Ash Above the Abyss

This book is the first comprehensive study in domestic historiography of the phenomenology of Nazi concentration camps (the Concentration World) as a special system that globally transformed everything that came under its influence—from time, history, and space to human anthropology and psychology. Exposure and clothing, food and hunger, violence and pain, language and silence, fear and death—each of these phenomena occupied its own place in the overall picture of total anthropological and psychophysical deformations of a person caught in the camp space. How did philosophy and theology transform "after Auschwitz," and why did liberation from the camp not grant freedom? For all those interested in the history of World War II, social history, social anthropology, and the public thought of Europe in the mid- to late 20th century.