Tim Cole | University of Bristol (original) (raw)
Papers by Tim Cole
T +44 (0)117 331 8313 " I was taken one day to an office, and I thought to myself 'that's the Hea... more T +44 (0)117 331 8313 " I was taken one day to an office, and I thought to myself 'that's the Headmaster's office, I wonder what trouble I'm in now?' and he said 'No problem, no problem at all, this is the lost property office as well. You're the only one in the school without school uniform-what is the reason for it?'. And I said 'Well, my parents can't afford school uniform' and that was it. And I walked out of that office, I was completely dressed-cap, blazer, tie, shirt, trousers and shoes-walked out the office like everybody else and I was made up for the day. " Basil Clarke talks about his memories of Lockleaze School in the 1950s and 60s
Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2018
International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2019
This article responds to the widespread and oft-noted challenges digital humanists face in workin... more This article responds to the widespread and oft-noted challenges digital humanists face in working with data that is uncertain and characterised by complex narratives. Using an example drawn from the vast archives of post-war interviews with Holocaust survivors, it draws on approaches developed in Qualitative Spatial Representation (QSR) to explore how two key spatial aspects of survivor's narratives – their uncertain wartime trajectories and the slippage in scales as these are retold – can be represented. Spatial information in narratives tends to not provide the exact coordinates necessary to store the information in geospatial databases. Instead, narratives rely much more on often less precise qualitative spatial relations such as ‘near’, ‘next to’, ‘at the corner of’ without precise geometric interpretations. Given that relational databases are ill-equipped to store this kind of relational spatial knowledge from natural language sources, the article argues for a need for dig...
Journal of Israeli History, 2004
There has been much recent interest in what has been dubbed the “nativization” of the Holocaust, ... more There has been much recent interest in what has been dubbed the “nativization” of the Holocaust, a term which, for Isabel Wollaston, describes the reality that “memorials and museums, and discussion of issues relating to the Holocaust, take particular forms and have particular emphases depending upon their national context . . .” A good example of this approach can be seen in James Young’s groundbreaking study of Holocaust memorial landscapes in Austria, Germany, Poland, Israel and America. There, Young suggested that the “national memory of what I might call the Shoah varies from land to land,” and that, “in every nation’s memorials and museums, a different Holocaust is remembered, often to conflicting political and religious ends.” Through a comparative landscape study of three — to varying degrees — national Holocaust museums, I want to examine not simply the nativization of the Holocaust, but also its nationalization, within museum space in Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom. I will not focus on the reception of the narratives offered in these museums — an area relatively underresearched by scholars writing on Holocaust representation — nor on the institutional and broader politics underlying the creation of the museums themselves. Rather, I want to examine three Holocaust museums — Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (the present historical museum was opened in 1973, although currently a new museum is in the process of being created), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC (first opened in 1993) and the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London (first opened in 2000) — in terms of two major themes. First, I want to reflect upon the meanings conferred upon the Holocaust narratives offered in these museums by considering the siting of the museums themselves. These museums do not exist within a spatial vacuum, but in specific sites with their own layers of memory and their own meanings, which influence the memories and meanings given to
Patterns of Prejudice, 1999
ABSTRACT
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2010
Journal of Historical Geography, 1995
The underlying premise of this paper is that the power of geography is of importance in understan... more The underlying premise of this paper is that the power of geography is of importance in understanding the Final Solution. Ghettoization, as part of the Jewish Holocaust, forms the basis of this article. It begins by locating the particular perspective which we wish to adopt within the context of recent interpretations of ghettoization. Rather than approaching the spatial segregation of
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2009
... 13 Robert D. Sack ... See for example, Molnár, Zsidósors 1944–ben; Anna Gergely, A Székesfehé... more ... 13 Robert D. Sack ... See for example, Molnár, Zsidósors 1944–ben; Anna Gergely, A Székesfehérvári és Fejér megyei zsidóság tragédiája (1938–1944) (Budapest: Vince Kiadó, 2003); László Csősz, “'Keresztény polgari erdemek serelme nelkül … ': Gettositas Szolnokon 1944 ...
History and Memory, 2013
ABSTRACT
Environmental History, 2011
This article draws together empirical case studies from Britain, France, and the United States to... more This article draws together empirical case studies from Britain, France, and the United States to develop the nascent history of landscapes used to prepare for war and national defense. Although environmental historians have explored the environmental impact of war, the military training areas and weapons manufacturing sites that form the focus of this comparative study remain peripheral to the discipline, despite the vast landholdings that militaries deploy in the preparation for war. This essay approaches these important but understudied sites through the lens of four major themes-protesting militarization through eviction, the emergence of military environmentalism, the status and role of nonhuman occupants of militarized landscapes, and cooperation between civilians and the military-in a broadly chronological comparative study. As these themes reveal, more subtle analysis of the evolving relationship between the military and the environment is required as an antidote to the binary approaches that currently dominate scholarship. Existing perspectives not only tend to lack sensitivity to both time and space but either uncritically claim that military activity is ecologically harmless (or even beneficial) or dismiss the claims of military environmentalism as mere "greenwash."
