killing the Indians, and the fact that they are "dying out" (DCA, 122) is the proof of their allegiance to "their own beliefs." This more-or-less con-ventional representation of the vanishing race is here transformed into the Indian's way of being "supremely" Indian.
But this commitment to the purified ontology of nativist identity finds perhaps its most explicit form in Cather's internal thematization of her own aesthetic. Amid the prologue's general discussion of "ancestry" and of the attributes of different nationalities ("the Germans classify, but the French arrange" [DCA, 9]), a question is raised about the future Bishop's "intelligence in matters of art" (DCA, 11), about whether he has what the Cardinal calls "a discerning eye" (DCA, 13). The relevance to missionary work of a good eye for pictures is not obvious to the Bishop's supporters but Cather's model for Death Comes for the Archbishop was at least partly pictorial, and Father Latour is explicitly made to articulate for her the meaning of the visual in the context of a narrative genre like the novel. The model was the frescoes of Puvis de Chavannes, which had long inspired her, Cather says, "to try something a little like that in prose; something without accent..." 20 The point of eliminating accent is "to treat all human experiences" as if they are of "about the same importance," to minimize the significance of what she calls the "situation" (OW, 9). This formal ambition seems to her to match the "mood" or "spirit" in which the historical models for Latour and Vaillant seem actually to have "accepted the accidents and hardships of a desert country" (OW, 10). More concretely, it finds expression in what she describes as the dying Bishop's loss of "perspective in his memories" (DCA, 290). This disappearance of "calendared time" turns the narrativized connection of past to present self into a "great picture," guaranteeing continuity through time by reimagining it as continuity in space. Not only are the achievements of "European civilization" understood as one's "own memories," one's own memories are understood as continuing experiences: "He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand..." (DCA, 290).
"It is impossible for society to break with its past" (ANE, 49), Coolidge had told the clas-sicists; the "great picture" of the Bishop's life makes this impossibility literal. The problem of securing one's identity in the past is solved by making the past continually present. Instead of "states of mind" succeeding each other in time, they are laid out next to each other in space, as if on a canvas, and the elimination of perspective guarantees that none will seem closer than any other. Cather is often and plausibly regarded as an exponent of organic unity but the commitment here to unity goes beyond the organic because it denies the possibility of time and so of change; because nothing can be "outgrown," nothing can grow. What this means at the level of plot is that nothing leads to anything else. So, paradoxically, everything is con-nected but anything can be disconnected, which is why, for example, Cather thought that it would be easy to select parts of Death Comes for the Archbishop to anthologize. Because no part of the narrative was subordinated to any other part of the narrative, every part was equally a part of the whole. But because every part was equally a part of the whole, any part could be used as a whole.
The identity of the work of art is imagined here as the utopian form of cultural identity, simultaneously determining the relation of the self to the past (guaranteeing that Indians remain Indian) and the relation of the self to the collective identity that past produces (guaranteeing, in effect, that Indians be defined by their being Indians). Hence in Williams's version of this "memoriam to identity," "My country, right or wrong" is accompanied not only by "The book as a whole is a whole" but also by a dedication "TO MY BOYS--Wishing them luck" (EK, 2). The dedication makes explicit what a poem like Spring and All's "The pure products of America / go crazy" suggests, 21 that the conception of identity built into the poetics of embodiment is essentially genetic; what makes a poem a poem and not a piece of prose, for example, is its "source" or "origin" (SA, 230). This is why Williams regards it as "possible, even essential, that when poetry fails it does not become prose but bad poetry" (SA, 230). It cannot "become" prose because neither prose nor poetry can ever become anything different from what they already are. If poetry, in order to be poetry, must come "from the source from which poetry starts"; if, in other words, the identity of the object is determined by its origin, then nothing can ever be anything other than what it already is. To treat prose as bad poetry would be to collapse the difference between two different things by treating them as if they were two more-or-less-good versions of the same thing. Insisting instead that each has "a separate origin," Williams makes comparison between them odious by making the difference between them "essential."
In The Embodiment of Knowledge, this principle, as we have already seen, is generalized: "every individual, every place, every opportunity of thought is both favored and limited by its emplacement in time and place" (EK, 149). And "America is such a place. The old cultures cannot, can never, without our history, our blood or climate, our time of flowering in his-tory--can never be the same as we" (EK, 150). Williams's name for this principle is "the pluralism of experience" (EK, 149). Modernism and pluralism necessarily accompany each other in Williams since the modernist commitment to the materiality of the poem requires above all that the poem be itself, which is to say that it locates the poem's value in its identity and so in its difference from anything else. Just as in nativism the goal of the American is to be American, in Williams's modernism the goal of the American poet is to produce American poetry. In this respect, Williams's polemic against Eliot and the "traditionalists of plagiarism" explicitly extends Poe's attack on "Longfellow and Other Plagiarists." Their plagiarism consists in a betrayal of originality--since they "copy" other poets--and a betrayal of materiality--since they "copy" "reality"--both of which are understood by Williams as betrayals of nationality, since by copying other poets they attach themselves to a tradition that is essentially European, and by copying reality they refuse the obligation to embodiment that constitutes in nativism the very meaning of nationality. Poe, by contrast, is "original" (IAG, 229) and "abstract" (IAG, 230). His originality consists in the fact that for inspiration he goes not to England but "back to the ground"; his abstraction consists in the fact that what he does when he gets there is not copy it (no local color in Poe) but "clear" it (IAG, 216). Getting rid of the "scenery" "in order to let the real business of composition show" (IAG, 230), Poe "was American" (IAG, 226).
From this standpoint, what is striking about Williams's poetics is not the materialism--its commitment to the idea that the poem's identity consists in its material features--but the deployment of that materialism in the service of what might be called its identitarianism--the commitment to the idea that the success of the poem consists in the achievement of its identity. 22 Coolidge's characterization of Americans as desiring "to be supremely American" had great success with audiences beyond the classicists to whom he spoke in 1921: Speranza quotes it on the first page of Race or Nation and Stoddard makes it the cornerstone of a chapter on "The Will to National Unity" in Re-Forging America. Both these books attempt to rescue what they call "American culture" not simply by excluding aliens (the Congress and the Coolidge administration had already, they thought, accomplished that in the Immigration Act of 1924) but by urging their readers to appreciate the past and present glories of the American "heritage." "We are to-day evolving a whole series of distinctively 'American' forms which truly express the national spirit and which therefore possess creative feeling and beauty," Stoddard wrote. "Thus culturally, as well as racially and spiritually, alienism is being slowly but surely mastered" (RFA, 368).
Nativism's racial pluralism makes one's difference from others essential; nativism's cultural pluralism makes one's potential difference from oneself equally essential. Culture here provides the technology through which the fact that you are who you are can be doubled by the responsibility to be who you are. Stoddard's criterion of beauty is thus the true expression of "national spirit," a criterion that Williams makes more powerful by making formal; the poem will express America by embodying it. Transforming tautology (the poem is itself) into imperative (the poem must be itself), Williams produces for American poetry the project of American nativism: what we are (Americans), is what we must strive to be (American). The poem becomes what it is, in effect, not by expressing something else but by accepting that it can only express itself: "quite truly a work of art means nothing...but itself" (EK, 120).
In the second edition of her The American Rhythm (1930; the first was published in 1923), Mary Austin identifies what she describes as "the growing interest of Americans in Amerind dancing" with the tendency toward "abstraction of movement" in modern "esthetic danc-ing." 23 Abstraction here plays the role of "opacity" in Williams. Such abstraction is easier in "the plastic arts," Austin thinks, because they "are not burdened, as literature often is, with the necessity of conveying a certain amount of information." It is this "burden" that Williams's "pure writing" ("There is pure writing and writing which is made to be the horse of any one who has a burden to carry") refuses to assume, and it is striking in this context that the element of American verse that Austin herself singles out as distinctively American is rhythm, which she identifies, through its manifestations in the "human organism" (AR, 4) as the "physical basis of poetry" (AR, 8). What makes American poetry American, in other words, is not that it thematizes American subjects but that it has the physical qualities of American bodies. The modern poets Austin admires, resisting "Greek and Hebrew" models, "derive their impulses" from "our own aboriginals" (AR, 46); in a paradigmatically nativist gesture, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg are made the heirs of the Ojibway and the Chippewa.
Insofar as modernist abstraction could be understood to have a non-European genealogy, however, it was more usually described as African than as Amerindian. African sculpture, in particular, seemed to have achieved a "plastic freedom" that went beyond anything accomp-lished in the West. In the West, as Albert Barnes put it, sculpture was
at all times complicated by the motive of representation, so that the arrangement of masses, of head, trunk and limbs, which would have made the most effective plastic ensemble, was rarely found. Literature, in other words, stood in the way of plastic form. With negro sculpture, the literary motive was absent and the artist strove to distribute his masses in accord with the requirements of a truly sculptural design. 24
For Barnes and for other critics, it was the explicit three-dimensionality of African sculpture that produced the effect of abstraction and hence of objects that were to be understood on their own terms rather than as imitations of other objects. Thus, in his influential anthology The New Negro (to which Barnes also contributed), Alain Locke praises the "abstract decorative forms" of African art and quotes Roger Fry on the "disconcerting vitality" of these forms, "the suggestion that they make of being not mere echoes of actual figures, but of possessing an inner life of their own." 25 African sculpture, like modernist poetry, insists on its own reality.
For Locke, however, the new prestige of African art, its influence on Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, etc., is a phenomenon complicated by the inability thus far of Negro artists to profit from it. In an essay called "The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts," he deplores the fact that Negro artists have lagged behind Europeans in discovering and asserting the value of African art, and he attributes this failure to what he calls "our timid and apologetic imitativeness and overburdening sense of cultural indebtedness" (NN, 256). While avant-garde Europeans have been mining African sculpture for "lesson[s] in simplicity and originality of expression," the "timid conventionalism" of the Negro has left him in thrall to "the most reactionary conventions in art" (NN, 262). It is only, then, by following the lead of the Europeans and turning his attention to Africa that the Negro can overcome his "imitativeness" and "con-ventionalism." And while this might seem paradoxical--isn't Locke just asking the Negro to stop imitating reactionary Europeans and to start imitating progressive ones?--in fact, what Locke is imagining here is a way out of imitation altogether. For the Negro's relation to African sculpture will be significantly different from the European's relation to it. Where the European "inherit[s]" it by "tradition," the Negro is "bound to it by a sense of direct cultural kinship" (NN, 256). Thus in taking up his ancestral legacy, the Negro is not only not imitating the European, he is not imitating the African either; he is, in effect, being himself. Indeed, from this standpoint, what's paradoxical is the European's relation to African art: the "originality" that the European finds in African art is something that he can only imitate; the origin that the Negro finds there is his own.
