Published by Indiana University Press, 2023.


Throughout the Holocaust, the Nazis created spaces of a violent and genocidal nature all over Europe. The Jewish ghetto they established in occupied Warsaw in the years between 1940 and 1943 was one of them. As a social and spatial construct, the ghetto was in many ways harmful to the Jews imprisoned in it: it excluded, disoriented and alienated them; it ruptured existing relationships and allowed the Germans to create conditions that were fundamentally adverse to Jewish lives.
The ghetto was not only pervaded by violence, it was, in fact, an act of violence in and of itself. To explore this phenomenon, Violent Space establishes a theoretical framework to help describe spatialized forms of violence and provides a spatially oriented history of the Warsaw ghetto, retracing in detail how the German occupiers “made” the ghetto, how they governed and used it.
Then, the analysis turns to the victims, whose perceptions and experiences lie at the heart of the book. Working with first-hand accounts from the ghetto, Violent Space carefully traces out the immense trauma and pain that was caused by the spatial aspects of ghettoization. Analyzing recurring experiences, situations and constellations, it shows the ghetto as it was experienced and described by those whose lives were most brutally reshaped and affected by it.
Praise
„Anja Nowak’s Violent Space marks the advent of mature spatial scholarship on the Holocaust. This astonishingly insightful book is infused with Nowak’s profound understanding of Nazi spatial theory and practice and how their violent implementation in the Warsaw ghetto created extreme, constantly changing spaces of human suffering. Nowak’s lucid prose makes every chapter coherent and powerful, while building a sustained interpretation of ghettoized space as violence, and violence as a flood of spatial acts. Violent Space is spatial history at its very best: deeply geographical, seeking at every turn to determine how spatial ideas became specific actions that affected Jews‘ lives. A brilliant contribution to Holocaust studies that spatial scholars across the humanities should read.“
~ Anne Kelly Knowles, editor of Geographies of the Holocaust
„Given its focus on the Warsaw ghetto, Violent Space builds on a number of existing works in important ways through its focus on the topography of the ghetto and the spatial practices of ghetto inhabitants. As the author notes, the destruction of the ghetto means that these places and spaces are no longer present in the contemporary city and the author follows Engelking and Leociak in excavating them and bringing them to life. Here the book will appeal to the general reader given the importance of the Warsaw ghetto within the story of the Holocaust. But Violent Space does more than focus on Warsaw alone and so will be of wider interest to scholars of ghettos and the nascent field of Holocaust geographies, environmental histories of the Holocaust and genocide space.“
~ Tim Cole, author of Holocaust Landscapes
„This is an excellent book. It is well-written, clear, original, and relevant. The author never fails, when discussing these experiences, to frame the conversation around the concept of space, with pertinent examples and quite deep reflections on the personal geographies and stories of the witnesses.“
~ Alberto Giordano, editor of Geographies of the Holocaust
Related Papers
„Spatial Configurations of the Concentration Camp: The Inside and the Outside.” Geograficzne przestrzenie utekstowione. Edited by Bożena Karwowska and Ewa Wampuszyc. University of Bialystok Publishing House, 2017, p. 371-386.
Funded by
Hamburger Stiftung für Kultur und Wissenschaft; UBC Holocaust Education Committee; Killam Doctoral Scholarship; UBC Arts Research Abroad & Go Global.