American Journal of Sociology, 2005
Nobody wants to be an anti-Semite anymore. This is what distinguishes anti-Semitism of today from... more Nobody wants to be an anti-Semite anymore. This is what distinguishes anti-Semitism of today from that before the Holocaust. There is no pride in it anymore. The memory of the Holocaust has delegitimized the hatred of the Jews in our days. Since modern anti-Semitism has no legitimacy anymore, it lacks clear conceptualization. What remains are parts of a system of resentment that needs to cover its traces. The concept of anti-Semitism was born in the nineteenth century before the Holocaust. Not only has the Holocaust complicated contemporary conceptualizations of anti-Semitism, but also the foundation of the state of Israel as the expression of Jewish political sovereignty. This is why Brustein's study on anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust is not only an important historical study of comparative structure of prejudice. The book would be already worth its price for those interested in historical comparative studies. Brustein compares France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Romania and covers the years 1879 to 1939. The countries were chosen to demonstrate a wide range of anti-Jewish sentiments. Germany and Romania displayed high levels of anti-Semitism, Great Britain and Italy low levels, and France somewhere in the middle. But clearly more is at stake here. According to Brustein, the Germans did not hate the Jews more than any other Europeans. Brustein's intellectual foe is Daniel Goldhagen and his study Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust in which Goldhagen claims that German anti-Semitism was qualitatively different from other European forms of anti-Jewish prejudice. Its eliminationist character not only made the Holocaust a purely German affair, but it looked for its root caus
The American Historical Review, 2009
The book series Der Ort des Terrors [Place of Terror] provides a survey of the concentration camp... more The book series Der Ort des Terrors [Place of Terror] provides a survey of the concentration camps and the state of knowledge about this instrument of control in Nazi Germany and the occupied territories. Its subjects are the more than twenty main camps and about 1,000 subordinate camps (Außenlager). The realization of this enormous work drew on countless contributions by researchers from diverse specialist disciplines over the last quarter-century. The first joint volume examined the structures of the Nazi camp system and functional changes in them over time. 1 The subsequent volumes presented the camps chronologically, looking at a plethora of auxiliary camps in Germany. Volume 8 differs from its predecessors insofar as it explores not only camps subject to the SS-Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager), but the Operation Reinhard death camps in the Generalgouvernement of Poland, which came into being thanks to Himmler, his regional representatives, and the Reich chancellery. (Auschwitz is examined in Volume 5, published in 2007, pp 75-311.) Meanwhile, the ambitious project undertaken by Wolfgang Benz, longtime director of the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at Berlin's Technical University, and Barbara Distel, former director of the concentration camp memorial (Gedenkstätte) in Dachau, has reached its conclusion with Volume 9, dealing with institutions similar to the camps proper. 2 The contributions have a similar structure: describing the foundation and development of the camps, their internal organization, and the deeds of the guards and their commanders. The same weight is given to different groups of prisoners, their suffering, powers of self-assertion, and resistance. The authors also investigate the place of the camp within the overall frame of the Holocaust and occupation policy in the country or region under consideration. Franziska Jahn begins Volume 8 with her presentation of the Riga-Kaiserwald camp (pp 17-63), which the German conquerors erected in March 1943 in the part of the Latvian capital known as Mežaparks. It was situated in a formerly elegant suburb, once inhabited by local Germans, not far from the central administration of the Reich commissariat
The American Historical Review, 2010
Cahiers de géographie du Québec, 2013
During the final year of the war, mass evacuations westwards from concentration camps on foot bro... more During the final year of the war, mass evacuations westwards from concentration camps on foot brought the European road network into the orbit of Holocaust landscapes. The routes of these so-called “death marches” that criss-crossed Europe have been followed by a wide variety of pilgrims, ranging from Holocaust survivors retracing former journeys they made half a century before (oftentimes accompanied by family members, and in some cases, documentary filmmakers), through organized groups of Jews and Christians, to visual artists. While motivated by very different concerns, all share assumptions that the encounter with place – an authentic site of wartime atrocity – shrinks time, merging past and present (and future). Such notions of the possibility of direct access to the past are heightened by the haptic and embodied experiences of place that are central to walking. The individuals and groups I examine aspire, quite literally, to follow in the footsteps of the victims, walking on t...