In this account, the modernism of the Negro is a function of his racial identity, 26 or rather, of his ability to establish the right relation to his racial identity. Like Coolidge's Americans desiring to be "supremely American," the "New Negro's" aspiration to modernity generates a project out of a tautology. If, in other words, the New Negro was new insofar as he managed to be himself, the "Old Negro" was old because he hadn't quite managed to be himself. He had been instead a "myth," produced partly by whites and partly by the "protective social mimicry" (NN, 3) that his "psychology of imitation" (NN, 4) had deployed in response to whites. The project, then, of being oneself is given content by the Negro's historical pro-pensity to imitation, a propensity that has, as Zora Neale Hurston puts it, given rise to the charge (repeated so often that it has "almost become a gospel") that "the Negro is lacking in originality." 27
Locke's response to this charge was, as we have already seen, to deny the imitativeness at least of the New Negro: the project of being a New Negro involves the refusal of imitation. For Hurston, however, such a refusal is impossible. "The Negro, the world over, is famous as a mimic" ("CNE," 59). Hurston's goal is not to deny the qualities that have produced this fame, but instead to undo the opposition between imitation and originality, which is to say that she is concerned to assert the Negro's ability as a "mimic" while defending him from charges that he lacks "originality" and that he "imitates from a feeling of inferiority." The defense against the first charge is that all art is "mimicry"; if it doesn't "reflect" or "suggest" "anything in nature or human experience we turn away with a dull wonder in our hearts at why the thing was done" ("CNE," 59). From this standpoint, the Negro's ability as a mimic is just his ability as an artist and would seem to need no further defense. But the second charge--"that the Negro imitates from a feeling of inferiority"--suggests the insufficiency of the response that all art is imitation of nature. For what the Negro is accused of imitating here is not nature but "white civilization," so the Negro's claim to originality has to be estab-lished here in the face of what even Hurston acknowledges is a "group of Negroes who slavishly imitate" whites.
To accomplish this defense, Hurston invokes a set of class distinctions. Locke, introducing The New Negro, had cited "class differentiation" (NN, 6) as one of the factors rendering "traditional lines of opinion" about the Negro "obsolete" (NN, 5); it is now "unjust" and "ridiculous," he argued, "to regard and treat the Negro en masse" (NN, 6). But this argument could have at best a problematic relation to the major claim of The New Negro, that "Negro life" was now "seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination" (NN, 7): how can it no longer be right to regard the Negro "en masse" at the very moment when "a great race-welding" has finally made Negro "group expression" (NN, 7) possible? Earlier, in, say, Du Bois, the commitment to class difference had been accom-panied by a certain skepticism about racial solidarity, a suspicion that upper-class blacks had more in common with upper-class whites than with lower-class blacks; how could class difference be mobilized now to produce (rather than undermine) the "group expression" of the New Negro?
Hurston answers this question by describing the differences between classes as dif-ferences in racial identification: "The average Negro glories in his ways. The highly educated Negro the same. The self-despisement lies in a middle class who scorns to do or be anything Negro" ("CNE," 59). Racial authenticity becomes the principle of class distinction. The Negro "'farthest down'" "likes his own things best"; it is this Negro whose mimicry counts as original, because it is not of whites and because what it is of ("various animals," for example, i.e., nature) shows that he imitates "for the love of it, and not because he wishes to be like the one imitated" ("CNE," 60). (The status of this mimicry as autotelic imitation is what makes it "art.") The middle class Negro, however, "wears drab clothing, sits through a boresome church service..., holds beauty contests, and otherwise apes all the mediocrities of the white brother" ("CNE," 59). Hurston's idea is not that as Negroes rise in class they become less Negro; on the contrary, it is only the imitation of whites that identifies the middle class as a class. The racial betrayal is understood here to produce rather than to reflect adherence to the middle class, a point that is hammered home by the claim that the "truly cultured Negro" "glories," like the "average Negro," in his "ways": you don't need to be "average" to be authentically Negro but you do need to be inauthentically Negro (imitation white) to be "middle class."
But, of course, the very success of this effort to key class identity to racial identification produces a problem: what, exactly, are the "highly educated" Negro's ways? Does the "highly educated" Negro, like the "average" one, imitate nature? If he does, how is he different from the "average?" And, if he doesn't, what guarantees his authenticity? It is essential to Hurston that the higher class not be collapsed into the bottom one (the "farthest down") because, if it were collapsed, there could be no reason for thinking of racial identity as prior to class identity. Any movement upward from the "farthest down" would, in other words, auto-matically count as movement away from the race and so, with racial identity and class identity exactly correlated, there would be no place for racial autonomy. And it is racial autonomy that, as we can now see, is the payoff for the New Negro's insistence on class difference. Where race and class are not precisely correlated, race achieves an identity of its own--this is why the breakup of the Negro "en masse" is actually a necessary condition rather than, as it first seemed, an unfortunate contradiction of the "great race-welding." It seemed like a contradiction because it seemed to threaten the unity of the "group"; in fact, however, breaking up class unity, it sets the stage for race unity.
So the problem is, on the one hand, if there is to be a Negro there need to be identifiably Negro "ways," and, on the other hand, if there is to be a Negro there needs to be more than one class of Negroes. And this is a problem because if there's more than one class but there's only one set of ways, it's difficult to see how the difference in class can be kept from becoming a difference in racial authenticity or, to put it the other way around, how the identity of race can be kept from becoming a mere identity of class. Hurston's solution to this problem is embodied in her own intellectual practice. Where the middle class Negro rejects Negro "ways" with the "terrible rebuke," "'That's just like a Nigger,'" the "truly cultured" Negro writer insists on writing "just like a Nigger" ("CNE," 59). She cannot write as a "Nigger" because, in order to guarantee the autonomy of the "Negro," not all "Negroes" can be "Niggers." But she cannot write like a white since that would make her inauthentically middle class. In order to write as a Negro she must write "like" a "Nigger." This is what it means for Hurston to believe that "The Negro's universal mimicry is not so much a thing in itself as an evidence of something that permeates his entire self" ("CNE," 49). It is only mimicry that guarantees the Negro's existence as a Negro; imitation is, in Hurston, the condition of racial identity.
The point, then, of Hurston's discussion of the "truly cultured" is not simply to legitimate black intellectuals by connecting them to their racial base. For without the black intellectual there could be no racial base. The function of the "truly cultured" in Hurston is to escape the reduction of race to class implicit in the distinction between "Niggers" and "imitation white folks." Imitating "Niggers," the "truly cultured" make racial autonomy (the irreducibility of race to class) possible and so make racial authenticity possible. The "Nigger" is thus the criterion of authenticity, but the "truly cultured" provide the technology of authenticity, since without the existence of the "truly cultured" making themselves "just like" the "Nigger," there would be no properly racial nigger at all--the "Nigger" would just be the "farthest down" who, insofar as he improves himself socially and economically and educationally, ceases to be "Nigger" and becomes "imitation white."
Everything here depends on the distinction between just being "Nigger" and both being and imitating "Nigger," between being something and trying to be the thing one is. In Williams's nativist poetics, as we have seen, this effort of identity takes the form of a critique of representation where representation seems essential (i.e., in language); in the constitution of the "New Negro," it takes the form of an insistence on representation where representation seems supererogatory (i.e., the representation of one's own racial identity). (An analog for this would be someone who could "pass" but who chooses not to and is therefore required to represent in some way his or her otherwise invisible racial essence. 28 ) With respect to a poetics of "Negro" rather than "American" identity, this demand for representation put an almost unbearable pressure on the lyric poem. Thus, in his contri-bution to The New Negro, "The Negro in American Literature," William Stanley Braithwaite finds himself characterizing Paul Dunbar's dialect poems both as the "first authentic lyric utterance" of "Negro life" (NN, 37) and as "the end of a regime" rather than "the beginning of a tradition" (NN, 38), and this despite the fact that after Dunbar, "many versifiers appeared--all largely dominated by his successful dialect work." Dunbar's problem, according to Braithwaite, is that he "expressed a folk temperament, but not a race soul," a judgment that Braithwaite himself leaves unexplained but that we can gloss through Hurston: the dialect poem seems only to be rather than both to be and to represent "Nigger." The dialect poem thus represents a kind of trap, but one that was perhaps not as easily avoidable as Braithwaite seems to have thought. For the new poets whom Braithwaite praises (e.g., Fenton Johnson, Roscoe Jameson, Anne Spencer, and especially Claude McKay) man-age to achieve what he calls a "poetry that is racial in substance" only by making race their subject while speaking in a voice that sounds what he calls "the universal note, with the conscious background of the full heritage of English poetry" (NN, 38). The alternative to "Nigger," in other words, seems to be "imitation white."
This, at least, is how Langston Hughes, the most talented of the "new Negro" poets, depicted the reaction against Dunbar in Not Without Laughter , where the socially ambitious Tempy--who thinks "colored people" should "dress like white people, talk like white people, think like white people"--only tolerates Dunbar "on account of his fame" and condemns him because he wrote "so much in dialect and so often of the lower classes of colored people." 29 Tempy is contrasted in this book to her sister Harriet, a blues singer, and, of course, Hughes would frequently cast himself as a blues poet in poems that would count for him as equivalents of Dunbar's dialect poems. But his commitment to a poetry of racial identity could be asserted also in poems whose diction is that of the standard English to which Tempy aspires (like "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"), and, in fact, Not Without Laughter seems at least as committed to reconciling these two modes as it is to distinguishing between them. For although Hughes is as interested as Hurston in keying class differences between blacks to different ways of being black (committed, in other words, to understanding class identity as a relation to racial identity), he is, unlike Hurston, also committed to what amounts to a kind of collaboration between the classes that will "help the whole race" (NWL, 303).
