GRMN 700-301 Graduate Research Colloquium - Brown Recycling: The Nazi Politics of Extraction

Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - 9:00am to 10:30am

Anne Berg

440 Williams Hall 

Brown Recycling: The Nazi Politics of Extraction As I have argued elsewhere, the Nazi Racial State was one of the first modern states to pursue zero waste as an official policy. In this short presentation I will sketch the politics of extraction at their most extreme. Focusing on the camp economy, I illustrate that waste management and recycling lay at the heart of the Nazi order and were a key part of an arsenal of technologies geared toward systematic destruction. In the camps scarcity was endemic by design and yet prisoners slaved to extend the Reich’s resource base. They sorted, cleaned, mended and refashioned all sorts of secondary materials as part of the regime’s comprehensive efforts to salvage their way to final victory. In the regime’s rhetoric the “redemptive” aspects of manual labor seamlessly aligned with its obsessive focus on frugality, thrift and sacrifice, providing moral and economic rationales for institutionalized violence, excessive brutality, and, in fact, genocide.   Anne Berg studies the histories of waste and recycling, film and cities, racism and genocide. Trained as a historian of modern Germany and Europe, Anne increasingly ventures into more global terrain. Her research proceeds along a number of parallel tracks, connected by a sustained interest in the visual, the spatial and the material. She has published articles on the history of waste in Nazi Germany, the United States and South Africa. Currently, Anne is working on a book project that examines the disturbing connections between waste management and genocide in the Third Reich, entitled Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany. At Penn, Anne teaches courses on the history of National Socialism, world history, environmental history and the history of garbage.