T +44 (0)117 331 8313 " I was taken one day to an office, and I thought to myself 'that's the Hea... more T +44 (0)117 331 8313 " I was taken one day to an office, and I thought to myself 'that's the Headmaster's office, I wonder what trouble I'm in now?' and he said 'No problem, no problem at all, this is the lost property office as well. You're the only one in the school without school uniform-what is the reason for it?'. And I said 'Well, my parents can't afford school uniform' and that was it. And I walked out of that office, I was completely dressed-cap, blazer, tie, shirt, trousers and shoes-walked out the office like everybody else and I was made up for the day. " Basil Clarke talks about his memories of Lockleaze School in the 1950s and 60s
Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2018
International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2019
This article responds to the widespread and oft-noted challenges digital humanists face in workin... more This article responds to the widespread and oft-noted challenges digital humanists face in working with data that is uncertain and characterised by complex narratives. Using an example drawn from the vast archives of post-war interviews with Holocaust survivors, it draws on approaches developed in Qualitative Spatial Representation (QSR) to explore how two key spatial aspects of survivor's narratives – their uncertain wartime trajectories and the slippage in scales as these are retold – can be represented. Spatial information in narratives tends to not provide the exact coordinates necessary to store the information in geospatial databases. Instead, narratives rely much more on often less precise qualitative spatial relations such as ‘near’, ‘next to’, ‘at the corner of’ without precise geometric interpretations. Given that relational databases are ill-equipped to store this kind of relational spatial knowledge from natural language sources, the article argues for a need for dig...
Journal of Israeli History, 2004
There has been much recent interest in what has been dubbed the “nativization” of the Holocaust, ... more There has been much recent interest in what has been dubbed the “nativization” of the Holocaust, a term which, for Isabel Wollaston, describes the reality that “memorials and museums, and discussion of issues relating to the Holocaust, take particular forms and have particular emphases depending upon their national context . . .” A good example of this approach can be seen in James Young’s groundbreaking study of Holocaust memorial landscapes in Austria, Germany, Poland, Israel and America. There, Young suggested that the “national memory of what I might call the Shoah varies from land to land,” and that, “in every nation’s memorials and museums, a different Holocaust is remembered, often to conflicting political and religious ends.” Through a comparative landscape study of three — to varying degrees — national Holocaust museums, I want to examine not simply the nativization of the Holocaust, but also its nationalization, within museum space in Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom. I will not focus on the reception of the narratives offered in these museums — an area relatively underresearched by scholars writing on Holocaust representation — nor on the institutional and broader politics underlying the creation of the museums themselves. Rather, I want to examine three Holocaust museums — Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (the present historical museum was opened in 1973, although currently a new museum is in the process of being created), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC (first opened in 1993) and the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London (first opened in 2000) — in terms of two major themes. First, I want to reflect upon the meanings conferred upon the Holocaust narratives offered in these museums by considering the siting of the museums themselves. These museums do not exist within a spatial vacuum, but in specific sites with their own layers of memory and their own meanings, which influence the memories and meanings given to
Patterns of Prejudice, 1999
ABSTRACT
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2010
Journal of Historical Geography, 1995
The underlying premise of this paper is that the power of geography is of importance in understan... more The underlying premise of this paper is that the power of geography is of importance in understanding the Final Solution. Ghettoization, as part of the Jewish Holocaust, forms the basis of this article. It begins by locating the particular perspective which we wish to adopt within the context of recent interpretations of ghettoization. Rather than approaching the spatial segregation of
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2009
... 13 Robert D. Sack ... See for example, Molnár, Zsidósors 1944–ben; Anna Gergely, A Székesfehé... more ... 13 Robert D. Sack ... See for example, Molnár, Zsidósors 1944–ben; Anna Gergely, A Székesfehérvári és Fejér megyei zsidóság tragédiája (1938–1944) (Budapest: Vince Kiadó, 2003); László Csősz, “'Keresztény polgari erdemek serelme nelkül … ': Gettositas Szolnokon 1944 ...
History and Memory, 2013
ABSTRACT
Environmental History, 2011
This article draws together empirical case studies from Britain, France, and the United States to... more This article draws together empirical case studies from Britain, France, and the United States to develop the nascent history of landscapes used to prepare for war and national defense. Although environmental historians have explored the environmental impact of war, the military training areas and weapons manufacturing sites that form the focus of this comparative study remain peripheral to the discipline, despite the vast landholdings that militaries deploy in the preparation for war. This essay approaches these important but understudied sites through the lens of four major themes-protesting militarization through eviction, the emergence of military environmentalism, the status and role of nonhuman occupants of militarized landscapes, and cooperation between civilians and the military-in a broadly chronological comparative study. As these themes reveal, more subtle analysis of the evolving relationship between the military and the environment is required as an antidote to the binary approaches that currently dominate scholarship. Existing perspectives not only tend to lack sensitivity to both time and space but either uncritically claim that military activity is ecologically harmless (or even beneficial) or dismiss the claims of military environmentalism as mere "greenwash."