Thus the class difference embodied in the antagonism between the upwardly mobile Tempy and the family she leaves behind is imagined by her sister (as it might be by Hurston) as an effect of Tempy's attempt to imitate whites--"when niggers get up in the world, they act just like white folks" (NWL, 41)--but by Tempy herself as an attempt to escape sub-servience to whites; where Harriet has been taught to admire Booker T. Washington, Tempy dismisses him as a "white folks' nigger" (NWL, 245) and sings the praises of W. E. B. Du Bois instead. So, although each class defines itself in opposition to the other, each class defines itself also by its commitment to "the Negro," and the difference between their definitions is elided in the figure of their nephew Sandy who reads Washington and Du Bois: "'I guess they are both great men,' he thought" (NWL, 245). Refusing to choose between the classes, Sandy embodies both their hopes for "the black race," mediating without dissolving the differences between Washington and Du Bois, the church and the street. In effect, he transforms them into the components of a racial identity that will not be reduced to a class position. And insofar as Not Without Laughter's commitment to Sandy expresses Hughes's autobiograph-ical commitment to the meaning of his own career, the poet becomes the vehicle for a racial identity that simultaneously defines and transcends class identity: defines it because each class thinks of itself as more truly black, transcends it because the blackness of each class is revealed through Sandy to be only a part of the blackness of "the whole race" (NWL, 303). 30
The story of Sandy's relation to his race is thus a variant of Hurston's account of the role played by the "truly cultured," the Negro intellectual, in the constitution of racial identity. It's different in that Sandy subsumes rather than simply repudiates the ambitions of the middle class, but it's perhaps more powerfully the same in that Sandy's aspiration to become one of the race's "great men" (NWL, 245) embodies Hurston's aspiration through class difference to racial identity. And the fulfillment of this aspiration is demonstrated by Hughes not in any-thing that actually happens to Sandy in the novel but in the narrative voice that depicts the aspiration. Insofar as that narrative voice is not itself "Nigger" (it's not dialect, for example), it runs the risk of looking like imitation white. But insofar as that narrative voice is concerned with imitating "Nigger," with portraying the speech and actions of the "farthest down," it achieves the condition of the "truly cultured," those whose racial identity consists not in simply being but in representing "Nigger." In effect, then, the narrative voice of the novel produces both the necessary discrepancy from and mimetic relation to the "Nigger" that in Hurston characterizes the emergence of a properly racial autonomy.
In this sense, the formal distinction between the representing and the represented voices of the novel is at the same time a genealogy, a fact that the novel insists upon in its com-mitment to Sandy's representation of his family, and that it literalizes by making Sandy's father Jimboy the kind of blues singer out of whom the blues poet will emerge. So the story Sandy tells of his own genealogy--the story, in Locke's terms, of the emergence of the "New Negro" out of the "Old"--will at the same time be the means by which he establishes his own place in that genealogy, the means by which he both affiliates himself with and distinguishes himself from the "Nigger." Hurston's requirement that the "truly cultured" be inextricably linked but not identical to the "farthest down" invents a new position for the black intel-lectual, making him the linchpin to racial identity by making him the heir to and thus the transmitter of a racial "legacy." Which is to say that the representational strategies of Not Without Laughter, strategies that find probably their greatest racial achievement in Hurston's own Their Eyes Were Watching God , produce the conditions in which a "primitive" or "folk" culture can be transformed into a racial heritage. 31
Another way to put this is to say that the great achievement of African-American intel-lectuals in the Harlem Renaissance was to invent a new answer to the long-standing question of the intellectual's relation to the masses. In Marxist terms, of course, this could only be a question about the class identification of intellectuals. Thus, in essentially the same time-frame (1929-1935), Gramsci was articulating the distinction between "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals as a distinction between those intellectuals who understood them-selves to belong to "an autonomous and independent social group," a group constituted with-out reference to social class, and those intellectuals who understood themselves to express a set of class interests and who therefore identified their position as intellectuals with "active participation" in the "practical life" of the class to which they belonged. 32 Hurston obviously understood herself as belonging to the group about which she wrote but, as Hazel Carby has remarked, most "African-American intellectuals were generations removed from the 'folk' they tried to represent," and even those who weren't had, in the process of becoming intellectuals, left behind the world and the "people" described by Hurston and Hughes. Thus Carby criticizes Hurston for identifying herself "both as an intellectual and as a repre-sentative figure from the folk culture she reproduced and made authentic in her work"; as Carby points out, "asserting that she was both did not resolve the contradictions embedded in the social meaning of each category." 33
But to put the point this way is insufficiently to acknowledge what is original about writers like Hurston and Hughes: their transformation of folk culture into racial heritage, their rewriting of the people as the race, and so their deployment of racial identity as a category through which class difference can be articulated and by which class difference can be sub-sumed. It is race not class that connects the African-American intellectual to the culture that, disconnected by the intellectual from the "folk," is thereby reconnected to the race. Thus the meaning of the genre to which texts like Not Without Laughter and Their Eyes Were Watching God belong is nothing but the process of racialization, the enactment of the rela-tion between narrator and narrated as a genealogy through which an autonomous racial identity is both authenticated and, in the process of authentication, created.
The idea that a text should be itself by ceasing to represent is in at least one way clearly opposed to the idea that a race becomes itself only by being represented: the first urges that representation be suspended, the second insists that it be enforced. But this opposition is at most provisional. For Williams's commitment to the "opacity" of the poem, to letting what he called in his chapter on Poe "the real business of composition show" (IAG, 230)--"WRITING," "Method, punctuation, grammar--" (IAG, 227) instead of "sentiment or mood," "trees and Indians" (IAG, 229)--cannot in the end completely repudiate the effort toward "like"-ness. Poe's "greatness," according to Williams, "is that he turned his back and faced inland, to originality, with the identical gesture of a Boone" (IAG, 226). What's striking about this comparison is not the likeness of Poe to Boone (they aren't alike; their gestures are "identical") but the fact that Boone's "genius" consists in his ability to be "like an Indian" (IAG, 137). "To Boone the Indian was his greatest master. Not for himself surely to be an Indian, though they eagerly sought to adopt him into their tribes, but the reverse: to be himself in a new world, Indianlike." Poetry, in Williams, is, above all, "not 'like' anything" (IAG, 121) and the difference between Poe's writing and Longfellow's or Cooper's or even Hawthorne's is that it is not "lifelike copying" (IAG, 228). Thus the "local," "American" quality of Poe's work consists not in the fact that it represents American subjects (e.g., "the Indians, the forests, the great natural beauty of the New World" [IAG, 227]) but in the fact that it is American, it's made "of original fibre." In order to be "Indianlike," the writer must make no likenesses of Indians, he must devote himself to "WRITING." Thus Boone is most "Indianlike" when he refuses to become an Indian (refuses, in effect, the ontological assumptions of naturalization) and insists instead on being "himself" (IAG, 137), and Poe is most "Indianlike" when he refuses to write about Indians and insists instead on the "WRITING" itself. The effort of imitation is redeemed when it's mobilized on behalf of identity.
In this respect, it would be--and has been--misleading to think of American modernism as fundamentally concerned with questions of representation, either with the critique of representation or with its defense. What I have been suggesting instead is that the modernist concern with representation be understood as instrumental to the modernist commitment to identity, and in particular to the modernist commitment to identity as understood in racial and/or national terms. In the texts discussed here, both the critique of representation and the insistence on it are mobilized on behalf of identitarian categories. When these categories are literary texts, as they are in Williams, the terms in which those texts are conceived are, as I have tried to show, indistinguishable from the terms of racial identity in the 1920s. When these categories are explicitly racial, the promulgation of racial identity is made literally indistinguishable from strategies of literary narration.
My point here is not that many or most modernist writers were racists. Indeed, insofar as racism is identified with a commitment to the superiority of some racial groups to others, it is by no means certain that any of the writers discussed here were racists. Certainly one could find many more egregious examples. And my point isn't exactly that American modernist writers were deeply committed to racial difference (as opposed to racial superiority), although this certainly is true, both of the writers discussed here and of many others. My point rather is that American modernism consisted in the set of ontological commitments that both derived from and made sense of the commitment to racial difference. The commitment to the ontology of racial identity was, in other words, internal to American modernism; what American modernism was was the insistence on that ontology. 34 Its characteristic formal ambitions--for things to be themselves, for things to represent themselves--are irreducibly identitarian, as are its instances of failed ambition. After all, nothing can succeed in being itself unless it can also fail to be itself. 35 American modernism, then, is both the privileging of identity and its transformation into a project. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Coolidge wrote. "American Negroes have been more a race in name than in fact," Locke complained; what the "New Negro" wants is to be really a Negro: "This deep feeling of race is at present the mainspring of Negro life" (NN, 11). The contribution of the poetics of identity is to make sense both of the objects of these desires and of the fact that they can be desires.
Walter Benn Michaels is Professor of English and the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism and of a monograph on American literature from 1890 to 1914 forthcoming as part of the Cambridge History of American Literature. "American Modernism and the Poetics of Identity" comes from his work in progress, Our America: Nativism, Pluralism and Modernism.
* I am grateful to David Kadlec for useful suggestions in revising this essay.
1. William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge, ed. Ron Loewinsohn (New York: New Directions, 1974), 143, 144; hereafter abbreviated EK. For influential discussions of Williams's views on the word as object, see Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1975) and J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1966).
2. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1951), 146.
3. William Carlos Williams, Spring and All in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 206; hereafter abbreviated SA.
4. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1925), 221; hereafter abbreviated IAG.
5. The only mention I've found of patterns like the ones just described is Albert Gelpi's in A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Gelpi points out that "'All' recurs four times in the poem," and that "it rhymes internally with 'fallen, tall, small'" , and he convincingly cites various other forms of alliteration and assonance that amount to a "network of verbal echoes and sound play." He is less convincing, however, in his explanation of what these patterns do: the use of "reiterated dental consonants," for example, is said to "suggest the balked stasis of the scene" and repetition in general is said to "integrate the individual details into the picture." The problem here is the effort to instrumentalize the "materials," to put them to the use of representation when it is their resistance to representation that mattered to Williams. The point is not that the poem has no meaning but that these elements are foregrounded and yet are not part of that meaning.
