Holocaust City
The Making of a Jewish Ghetto
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- $54.99
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- $54.99
Publisher Description
Drawing from the ideas of critical geography and based on extensive archival research, Cole brilliantly reconstructs the formation of the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust, focusing primarily on the ghetto in Budapest, Hungary--one of the largest created during the war, but rarely examined. Cole maps the city illustrating how spaces--cafes, theaters, bars, bathhouses--became divided in two. Throughout the book, Cole discusses how the creation of this Jewish ghetto, just like the others being built across occupied Europe, tells us a great deal about the nature of Nazism, what life was like under Nazi-occupation, and the role the ghetto actually played in the Final Solution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Focusing on the Jewish ghetto in Budapest during WWII, Cole (author of the controversial Selling the Holocaust) not only explores the architecture of ghettoization, but also tries to enter the minds of the"ordinary men" who built such places of death."At the back of my own mind," he writes,"there is an image of an engineer working diligently in an office in Berlin, creating the most efficient door possible for a crematoria oven." Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Robert Jan van Pelt and others, Cole uses architectural history, geography and studies of space and place to explain how the Budapest ghetto was built, how ordinary urban space was converted into a death place, and how architects, engineers, and municipal officials collaborated in the Holocaust. Cole's illuminating approach is scholarly rather than narrative, and some readers will be baffled by his placing of quotation marks around words such as"Jewish" and"non-Jewish," as if to imply these are merely social constructs.
