Full Description
This significant new study is concerned with the role of interpreting in Nazi concentration camps, where prisoners were of 30 to 40 different nationalities. With German as the only official language in the lager, communication was vital to the prisoners' survival. While in the last few decades there has been extensive research on the language used by the camp inmates, investigation into the mediating role of interpreters between SS guards and prisoners on the one hand, and among inmates on the other, has been almost nonexistent.
On the basis of Primo Levi's considerations on communication in the Nazi concentrationary system, this book investigates the ambivalent role of interpreting in the camps. One of the central questions is what the role of interpreting was in the wider context of shaping life in concentration camps. And in what way did the knowledge of languages, and accordingly, certain communication skills, contribute to the survival of concentration camp inmates and of the interpreting person? The main sources under investigation are both archive materials and survivors' memoirs and testimonials in various languages.
On a different level, Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps also asks in what way the study of communication in concentration camps enhances our understanding of the ambiguous role of interpreting in more general terms. And in what way does the study of interpreting in concentration camps shape an interpreting concept which can help us to better understand the violent nature of interpreting in contexts other than the Holocaust?
Contents
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps: Challenging the "Order of Terror"?
Michaela Wolf, University of Graz, Austria
PART 1 The Concentration Camp Universe
Chapter 1 The Camp Society: Approaches to Social Structure and Ordinary Life in Nazi Concentration Camps
Alexander Prenninger, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Research, Austria
Chapter 2 Translanguagers and the Concentrationary Universe
David Gramling, University of Arizona, USA
PART 2 Language Diversity in the Camps
Chapter 3 Linguistic Terror in Nazi Concentration Camps: Lucien and Gilbert - Portraits of Two "Interpreters"
Heidi Aschenberg, University of Tübingen, Germany
Chapter 4 Lagersprache through the Lens of Primo Levi's Essay on Translation: "Tradurre ed essere tradotti"
Zaia Alexander, Berlin, Germany
Chapter 5 On Translating and Being Translated
Primo Levi
PART 3 Interpreting in the Camps
Chapter 6 "Someone whispered the translation in 100 languages, like a Babel...": Interpreting in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp
Michaela Wolf, University of Graz, Austria
Chapter 7 Interpreters in the Concentration Camp of Majdanek (1941-1944)
Malgorzata Tryuk, University of Warsaw, Poland
Chapter 8 "Deaf Holocaust": Deaf Jews and their "True" Communication in Nazi Concentration Camps
Mark Zaurov, University of Hamburg, Germany
PART 4 Translating the Legacy of the Holocaust
Chapter 9 "L'écrit reste. L'écrit est une trace, tandis que les paroles s'envolent": On the Hermeneutics of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs
Peter Kuon, University of Salzburg, Austria
Chapter 10 The Ambiguous Task of the Interpreter in Lanzmann's Films Shoah and Sobibor: Between the Director and the Survivors of the Camps and Ghettos
Francine Kaufmann, Bar Ilan University, Israel
Chapter 11 The Illusion of "Authenticity": The Translation of Video Testimonies with Survivors of National Socialist Terror for Use in Educational Work
Sylvia Degen, University of Aberystwyth, Wales
PART 5 Limits of Permeability
Chapter 12 Interpreters in Soviet Prisoner-Of-War Camps: Beyond the "Unsayable"?
Viktor Milosevic, University of Graz, Austria
Chapter 13 Interpreting under Pressure: From Collaboration to Resistance
Piotr Kuhiwczak, British Red Cross
Index