6. The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1950), 124. Williams himself reproduces much of this letter in an introduction (dated September 1918) to Kora in Hell . In addition to making fun of Williams's claim to be a "REAL American," Pound quotes a few lines deprecating the very idea of literary nationalism, a position worth remembering should it come to comparing Pound's anti-Semitism to the more properly nativist commitments described below. Although such a comparison cannot be undertaken here, it is worth noting that Pound's indifference to the idea of a native poetry and his hostility to pluralism suggest a set of racial commitments different not only in degree but in kind from those outlined in this essay.
7. For a discussion of separation as the attempt "to separate words from things," see Joseph Riddel, The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the CounterPoetics of William Carlos Williams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 225-26.
8. Calvin Coolidge, America's Need for Education, ed. Henry Suzzalo (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925), 56; hereafter abbreviated ANE.
9. This is not to say that a materialist poetics as such need be a nativist or even a nationalist poetics. Williams might, for example, have conceived of American identity as the sort of thing that could be achieved without in any sense also being inherited, and so might have admitted the possibility that someone who wasn't American could easily become American. He might, in other words, have been committed to the account of poetic identity that I describe him as holding without being committed to the account of national identity that I describe him as also holding, in which case he would not have identified poetic independence with national independence. In this sense, of course, the fact that he held both these views is contingent. My point in beginning this paragraph with the claim that the relation between the terms in which Williams describes poetry and the terms in which he describes Americans is not contingent is just to emphasize that the connection between poetry and Americanism is anchored in a deeper connection between poetry and national identity. Thus the relation between his terms of description (for poetry and American identity) is neither coincidental nor an expression of enthusiasm for attractively American qualities; the fact that the terms he uses are the same expresses his commitment to the idea that the conditions of identity in poetry are the same as the conditions of identity in nationality.
10. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), 160; hereafter abbreviated RTC. Stoddard was, perhaps, the most prolific and best-known nativist writer of the period; it's The Rising Tide that appears as "'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man Goddard" in The Great Gatsby. Other relevant nativists of the period include Madison Grant (author of The Passing of the Great Race [1916] and of an introduction to The Rising Tide), Charles W. Gould (author of America, A Family Matter [1922]), and Gino Speranza, whose major effort, Race or Nation, is discussed below and whose writings, according to Thomas J. Archdeacon, "best expressed" the "main arguments" of restrictionist nativism (Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American, An Ethnic History [New York: The Free Press, 1983], 171).
11. For more detailed discussion of Coolidge and especially of the meaning of the "classical" in American nativism, see Walter Benn Michaels, "The Vanishing American," American Literary History 2 (Summer 1990): 220-41.
12. Gino Speranza, Race or Nation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1925), 107; hereafter abbreviated RN.
13. Lothrop Stoddard, Re-Forging America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), 101; hereafter abbreviated RFA.
14. Among the most blatant examples are Rosamond St. Peter and Louis Marsellus (in The Professor's House) and Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn (in The Sun Also Rises), but it would take only the most rudimentary analysis to show that Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby (né Jimmy Gatz) (in The Great Gatsby) and Quentin Compson and the "man with a red tie" (in The Sound and the Fury) should also count as miscegenated couples.
15. See again The Professor's House and The Sound and the Fury, not to mention some of Hemingway's short stories (e.g., "The Battler" in In Our Time [1925]) and such lesser-known texts as Robinson Jeffers's Tamar and Oliver LaFarge's Laughing Boy .
16. Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (1924; New York: Boni and Liveright, 1970), 177; hereafter abbreviated CDUS. Indeed, according to Kallen, even miscegenation can't destroy racial identity. With respect to race, miscegenation too is an environmental influence, conferring upon people the "traits" of different races but leaving the traits themselves untouched; hence, "intermarriage...is not racial assimilation." This scenario preserves the integrity of the race at the expense of the integrity of the body; thus Faulkner's Joe Christmas, running from a lynch mob, incomprehensibly ends up hiding "where he must have known he would be certainly run to earth" and, carrying a loaded gun, fails to fire at the man who catches and then kills him: driven alternately and incoherently by his "black blood" and his "white blood," he is unable to "let his body save itself" (Faulkner, Light in August [1932; New York: Vintage Books, 1985], 443, 449). The races compete rather than mix in Joe Christmas; his body doesn't have a racial identity, it is a site occupied by (more than one) racial identity.
17. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Vintage Books, 1927), 286; hereafter abbreviated DCA. Although it may seem odd to link, under the rubric of modernism, writers as different in many respects as Cather and Williams, it is, of course, their shared commitment to the nativist ontology of identity that I mean to emphasize here. And it might even be suggested that it is precisely the commitment to this ontology, whether deployed in respect to persons, texts or cultures, that should be understood as the defining characteristic of American modernism in the 1920s.
18. James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 396. The remark is quoted from a letter to Fanny Butcher.
19. The passionate Padre Martinez is the exception that proves the rule. A "native" priest who refuses celibacy and who has children and grandchildren throughout the area, he is rendered by the Bishop's arrival "really impotent" (DCA, 141). And this impotence makes him a bulwark of rather than a threat to nativist identity; he begins "already" to be "picturesque," something "left over from the past," like the Indians who are also, of course, "dying out" (DCA, 122). (For discussion of racial extinction as a characteristic marker of racial purity, see Walter Benn Michaels, "The Vanishing American.")
20. Willa Cather, On Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 9; hereafter abbreviated OW. This remark is quoted from Cather's 1927 letter to The Commonweal discussing the composition of Death Comes for the Archbishop.
21. What makes them crazy is what makes them pure, the inbreeding of "old names," a "promiscuity" that produces "deaf-mutes" (SA, 217). The "isolate lakes and valleys" of New Jersey make the setting of this poem a topographic equivalent of the "separate" "reality" of "pure writing." Its central figure, a "desolate" girl "with a dash of Indian blood," expresses "the truth about us" (SA, 218) by embodying in her desolation the truth of poetry's separation (its purity) and of America's isolation (its purity).
22. The specificity of this claim may be indicated by contrasting it to related discussions (in, for example, Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987] and Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987]) of the meaning of a certain preoccupation with the materiality of writing in American literature at the turn of the century. I would distinguish here between what might be called a pre-modern insistence on materiality as a form of metaphysical inquiry into the conditions of identity--what makes writing writing--and the nativist insistence on materiality as a way of making identity primary, and so of distinguishing between different identities--what makes American writing American. In the poetics under discussion here, identity is always relational--the point, in other words, is not the artifactuality of the poem but the Americanness of the artifact.
23. Mary Austin, The American Rhythm (1930; New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970), 67; hereafter abbreviated AR.
24. Albert C. Barnes, The Art in Painting (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925), 306.
25. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1968), 267, 261; hereafter abbreviated NN.
26. As Houston A. Baker, Jr. puts it, the "inner objective" of The New Negro was "to found a nation of Afro-Americans on the basis of RACE" (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]), 79.
27. Zora Neale Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," in The Sanctified Church (Berkeley, Calif.: Turtle Island, 1981), 58; hereafter abbreviated "CNE." This essay was first published in 1934 in Nancy Cunard's anthology The Negro.
28. I don't, of course, mean to imply here that only the decision not to pass involves a commitment to racial essence; on the contrary, the very concept of passing--requiring, as it does, the possibility of a difference between one's apparent racial identity and one's real racial identity--involves such a commitment. For if there could be no difference between one's real racial identity and one's apparent racial identity, no one could ever pass: what you passed for would of necessity be what you were.
29. Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1969), 240, 244; hereafter abbreviated NWL.
30. The idea that class identity can be deployed on behalf of racial identity needs to be distinguished from the idea that class identity can be understood as a kind of (or on the model of) racial identity. The racialization of class is crucial to some forms of nativist modernism--reading The Great Gatsby against the contemporary but nonetheless pre-nativist An American Tragedy , one can see the Fitzgerald as an essay in transforming class differences into racial differences--but it is nonetheless importantly different from the autonomization of race through the insistence on class under discussion here. (For a discussion of racial identity in Fitzgerald, see Walter Benn Michaels, "The Souls of White Folk" in Literature and the Body, ed. Elaine Scarry [Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987], 185-209.)
31. In The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues for the particular importance of "a dialect-informed free indirect discourse" in Their Eyes Were Watching God, characterizing it "as a mediating third term that aspires to resolve the tension between standard English and black vernacular" . To put the point this way is to think of Hurston as feeling pressure to choose between the standard and the dialect (as if between middle-class or "white" and lower-class or "Nigger") and resorting to free indirect speech as "a third language" that, combining the dialect with the standard, becomes the "ultimate sign of the dignity and strength of the black voice" . If, however, the point in Hurston is not to incorporate dialect into the standard but to make dialect the object of (self-) representation, then the production of blackness would depend on maintaining rather than resolving the tension between the two, since it is only this tension that makes the project of representation and hence the articulation of racial autonomy through class difference possible.
32. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5, 10.
33. Hazel Carby, "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk" in New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, ed. Michael Awkward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 75, 76. The whole point for Hurston, however, is that the idea of race does resolve these contradictions. Carby compares Hurston unfavorably to Richard Wright, suggesting that Wright's efforts "to explode the category of the Negro" reveal him to be a "modernist," while Hurston is left "embedded in the politics of Negro identity" . Carby is surely right to think of Hurston as committed to the politics of Negro identity but it is precisely this commitment that constitutes her modernism.
34. Postmodernism might, in this context, be described as the rescue of the ontology of race by way of its critique. Postmodernism, in other words, is committed to denying racial essentialism and asserting instead that race is a social construct while at the same time employing the notion of race as a social construct in ways that are incoherent without recourse to racial essentialism. For discussion of this phenomenon, see Walter Benn Michaels, "Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity," Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 655-85.
35. Hence, once again, the inevitable refinement of identitarian thinking in which the difference of the self from others is redeployed as the difference of the self from itself. Affective responses to this internal difference may vary but, for the reason suggested in the text, the assertion of its possibility cannot.
.
Already its name seems inassimilable. Before we have recovered from its harsh and repulsive beginning ("Ausch") we are hit by its violent and sarcastic end ("Witz"). The name itself already suggests the content which, according to Jean-François Lyotard, is "the experience of language that brings speculative discourse to an end." 1 Staunch Heideggerians, who seek to justify their master's inability to confront or even name the Holocaust, have declared Auschwitz an unthinkable realm shrouded in silence. Many others also believe that silence serves the pious memory of the victims and shows a deferential respect for the survivors. They declare Auschwitz to be an unintelligible world, a strange universe that cannot and may not be explained. Hochuth called it "Planet Auschwitz," a forlorn, damned, and desolate world.
