During one of the most famous moments of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, author and Holocaust survivor Yehiel Dinur took the witness stand in the summer of 1961 to deliver a brief and enigmatic testimony about what he termed “the Auschwitz planet.” Over the next two decades, as international Holocaust consciousness re-emerged in the shadow of the Cold War, writers, thinkers, and filmmakers would elaborate on the topography of “Planet Auschwitz,” figuring the Holocaust as an alien world at the limits of modernity. Drawing on a number of sources not always included in canons of art and theory of Holocaust memory, this article shows how the genocide of Europe’s Jews, ongoing global racial conflicts, and the penetration of the “final frontier” became overlapping sites of philosophical speculation during the 1960s and 1970s about the nature of modernity and what it means to be a human being.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Fall 2018
Research Article|
November 01 2018
Remembering “Planet Auschwitz” During the Cold War
Kathryn L. Brackney
Kathryn L. Brackney
Kathryn L. Brackney is a research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and a doctoral candidate at Yale University, where she works in the field of modern European intellectual and cultural history.
Search for other works by this author on:
Representations (2018) 144 (1): 124–153.
Citation
Kathryn L. Brackney; Remembering “Planet Auschwitz” During the Cold War. Representations 1 November 2018; 144 (1): 124–153. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2018.144.1.124
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.