Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City | Date: 28 April 2011, 06:37
|
Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City
By Gordon J. Horwitz
* Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
* Number Of Pages: 416
* Publication Date: 2008-05-30
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 067402799X
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780674027992
Product Description:
Under the Third Reich, Nazi Germany undertook an unprecedented effort to refashion the city of Lodz. Home to prewar Poland’s second most populous Jewish community, this was to become a German city of enchantment—a modern, clean, and orderly showcase of urban planning and the arts. Central to the undertaking, however, was a crime of unparalleled dimension: the ghettoization, exploitation, and ultimate annihilation of the city’s entire Jewish population.
Ghettostadt is the terrifying examination of the Jewish ghetto’s place in the Nazi worldview. Exploring ghetto life in its broadest context, it deftly maneuvers between the perspectives and actions of Lodz’s beleaguered Jewish community, the Germans who oversaw and administered the ghetto’s affairs, and the “ordinary” inhabitants of the once Polish city. Gordon Horwitz reveals patterns of exchange, interactions, and interdependence within the city that are stunning in their extent and intimacy. He shows how the Nazis, exercising unbounded force and deception, exploited Jewish institutional traditions, social divisions, faith in rationality, and hope for survival to achieve their wider goal of Jewish elimination from the city and the world. With unusual narrative force, the work brings to light the crushing moral dilemmas facing one of the most significant Jewish communities of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, while simultaneously exploring the ideological underpinnings and cultural, economic, and social realities within which the Holocaust took shape and flourished.
This lucid, powerful, and harrowing account of the daily life of the “new” German city, both within and beyond the ghetto of Lodz, is an extraordinary revelation of the making of the Holocaust.
(20080310)
Summary: A Disappointing Book
Rating: 2
The tragic facts of the Lodz ghetto, even if carefully documented in great detail, don't by themselves make a good book. That takes more insight, more narrative shaping, better selection and emphasis of the materials, than this book offers. The Nazi creation of their ideal new city, scrubbed and healthy and all-German, at the same time they were starving and murdering 200,000 Jews within it, is an obvious irony that gets tedious with repetition. And the author's few timid attempts at interpretation--that, for example, the Jewish ghetto leader Rumkowski really wasn't so bad--are not convincing. There's an anthology of primary sources that a film about Lodz was based on that's far more vivid and revealing. Some of the best parts of this book are drawn from it--the diary kept by Poznanski, for one.
Summary: Daily Life Under Nazi Occupation In The Lodz Ghetto
Rating: 5
The daily cruelties inflicted on the Jews who were forced hurriedly out of their apartments in Lodz to make room for ethnic Germans into the Lodz ghetto is described in meticulous detail. The documentation for these events is thoroughly cited. For anyone interested in the life of the Jews living under brutal conditions imposed by the Nazis during World War 11, this is a must read. It is not just another book on the Holocaust.
Summary: GHETTOSTADT: LODZ AND THE MAKING OF A NAZI CITY
Rating: 5
A unique and highly descriptive volume on the ghetto in Lodz. This book gives both the Jewish and German perspectives of the creation of the ghetto, and goes into excellent detail of the Nazi intentions in regard to the city and region itself. The setup and functioning of the Chelmno death camp are vividly covered, and the section on the dissolution of the camp and attempts to erase evidence of the crimes committed there is excellent in its detail and description. One of the best narratives that I have read on the Lodz ghetto.
|
DISCLAIMER:
This site does not store Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City on its server. We only index and link to Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
|
 |
|
Comments (0)
All