Banished from the world of description, analysis, and conclusion, Auschwitz has become a myth in which the assumed universality of its impact obscures the contingencies of its beginning. I use the word "myth" here in the sense that Roland Barthes gave to it in his cele-brated essay "Myth Today." Mythification, he argued, occurs when language empties a narrative of its historical contingency to fill it with an unchanging nature. "In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences..." The result is an account of "bliss-ful clarity" in which there are no contradictions because statements of fact are interpreted as explanations. "Things appear to mean something by themselves." 2 Today few events can rival the mythic power of "Auschwitz." Unlike "Hiroshima," which indeed happened in an unintelligible flash, the story of the atrocity of "Auschwitz" can be depicted in sufficient detail to arouse our fascination. It takes place on a carefully mapped stage that holds our attention.
In this essay I aim to recover some of the historical quality of Auschwitz that, in the words of Barthes, consists in the memory that it once was made. 3 It is characteristic of a mythic site that it has always been, since its significance is assigned at the beginning of Creation, to be redeemed at the end of History. Jewish legend records that the site of Solomon's Temple marks not only the foundation stone of the world, but also the place where the Messiah will appear to Israel. 4 Auschwitz was not preordained to become the major site of the Holocaust. It actually acquired the role of "major site" almost by accident, and even the very fact that it became the site of mass murder resulted more from the failure to achieve one goal than from the ambition to realize another. To reclaim the reality of Auschwitz we must become attuned to the contradictions of the site, not in order to find reasons to deny what happened, but to square the way it happened with the ways of the world--a world in which the mysterious, mythifiable forces of malevolence seem ludicrously irrelevant com-pared to the profane, utterly intelligible, and very effective tendencies towards insufficiency and expediency. 5
As Jean-Claude Pressac has shown, the contingency of Auschwitz's evolution even applies to its mythic core: the crematories. 6 In this essay I will concentrate on another contradiction of the site that clashes with an essential aspect of the myth of Auschwitz: the idea that it was quite literally "the end of the world," that is, a place far away from everywhere else. My choice of subject goes back to a personal experience. The first time I visited Auschwitz I was surprised that a center of extermination was located side by side with a major town. I had seen Lanzmann's film Shoah and remembered its depiction of the forsaken isolation at the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, the silence of the forests that surrounded them. It was the same seclusion that I knew from the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork, where the weekly trains set out upon their fatal journey eastward. Growing up in Holland, I had always thought that the secret terminus of those trains ought to have been as deserted as their point of departure. When, forty years later, I followed the course of those trains, I arrived in a densely populated area, with large towns, huge industries, and very little camouflage. And all that development seemed more than fifty years old. I began to investigate the archives in Poland and found evidence that increased my confusion. Not only was the camp at Auschwitz built right next to an existing town, but this very town had been designated as a center of growth by the same men who had ordered the construction of the camp. National Socialist Auschwitz was to become a district capital and the site of massive industrial activity. It became clear that the mythification of Auschwitz, to which I too had contributed, had blinded me to a more complex reality in which seemingly opposing things such as the design for utopia and the reality of dystopia existed alongside each other. 7
In the following pages I aim to situate this relationship in the German mental map of Central Europe and the geography of the industrialized region of Upper Silesia. In other words, I try to understand the place of Auschwitz. I will show how that place became the focus of a Faustian project to create a German paradise amidst Polish perdition. The issue of "place," that is, the location of Auschwitz under the sky on the planet earth, raises the issue of "space," that is, the relation of the camp to the human body. Thus I will address the architecture of Auschwitz. Architecture can be defined as the art that mediates, through place and space, between the infinity of nature (sky and earth) and the finitude of the body. 8 I will explore some of the historical links that connect the place of Auschwitz with space in Auschwitz. Metaphorically speaking, I will try to describe the stage that hosted one of the most profound tragedies the human race has both permitted and endured. My story ends when the curtain rises--that is, when Himmler takes the decision to ship Jews to Auschwitz on 26 January 1942. This decision has been interpreted against the background of the mythical clarity of the Wannsee Conference, held a few days earlier. I believe that the issues that surrounded the first arrival of Jews in Auschwitz are more complex than previously assumed, but I simply do not have the space to treat this very difficult and important issue responsibly. I will limit myself here to observing that by the early summer of 1942 Auschwitz-Birkenau had become the site of mass-murder by means of two primitive gas chambers in adapted peasant houses. A year later the same camp contained four modern crematories with advanced killing installations and fourteen incinerators with a total of forty-six crucibles. For one million people these buildings proved, indeed, the end of the world.
Let us turn away from this unqualified evil, and look at the nexus of promise and perdition that undergirds the rise of Auschwitz. A good point of departure is a proposal for the Stammlager (main camp) at Auschwitz which was drawn up in the summer of 1942--that is, at the very time that the killing started (fig. 1). The plan, which is preserved in the archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, was drawn up by the architect Lothar Hartjenstein, who worked in the SS design office in Berlin. Not only does it show the concentration camp itself (usually designated as Auschwitz I), located to the left--with its barracks, roll-call place, hospital, prison, work shops, and auxiliary structures such as the Kommandantur, the offices of the Gestapo, the barracks for the SS men, and so on--but it also shows, to the right, a pleasant village for married SS men and their families, including a hotel, shops, sports facilities and, on the edge of the barbed-wire fence close to the prisoners' hospital, a primary school. The plan symbolizes but does not exhaust the juxtaposition of nightmare and dream. It does not show the enormous camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau (a mile west of the Stammlager), or the town of Auschwitz itself (a mile east of the SS village). The camp at Birkenau (also known as Auschwitz II) had, by the time Hartjenstein completed this drawing, already become the terminus of countless transports with Jews from all over Europe. And the town of Auschwitz was the reason why the Germans were there to start with, and why they had built that enormous camp at Birkenau.
Before we explore in more detail the situation in Auschwitz we must get some sense of the mindset and ambitions of the SS men who killed in the camp by day and dreamt in the village by night. The plan seems a perfect evocation of the pride with which National Socialists regarded their ability to recognize a Manichean polarity in the world. The resulting black-and-white vision, suggested in the opposition of camp and village, was perceived as an expression of intellectual clarity. Hence Dietrich Klagges, in his seminal Geschichtsunterricht als national-politische Erziehung (History Instruction as National-Political Education), called for a historiography that emplotted history as the battle between good (German) and evil (non-German, especially the Jew):
It is dangerously one-sided to present youth only with leaders and masters, the healthy creative forces of the nation...Forces of destruction oppose all these constructive forces in fierce combat. One must constantly refer to these...These include the traitors from our own race, and the racial-alien Jew, who would like to appear as German, but who attempts at the same time to destroy the people and the land. They work together with the enemies from outside, those from [Begin Page 84] the North and the South, from the East and the West, who have always tried to oppress Germany, to conquer it, to destroy it, and to transform it into a wilderness. 9
History was thus a protracted battle between the forces of creation and order and the powers of destruction and chaos. As we all know, this need for an aesthetic and moral symmetry that balanced the one against the other was nowhere so present as in the death camps. It was no accident that the self-declared Nordic racial avant-garde, the men and women of the SS, were the perpetrators of the Holocaust. This dialectic seems to inform Hartjenstein's plan. The problem, however, is that the true opposition exists only within the confines of the camp, in the actual encounter between the well-groomed, well-dressed, racially superior SS man and the filthy, rag-clad, racially inferior Untermensch. The village is only a contingent impli-cation of the fact that even SS men need to relax, eat, and sleep. It has, however, no direct bearing on our understanding of the camp itself.
There is also another way to interpret the bisection of the plan. This is not based on the commonplace of National Socialist racism, but on the complex of German vocation. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, Germans had been taught to believe that they, and they alone, had been the Kulturträger in the land that they called das deutsche Osten, which roughly coincided with the territory of the present Republic of Poland. There was some justi-fication to this claim. In the Middle Ages Germans had, in their notorious Drang nach Osten, brought Western technological, economic, and political know-how to the less developed Slavs. But they had done the same for the natives of Cameroon at the turn of the century. What made the German East different from Cameroon was the fact that Germany's civilizing role in Africa had no effect on the German sense of identity, while German involvement with Poland had shaped, according to prominent scholars, the Germans' sense of themselves and their destiny. In 1934 the German anthropologist Josef Nadler identified the German "Push to the East" as the event that had shaped the Germans into a Weltvolk, involving all the German tribes which had hitherto remained politically, culturally, and to some degree linguistically independent. Hence "this space [the East] became the cradle of the idea of a common German destiny, of a common German language, of a common modern German education, of a united German state...When the Germans cross the historic river boundary [between West and East] a new German world epoch begins, ethnic, spiritual, and poli-tical." 10 Three years later a popular history of this "Push to the East" stated unequivocally:
The German settlement of the East proves to be the central pillar in the total make-up of the German nation. Its history mirrors German history in general with penetrating clarity. One must know it for a general understanding of the history of the German land and the German people, and, consequently, for a correct and profound appreciation of the German character. 11
The central word here is settlement. The geopolitical doctrine of Lebensraum, which formed the foundation of Germany's infatuation with the East, implied that a nation did not gain anything by conquering other nations in order to rule them for economic profit. The only purpose of colonization was settlement. To a German in the 1930s das (deutsche) Osten equalled Siedlung. Everyone agreed that the ideology of settlement pervaded and vitalized the whole of German history. 12 Therefore the German East was the mythical region that held the whole of German history together. The resulting German self-definition as a nation of Siedler (settlers) was attractive, as it brought together in one image the opposites of adven-ture and commitment, horizon and place, future and past, universal and particular. As a popular history of the German East explained,
energetic German people from all lineages regained in constant, peaceful Kulturarbeit the land in which once before Germans had lived. Quietly they anchored the German character in their new Heimat. As a result we can say with every justification that "that land is German!" After all it is not superficially "occupied" but has been truly acquired and transformed into the soil of German people and German culture.