American Journal of Sociology, 2005
Nobody wants to be an anti-Semite anymore. This is what distinguishes anti-Semitism of today from... more Nobody wants to be an anti-Semite anymore. This is what distinguishes anti-Semitism of today from that before the Holocaust. There is no pride in it anymore. The memory of the Holocaust has delegitimized the hatred of the Jews in our days. Since modern anti-Semitism has no legitimacy anymore, it lacks clear conceptualization. What remains are parts of a system of resentment that needs to cover its traces. The concept of anti-Semitism was born in the nineteenth century before the Holocaust. Not only has the Holocaust complicated contemporary conceptualizations of anti-Semitism, but also the foundation of the state of Israel as the expression of Jewish political sovereignty. This is why Brustein's study on anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust is not only an important historical study of comparative structure of prejudice. The book would be already worth its price for those interested in historical comparative studies. Brustein compares France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Romania and covers the years 1879 to 1939. The countries were chosen to demonstrate a wide range of anti-Jewish sentiments. Germany and Romania displayed high levels of anti-Semitism, Great Britain and Italy low levels, and France somewhere in the middle. But clearly more is at stake here. According to Brustein, the Germans did not hate the Jews more than any other Europeans. Brustein's intellectual foe is Daniel Goldhagen and his study Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust in which Goldhagen claims that German anti-Semitism was qualitatively different from other European forms of anti-Jewish prejudice. Its eliminationist character not only made the Holocaust a purely German affair, but it looked for its root caus
The American Historical Review, 2009
The book series Der Ort des Terrors [Place of Terror] provides a survey of the concentration camp... more The book series Der Ort des Terrors [Place of Terror] provides a survey of the concentration camps and the state of knowledge about this instrument of control in Nazi Germany and the occupied territories. Its subjects are the more than twenty main camps and about 1,000 subordinate camps (Außenlager). The realization of this enormous work drew on countless contributions by researchers from diverse specialist disciplines over the last quarter-century. The first joint volume examined the structures of the Nazi camp system and functional changes in them over time. 1 The subsequent volumes presented the camps chronologically, looking at a plethora of auxiliary camps in Germany. Volume 8 differs from its predecessors insofar as it explores not only camps subject to the SS-Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager), but the Operation Reinhard death camps in the Generalgouvernement of Poland, which came into being thanks to Himmler, his regional representatives, and the Reich chancellery. (Auschwitz is examined in Volume 5, published in 2007, pp 75-311.) Meanwhile, the ambitious project undertaken by Wolfgang Benz, longtime director of the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at Berlin's Technical University, and Barbara Distel, former director of the concentration camp memorial (Gedenkstätte) in Dachau, has reached its conclusion with Volume 9, dealing with institutions similar to the camps proper. 2 The contributions have a similar structure: describing the foundation and development of the camps, their internal organization, and the deeds of the guards and their commanders. The same weight is given to different groups of prisoners, their suffering, powers of self-assertion, and resistance. The authors also investigate the place of the camp within the overall frame of the Holocaust and occupation policy in the country or region under consideration. Franziska Jahn begins Volume 8 with her presentation of the Riga-Kaiserwald camp (pp 17-63), which the German conquerors erected in March 1943 in the part of the Latvian capital known as Mežaparks. It was situated in a formerly elegant suburb, once inhabited by local Germans, not far from the central administration of the Reich commissariat
The American Historical Review, 2010
Cahiers de géographie du Québec, 2013
During the final year of the war, mass evacuations westwards from concentration camps on foot bro... more During the final year of the war, mass evacuations westwards from concentration camps on foot brought the European road network into the orbit of Holocaust landscapes. The routes of these so-called “death marches” that criss-crossed Europe have been followed by a wide variety of pilgrims, ranging from Holocaust survivors retracing former journeys they made half a century before (oftentimes accompanied by family members, and in some cases, documentary filmmakers), through organized groups of Jews and Christians, to visual artists. While motivated by very different concerns, all share assumptions that the encounter with place – an authentic site of wartime atrocity – shrinks time, merging past and present (and future). Such notions of the possibility of direct access to the past are heightened by the haptic and embodied experiences of place that are central to walking. The individuals and groups I examine aspire, quite literally, to follow in the footsteps of the victims, walking on t...