The narrative closed by observing, "this is also the reason that this 'Great Feat of the German Nation,' as the colonization of the East has been characterized, has survived the centuries and, taken up again after stagnation and obstruction, profoundly influences the contem-porary German direction of life." 13
The man who was chiefly responsible for transforming the ideology of resettlement into practical policy was Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (fig. 2). This responsibility dated from 7 October 1939, when Hitler had appointed Himmler as Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums. As such, he was responsible for a massive program to evacuate hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans who were scattered in the countries that had fallen within the Soviet sphere of influence as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and to resettle them in those parts of Poland that Germany had conquered in September 1939 and was officially to annex on 26 October of that year. Hitler had openly announced this program in his Reichstag speech a day before Himmler's appointment when he called for the establishment of a new ethnic order in the former Polish territories with an eye to the "resettlement of nationalities in such a manner that the process ultimately results in the obtaining of better dividing lines than is the case at present." 14 From the very beginning Himmler took great pride in the new role that allowed him to become one of the master builders of the New Europe. In an illustrated editorial of Das Schwarze Korps, he reflected on the history and future of German settlement in the East:
The great epochs of a nation find the ultimate expression of their inner force and power in its works of culture. One truth stands at the beginning and the end of each historic epoch: stones will speak when the people have fallen silent. Great epochs already speak in stone to the present.
Following this was a description of the German castles in the East, "testimonies of soldier-like conquest and stubborn defense, as well as symbols of high German culture." The most famous German castle, the onetime headquarters of the Teutonic Order at Marienburg, was "a memorial of the right to life and the will to persist of the whole German nation in the East." 15 For Himmler the castles had preserved the German claim on the East throughout the more than five centuries between the collapse of German power in the fifteenth century and the rise of National Socialism in the present. Thus he urged Germans to create con-ditions such that a decline of German power would never happen again.
One of the reasons that Hitler had chosen Himmler as Reichskommissar was the fact that Himmler headed the ideal tool to create this New Order: the SS. As a paramilitary force it had the muscle to take responsibility for the necessary ethnic cleansing, and as the National Socialist racial and ideological avant-garde, imbued with ideas of "Blood and Soil," it could provide the human resources for rebuilding the German East into a Nordic paradise. The ordinary SS men were left in no doubt as to their role in these territories, which was described in detail by an SS handbook. The conquest of Poland had not brought an alien land under German control. On the contrary: it restored to the German Lebensraum "what German diligence had created in the course of time." A massive program of reconstruction was to consolidate "what has been gained in battle and make it into an eternally linked part of the Greater German space. The German East was for centuries the German people's space of destiny. It will remain so for the following centuries." This reconstruction had a demographic dimension. "The ethnic mosaic of the East demands a new arrangement, which is historically, morally, and ethically totally justified. Connected with the new ordering of space in the East is not only the German-Polish problem and the one caused by other ethnic minorities, but also the Solution to the Jewish Problem as such." The text went on to blame the Jews for all that was wrong in Poland. The ghettos were the source of epidemics and the breeding ground of a criminal class. "The cooperation of Jewry and Poles produced the notorious 'Polish State of Affairs.' What this Polish State of Affairs amounted to has become clear to even the simplest German soldier during the Polish Campaign. In the regained areas in the East a comprehensive reconstruction is taking place with the aim of overcoming this Polish State of Affairs and replacing it with German order and German culture, lifting up the suppressed and enslaved Germans from the East, and finally linking this soil now and forever with the German nation." The handbook continued with the observation that the recon-struction was a titanic enterprise that involved radical land reform in which up to ten small, non-viable Polish farms would be combined to make one prosperous German farm. "The land will have to be rebuilt from the soil up, village by village. Whole villages will have to disappear when fields with a low yield are reforested." Traditionally the German East had suffered from the draining effect of the departure of farm laborers for the industrial areas in the West. To give them a reason to stay it was important to improve their condition, which included their housing:
In the same way that the unacceptable division of property demands reform, so does the unacceptable state of the farmer's houses, stables and barns. The planning of a comprehensive housing program for the East has already come to its completion. This program also involves the architectural reconstruction of the towns in the East, which should once again become centers of a German will for reconstruction as they were in earlier days, and like the German farms and villages, symbols of German life and German creation. 16
We have some remarkable accounts that attest to Himmler's obsession with this utopian project. One of them dates from early 1940, and was written by Himmler's personal friend Hanns Johst. The latter travelled with Himmler through Poland to inspect the progress of a program of ethnic cleansing, and recorded how, repeatedly during their trip,
the Reichsführer-SS stopped the car, climbed over the striated ditches, walked into the fields ploughed over by grenade shells, took some dirt between his fingers, smelled it thoughtfully with inclined head, crushed the crumbs of the field between his fingers, and then looked over the vast, vast space which was full, full to the horizon, with this good, fertile earth. Thus we stood like ancient farmers and we smiled at each other with twinkling eyes. All of this was now German soil!
And the two men considered how the German settlers would soon change the appearance of the land. Here trees and hedges would be planted. Shrubs would grow, and weasels and hedgehogs, buzzards, and falcons would prevent half of the harvest from perishing because of mice and vermin. All of this was a great work of culture undertaken in awe of nature. And they speculated on how these changes would "create protection from the wind, increase dew, and stimulate the formation of clouds, force rain, and thus push a more economically viable climate further toward the East." And, referring to the great resettlement programs already underway, they predicted that "under professional, rational, and scientific leadership, the Balt, Galician, and Volhynian returnees will do miracles." And Johst recorded how the two men stood in the fields, held conquered soil in their hands, and gazed "over the whole of these indifferently treated surfaces...populat[ing] them with villages surrounded by rustling orchards..." Almost as a kind of afterthought he jotted down that "the Western world cannot understand this pure pleasure derived from task and work, from sweat and calluses. It thinks in terms of business and turnover, where we look forward to action!!" 17
Neither Himmler nor Johst bothered about the millions of gentile and Jewish Poles who were to be deported from their farms, villages, and towns to make space for the ethnic German arrivals. On their trip through Poland Himmler and Johst visited Upper Silesia, in the eastern region where towns like Auschwitz, Blachstadt, and Saybusch, interpreted by Himmler as relics of German medieval colonization, had become centers of ethnic cleansing and large-scale ecological, architectural, and urban reconstruction. In a meeting in the government house of Upper Silesia, located in the town of Kattowitz, Himmler and the military and civilian authorities in the region talked openly about the policies to be enacted:
These lecturers do not speak in commonplaces, which one can noddingly affirm without further thought. They present the hard facts, and they ask concrete questions of Heinrich Himmler in his capacity as chief of the resettlement. He takes the podium and in his final answer gives these gentlemen and their departments clear and forcible directions.
Johst was enthralled:
It is wonderful to experience how here one calmly and dispassionately organizes the migration of whole nations. Hundreds of thousands of people stream into the Reich, and are settled in the East...others are deported...and it all happens while the nation fights the greatest defensive battle for its existence. Everything happens as if it were the most self-evident, the simplest issue in the world!
And he added, "at such moments I almost understand the hatred of the Western world for everything German. Nothing was ever so hateful as superiority, as natural superiority, by virtue of the belief in an idea, by virtue of achievements, and by virtue of results." 18
Johst was not the only one who would be astonished at the frankness with which Himmler discussed in public the nature and impact of his policies. In his notorious speech given to the SS leadership on 4 October 1943, Himmler discussed the Holocaust openly, congratulating himself and his comrades for the fact that they had "carried out this heaviest of our tasks in a spirit of love for our people. And our inward being, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it." 19 A year earlier he had discussed with equal frankness the problem of labor in the German East. Originally Himmler had intended to rely on the Reich Labor Service for the labor to plant new forests, drain the marshes, build the roads, prepare the settlements, and so on. But by 1942 the whole of the Reich Labor Service had been mobilized for the war and ceased to be at Himmler's disposal. Himmler could not wait until the Reich Labor Service could furnish manpower for peacetime projects. Noting that the SS had been charged with providing a stable foundation for a German future in the East, "a foundation that allows individuals who come fifty, eighty, one hundred, or two hundred years after us to cave in or to lose their heads without endangering the future of the German Imperium," Himmler announced the formation of an enormous army of slaves:
If we do not create the bricks here, if we do not fill our camps with slaves--in this room I state these things precisely and clearly--with workslaves who will build our cities, our villages, and our farms, irrespective of losses, then, after a long war, we will not have the money to create such settlements that allow a truly Germanic people to live with dignity and take root within one generation." 20
Himmler's use of the word "bricks" had both a metaphorical and literal sense. The German concentration camps, which Himmler controlled as Reichsführer-SS, had acquired in the late 1930s a key role in the German production of building materials. Originally intended as an instrument of terror to stabilize the National Socialist regime, at first the camps had not been used to furnish labor for productive work, as this would have competed with German business and hindered the reduction of high unemployment. By 1937, however, the camps were becoming superfluous as political tools, for the regime was now firmly established and enjoyed general approval. The number of inmates had dropped from 30,000 in early 1934 to 10,000, and a German future without concentration camps had become conceivable. Yet Himmler did not want to close them. First, they provided him a political power base; more important, he very clearly saw the camps' economic potential in a situation of labor shortage. Already in 1936-37 Himmler began to consider the productive potential of possible concentration camp sites. Dachau was to remain where it was, but the new camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were established in places that seemed optimal. Both were to be involved in the production of bricks to service the local programs of urban reconstruction. With an eye to providing the city of Weimar with brick, the SS decided to locate Buchenwald on the wooded Ettersberg, five miles from the former capital, a site chosen because it was adjacent to large loam and clay deposits. Sachsenhausen was to serve Speer's building program in Berlin; located twenty-five miles north of the city along the Hohenzollern canal in the town of Oranienburg, it offered good possibilities for bulk transport to the capital. Having decided on the location of these two camps, in early 1938 Himmler founded the Deutsche Erd und Steinwerke (DESt, or German Earth and Stone Works) to set up and run the brickworks at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and possibly other places, as well as to open and exploit granite quarries. The first brickyard to be opened was the one near Buchenwald, planned to have a capacity of 7 million bricks per year. With a subsidy of RM 9.5 million given by Speer, DESt also began construction of a brickyard in Oranienburg, intended to be the largest brickyard in the world with an annual production of 150 million bricks, ten times as many as the largest existing brickyards could yield. The same year DESt bought a defunct brickyard near Hamburg and began to plan a 40-million-brick-a-year production facility to supply the reconstruction of Hamburg. A new concentration camp, Neuengamme, was built adjacent to the factory.
To supply Speer with granite, DESt began to operate granite quarries in 1938. The first two to be acquired were a quarry near Flossenbürg, close to the Czech border in the Upper Palatinate, and a famous granite quarry adjacent to the Upper Austrian town of Mauthausen, near Linz. Before 1914 the quarries of Mauthausen had supplied most of the granite used in Vienna, Budapest, and the smaller cities of the former Austrian-Hungarian empire. 21 The quality of the stone and the town's location along a major transport corridor had contributed to its fame. With the dissolution of the empire, however, Mauthausen had fallen on hard times. Demand for granite had decreased, even as the use of concrete increased. For the town of Mauthausen the Anschluss of 1938 was a welcome event; in Hitler's Germany, granite was again the premier building material for public buildings. A few days after the Anschluss, Himmler and his aide Oswald Pohl, who controlled the administration of the SS and its companies, toured the Mauthausen area with an eye to establishing a DESt branch to exploit its riches. After some negotiation, the city leased two quarries to DESt; adjacent to each, the SS began to build a camp. The same pattern was applied in Flossenbürg, and to DESt operations in Silesia and the Alsace. Quarries were identified and assessed in relation to transport and markets, then leased or purchased, and finally complemented by new camps to provide labor: in Silesia the quarries, which Speer had designated as the main suppliers of Berlin, were to be serviced by Gross-Rosen and in the Alsace, by Natzweiler. In some cases the pattern was reversed. The concentration camp in Auschwitz, for example, was established adjacent to the formerly Polish town because of demographic and political reasons. But within a few months of its establishment, DESt acquired a gravel and sand production facility close to the camp.
More important than the production of gravel was Auschwitz's function as a labor reserve to facilitate German reconstruction of the eastern part of Upper Silesia. For various eco-nomic and geopolitical reasons, Auschwitz had attracted the attention of the men charged by Himmler with the long-range planning of the German East. As early as July 1940 Himmler had been convinced by Professor Doktor Konrad Meyer that a speedy Germanization of the area around Auschwitz was of the highest priority. 22 Himmler's Chief of Staff, Ulrich Greifelt, concurred. "It is very urgent at this point to create a purely ethnic German corner," he wrote, also suggesting several communities as potential places of settlement by ethnic Germans, among them the town of Auschwitz and the nearby village of Birkenau (fig. 3). 23 On Thursday, 10 October 1940 a meeting held in Kattowitz and attended by the SS and Upper Silesia's civil servants decided that part of the new province was going to be used for massive settlement by ethnic Germans. A map created for this meeting designated the area around Auschwitz as Siedlungszone 1a (Zone of Settlement 1a) (fig. 4). 24 This designation implied that the given area offered few impediments to the envisioned physical and social trans-formation. A master plan for the future of the region was to be completed by the spring of 1941. 25
Planning started quickly indeed. The Germans set to work on both regional and municipal designs. In December 1940 the architect Dr. Hans Stosberg accepted the task of creating a master plan for the reconstruction and enlargement of Auschwitz. After two months of work he produced a preliminary design (fig. 5), accompanied by an explanatory document that is printed as an appendix to this essay. 26 It noted that Auschwitz was located at the center of three major industrial areas, and that it offered good building ground and a bountiful supply of water. This was important because of the Upper Silesian coal mines located on the watershed between the Oder and the Vistula; their coal, being of relatively low grade, was intended to serve as raw material for chemical industries, but the unavailability of water effectively prevented the location of such plants adjacent to the mines. Auschwitz, because of the confluence of three rivers, was the closest site with the requisite water supply. Stosberg's draft assumes a city of first 35,500, and later 47,000 inhabitants. The largest single employer would be the chemical industry, an IG Farben plant, to make artificial rubber from coal, a complex that would employ 3,000 people who were to live in their own quarter. Eventually, both the plant and a small part of the IG Farben neighborhood were built. The draft continues with the railways, which would employ 1,500 people. These workers and their [Begin Page 93] families would live in a quarter close to the station. The document also mentions "SS and ancillary businesses (but not the barracks and the concentration camp inmates)." This would involve 1,500 workplaces.
Stosberg's design was faced with a number of vexing limitations. Space was tight. It was clear that the industry was to go to the town's east. To the south there was a large floodplain unsuitable for anything but recreational use; to the north the same condition applied; and to the west the town was surrounded on three sides by the concentration camp's Interes-sengebiet (Zone of Interests), which was forbidden territory. In his initial report of December 1940, Stosberg had thought it possible to harmonize the needs of the concentration camp for security with the needs of the town for breathing space. But as he continued to design and the camp continued to expand, relations between Stosberg and the SS soured. Stosberg and SS architect Hartjenstein developed mutually exclusive plans for the quarter located between the railway lines with the station, the Stammlager in Zasole, and the river Sola (fig. 6). 27 Stosberg's design for the civic peninsula that carved its way from the river bank into the camp's Zone of Interests was meant to provide citizens with a dignified if not festive access to the trains by means of a great boulevard that was to be the spine of New Town West, a densely built-up neighborhood for 7,500 people. Hartjenstein's proposal for the SS settle-ment engulfed some fifty percent of Stosberg's neighborhood, reducing it to what Stosberg termed a "torso." Furthermore, the vernacular character of the SS Garden City with its cozy one-family homesteads set in large gardens contradicted the strongly urban character of Stosberg's plan, a note the latter considered appropriate for the central urban axis connecting the city's major elements: the station to the medieval Ring and, beyond that, the new plaza (Parteiforum) that was to embody Auschwitz's dignity as capital of a new county (fig. 7), the eastern neighborhood, and the immense IG Farben plant that was to provide the economic justification for all these improvements.
There were really two solutions to the problem: either the SS settlement had to conform to the urban density of Stosberg's plan, providing an appropriate southern flank to the avenue mentioned above, or the SS had to move the Garden City to another site within their Zone of Interests, allowing for a new border between the city and the camp, one closer to the Stammlager. Stosberg was supported by the provincial bureaucracy. But the camp also had strong supporters, not the least of whom was Himmler. The two parties argued for almost a year, pushing the border between the city and the camp up and down between the proposed avenue and the perimeter of the camp. Ultimately the issue was settled in favor of the city; in a large meeting held in Auschwitz on Wednesday, 23 September, the chief of the SS-Wirtschafts Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA, or SS Economic and Administrative Department), SS-Obergruppenführer (General) Oswald Pohl, withdrew Hartjenstein's proposal and an-nounced that he had ordered the architect to prepare a master plan that moved the settlement to the south side of the Stammlager, firmly within the camp's Zone of Interests. 28 None of these difficulties was anticipated in Stosberg's 1941 report. There he still assumed that the camp's development would not obstruct the "organic" development of the town. In view of the later use of Auschwitz-Birkenau as an extermination plant, it is ironic that Stosberg identified that area (between the station and the Vistula) as a good site to establish "SS industrial installations."
Stosberg continued to work on his plan, of which important relics remain. One is a double-folded New Year's greeting card that he sent in December 1941. On the front he wished his benefactors and friends "health, happiness, and a good outcome for every new beginning." The inside spread showed his proposal for the rehabilitation of Auschwitz's market (fig. 8), while the back contained a four-sentence meditation placing Auschwitz firmly within the National Socialist Myth of the German East:
In the year 1241 Silesian knights, acting as saviors of the Reich, warded off the Mongolian assault at Wahlstatt. In that same century Auschwitz was founded as a German town. After six hundred years the Führer Adolf Hitler is turning the Bolshevik menace away from Europe. This year, 1941, the construction of a new German city and the reconstruction of the old Silesian market have been planned and initiated. 29
As we will see below, the suggested relation between Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union and the reconstruction of Auschwitz did not exist only in history. It also applied to space.
The realization of Stosberg's proposal depended on the availability of labor. Himmler was to oblige him. On 1 March 1941, on his way to a gathering of Bukowinian Germans who were waiting in camps in and around Breslau for their final resettlement in the region just south of Auschwitz, Himmler visited Auschwitz and ordered the construction of a large prisoner-of-war camp in Birkenau. A few weeks earlier he had been informed of Hitler's decision to attack the Soviet Union in the spring, and Himmler had immediately recognized that the expected mass of Soviet prisoners of war would provide him with the labor force he needed to continue the reconstruction of the German East. As the area around Auschwitz had been assigned top priority in this project, it made sense for the region to receive the bulk of prisoners of war who would be transferred into SS custody by the Army. According to the commandant of the concentration camp, Rudolf Höss, the various provincial officials present at Himmler's visit were not very happy at the prospect of 100,000 Soviet prisoners two [Begin Page 96] kilometers from Auschwitz, and raised their objections with the Reichsführer-SS. "Himmler just smiled," Höss recalled in 1946, "and disposed of their objections saying, 'Gentlemen, this project will be completed; my reasons are more important than your objections!'" 30 Even purely technical objections were not taken seriously. The wetlands of Birkenau were of crucial significance for the province's future. Most of Upper Silesia's population lived in a densely settled industrial belt occupying a plateau that formed, as we saw before, a watershed between the rivers Oder and Vistula; as a result the region lacked water, a deficiency that potentially limited future develop-ment. To redress this, the province had designated the lowland between the Vistula and the Sola as a major water reservoir for the industrial heart of Upper Silesia. 31 Provincial bureaucrats now argued that the sewage of 100,000 people was going to make it impossible to maintain the water quality, but Himmler impatiently dismissed their concerns: water management was merely a matter of technology to be solved by the experts (Höss, 285).
On Sunday, 22 June 1941 the German army surprised the Soviet Union in an early morning attack. Goebbels instructed the media to report the war in the East as the unmasking of "the greatest Jewish swindle of all times." The press got instructions to present the situation in the Soviet Union through
an impressive juxtaposition of inhuman conditions in the Soviet Union on the one hand and the social progress, the high cultural standard, and the healthy Lebensfreude of the working man in National Socialist Germany on the other. A good choice of pictures, contrasting the bestialized bolshevik types with the free and open gaze of the German worker, filthy Soviet hutments with German workers' settlements, muddy tracks with the German Reich highways, etc., will be of particular importance in this connexion. 32
From this it was only a small step to a rhetoric pitting the European Mensch against the Soviet Untermensch, which had come to mean a Russian in the clutches of Judeo-bolshevism.
The simple polarization of human being versus subhuman was graphically depicted in Der Untermensch, an SS publication released simultaneously in fifteen European languages to arouse enthusiasm across the continent for the German crusade in the East. An organ for Himmler's view of history, Der Untermensch emphasized the centuries-old conflict between the European Mensch and the predecessors of the Soviet Untermensch, the Hun and Mongol horsemen, whom the National Socialists conflated and confused. In this section, a two-page spread depicted the Hun/Mongol nemesis of the past and the Soviet enemy of the present. Mounted Huns trampling Germanic women and children were shown on the left, while on the right were portraits of six Soviet prisoners of war.   Their split eyes glowed with lust to kill and behind them they left only wilderness, murder, fire, and destruction." And, turning to the picture of the prisoners of war, the caption continued on the right-hand page, "now they are here again, the Huns, caricatures of human faces, nightmares that have become reality, a fist blow into the face of all that is good." 33
Convinced that the war against the Soviet Union was a crusade to protect European civili-zation against Asian barbarism, the leadership of the German army had decided on 8 September 1941 that rules of war established by custom and formulated in international law did not apply to the war in the East. This decision reflected a widely felt German sentiment. More than a month before the German attack on the Soviet Union, Colonel-General Höpner, commander of Panzer Group Four, had written:
The war against the Soviet Union is an essential component of the German people's struggle for existence. It is the old struggle of the Germans against the Slavs, the defense of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic fold, the warding-off of Jewish Bolshevism ...Both the planning and the execution of every battle must be dictated by an iron will to bring about a merciless, total annihilation of the enemy. 34
In early October another commander reminded his soldiers that their task was "the complete destruction" of the Soviet army and "the eradication of the Asiatic influence on the European cultural sphere." German troops had special tasks
which go beyond the conventional unilateral soldierly tradition. In the East the [German] soldier is not only a fighter according to the rules of war, but also a carrier of an inexorable racial conception and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been committed against the Germans and related races. 35
And in November another commander explained to his troops:
Here in the East spiritually unbridgeable conceptions are fighting each other: a German sense of honor and race, and a soldierly tradition of many centuries, against an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts, whipped up by a small number of mostly Jewish intellectuals...We clearly recognize our mission to save European culture from the advancing Asiatic barbarism...This battle can only end with the destruction of one or the other; compromise is out of the question. 36
The new attitude also affected the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. In the notorious "Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars," better known as the "Commissar Order," which was issued on 6 June 1941, the German army was forbidden to grant prisoner-of-war status to captured Soviet political commissars. Instead these "bearers of the Judeo-Bolshevik world view" were to be shot after identification. The army's acceptance of the Commissar Order opened the road for more violations of international law. On 28 June 1941, the general in charge of the Prisoner of War Department of the German Army High Command concluded a draft agreement with the SS that allowed SS Einsatzkommandos (Special Units) to enter prisoner-of-war camps to select and execute already imprisoned commissars, communist functionaries of all ranks, agitators and fanatical communists, and "all Jews." 37 This agreement came into force on 17 July. The army justified it by noting that "the special situation of the Eastern campaign...demands special measures." Military consi-derations were now going to give way to the "political objective," which was to "protect the German nation from Bolshevik inciters." 38
Less dramatic, but ultimately more deadly, was the German unwillingness to provide the remaining prisoners with sufficient accommodation. Three major international conventions, the First Hague Convention , the Second Hague Convention , and the Geneva Convention had established minimal standards of prisoner maintenance. Yet because the Soviet Union had not been a signatory to the last convention, which had merely clarified certain points of the earlier ones that were already ruling as law on the basis of custom, the German high command was led to the criminal assumption that none of the conventions applied. I will discuss some of their provisions later in more detail. Suffice it note that already in the early summer of 1941 catastrophic conditions began to occur in the camps holding Soviet prisoners of war. "Camps" is in fact a euphemism: a camp consisted of fields surrounded by barbed-wire fences. The inmates were to build themselves shelters, but no materials were provided. One of them, camp Lamsdorf in Silesia, reportedly held some 200,000 prisoners:
The camp was simply a square area of land where most of the Russians huddled together in huts made from the earth which they had built themselves. Food distribution to the camp was irregular and totally inadequate. The prisoners cooked for themselves in fire pits in the ground (Höss, 132).
Unwilling and unable to deal with the problem, the army negotiated a transfer of Soviet pri-soners with Himmler. 39 As we have seen, on Saturday, 1 March 1941 Himmler had desig-nated Birkenau as the site for a large camp. Yet for months nothing had been done toward its construction, and no funds had been allocated. When the Soviet prisoners arrived in early October in Birkenau, there was no camp available. Yet the Germans were happy to supply the designs. In fact, they had created a new architectural office headed by Karl Bischoff (fig. 9). Bischoff had begun work in early October 1941, and a first master plan was drawn by his assistant, the thirty-three-year-old Bauhaus graduate Fritz Ertl, on 7 October (fig. 10). The plan proposed a two-part camp for a total of 97,000 inmates. The smaller part, Bauabschnitt I (Building Sector I, abbreviated as BA I), which could hold a little under 17,000 inmates, was a quarantine camp, a reasonable provision given the bad physical condition of the arriving prisoners; the larger part, Bauabschnitt II (Building Sector II, abbreviated as BA II), designed to hold a little over 80,000 inmates, was the main camp. They were separated by a "neutral zone" (fig. 11). In a meeting held in mid-October the plan was modified, creating a second version that became the basis for a fourteen-page document that explains the design in detail. 40 The most important change was an increase in the camp's capacity from 97,000 to 125,000 inmates. One drawing, which shows a section of the standard hut to be built, leaves no doubt that the increase was achieved by cramming more inmates into the same space. The original drawing, signed by Bischoff on 8 October, listed a capacity of 550 men (fig. 12). A week later Bischoff had crossed out the "550" and replaced it with "744". 41 Nothing else had changed. Perhaps Bischoff's decision was inspired by the arrival of the first prisoners of war. "They arrived in Auschwitz after long weeks of marching with very little food supplied to them on route. During the breaks in their march they were simply led into nearby fields and told to 'graze' like cattle on everything that was edible." Having arrived, "they walked around aimlessly in a daze, or they crawled anywhere into a protected area to swallow something edible that they found. They tried to force it down their throats, or they simply, quietly, found a place to die" (Höss, 133). Fear of anarchy also led to another modification: the main camp (BA II) was now to be subdivided into twelve smaller, self-sufficient "camps"--an arrangement that was to persist throughout all subsequent modifications (BA IIa, b, c, d, e and f). Yet another modification was the inclusion of a rail spur to connect the camp directly to the railway junction a mile to the east. In the future prisoners were to arrive by train (fig. 13).
Working in a hurry, Bischoff had been drawing plans without informing Berlin and with no sense of available funding. On 25 October, SS headquarters telegraphed Bischoff to remind him that a budget could not be approved unless he submitted the plans according to the usual procedures. 42 A package was hastily created. The total budget was to be RM 8.9 million, which compares in 1993 to $36 million. In an accompanying letter Bischoff wrote that BA I was already under construction and would be finished in fourteen days. It was not the last time that Bischoff turned out to be far too optimistic about the amount of con-struction that could be achieved in Auschwitz. The Soviet prisoners, as Höss observed, were "perfectly willing to work, but unable to accomplish anything because of their weakened condition...The entire body organism was finished and could no longer function" (Höss, 132f.). None of this affected calculations back in Berlin: the SS head office reduced the total cost from RM 8.9 million to RM 7.7 million. The standard rate for labor costs did not apply because the prisoners were to build the camp themselves, and for free.
Closer study of the actual designs reveals how the Nazi identification of the Soviet soldier as an Untermensch was translated into architectural terms. The prisoners were to be housed in 174 barracks. Each barrack was to measure 116 ft. by 36 ft., that is, 4,176 sq. ft. Total volume was 13,257 cu. ft. The barrack was subdivided into 62 bays, each of 43 sq. ft., and each bay had three "roosts" (fig. 14). Originally a roost was supposed to hold three prisoners, but, as we have seen, in mid-October the capacity had been increased to four. To sleep, sit, and keep his belongings, each prisoner was now provided with "private" space that amounted to 11 sq. ft., the dimensions of a large coffin, or an average volume of 53 cu. ft., the size of a shallow grave. The cost per barrack was to be RM 12,400, that is, RM 16.67 per inmate.
Inmates were being deprived of the minimum space needed to exist. Tadeusz Borowski, who was interned in Auschwitz in 1943 as prisoner number 119,198, described the condi-tions in the camp as more horrendous than medieval fantasies about hell:
If the barrack walls were suddenly to fall away, many thousands of people, packed together, squeezed tightly in their bunks, would remain suspended in mid-air. Such a sight would be more gruesome than medieval paintings of the Last Judgment. For one of the ugliest sights to a man is that of another man sleeping on his tiny portion of the bunk, of the space which he must occupy, because he has a body--a body that has been exploited to the utmost: with a number tattooed on it to save on dog tags, with just enough sleep at night to work during the day, and just enough time to eat. And just enough food so it will not die wastefully. As for actual living there is only one place for it--a piece of bunk. The rest belongs to the camp, the Fatherland. 43
Borowski's comparison with medieval visions of hell was apt. Yet if there is a certain justification to the sufferings of medieval sinners who have been judged by God, nothing can justify the treatment of inmates at Birkenau, arbitrarily selected by an SS doctor. In the medieval paintings and reliefs, guilt and retribution are still related as cause and effect; in Birkenau it is the other way around. In a Kafkaesque inversion of crime and punishment, the camps first penalized people and then made them guilty. Anyone forced to live in the barracks could only become an object lesson for a photo-essay exploring the life and appearance of the Untermensch.
The extraordinarily small space allocated to each inmate and the high mortality rate within the huts meant that inmates would often die during the night, and that those who were still alive had no way to remove the corpses. Primo Levi, who experienced this in January 1945, reflected on the implications of this forced intimacy between the living and the dead: