"WHERE BUTCHERS SING LIKE ANGELS" Of Captive Bodies and Colonized Minds (With a Little Help from Louise Erdrich (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
Introduction This chapter focuses on the fate of butcher dogs in Germany from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. These remarkable dogs were draft and herding animals, but also animal companions to the butchers and an essential part of their public image.[2] There was even a breed of dogs named after them, the Metzgerhund or Fleischerhund.[3] This is worth mentioning since names of dog breeds rarely refer to the owner of the dog; the majority of dogs are named or categorized by geography, usage, prey, or social function: Newfoundlands or Yorkshires, say, or shepherd and hunting dogs, foxhounds, staghounds, lapdogs and toy dogs.[4] What is more, butcher dogs had a special status when it came to their freedom of movement. They were the only domesticated animals that were allowed to enter the slaughterhouse and leave it alive; and in contrast to the draft horses owned by butchers or cattle traders, butcher dogs could freely roam the slaughterhouse or abattoir environs.[5] This was not to last, however: after the 1860s, with the modernization of animal killing, the distinctive and even definitive mobility of the butcher dog came quickly to an end, as most local authorities in Germany moved to ban the butcher dogs from the slaughterhouse sites.[6] This chapter aims to understand the proscription of butcher dogs, looking at the historical context of this unique human-animal relationship and its framing of the liminality of animals and humans alike. The first section of this chapter attempts to characterize the bond between butchers and their dogs in the early nineteenth century. Historical research on butcher dogs is hardly abundant, so this first section presents and debates source material that can provide an insight into the historical relationships between butchers and their dogs in German towns. This rough sketch will show that the public image of butcher dogs was affected by the negative stereotypes of butchers themselves, something that had developed long before the nineteenth century.[7] The occupation of killing made butchers the subject of suspicion and speculation, notably whether they were born cruel or made cruel by their profession.[8] Nevertheless, the social status of butchers and by extension their dogs was not that of complete outsiders. Their ‘bloody’ craft separated them from the ordinary citizen and defined the butcher and his dogs as a liminal pair in a moral sense. But butchers were organized in respected and established municipal associations such as guilds.[9] Butchers and butcher dogs were liminal beings, repeatedly traversing rites de passage, and proceeding through the classic phases of separation, liminality, and aggregation.[10] Every act of killing an animal inside the slaughterhouse separated the butcher from his fellow citizens, but every act of slaughtering, transforming the dead animal body into meat, was a liminal act that led to acts of aggregation to society, such as through the sale of meat that resulted, or the cattle-trade in general, or, most significantly, the performance of corporate identities during festivities.[11] Having established the traditional liminal status of the butchers and their dogs, the second section of this chapter describes the transformation to a publicly-monitored slaughterhouse culture in Germany after 1860. This change to the profession split and ultimately dissolved the liminal position originally inhabited by butchers and butcher dogs. Now the butchers would be observed and accompanied in public only by other butchers, and by public officials and veterinarians, while the butcher dogs were no longer actors even inside the slaughterhouse. After the butchers’ social position became less liminal, in other words, the social role of the butcher dogs was eliminated.
Accessing Campscapes, 2018
When Holocaust survivors refer to cannibalism in their testimonies, they do not merely describe what they have witnessed or heard of, but also ponder the boundaries of civilization and humanity. Such reflection is not restricted to the Holocaust. For centuries, Europeans have made references to cannibalism as narrative instruments for drawing the line between “civilized” and “uncivilized,” and demonizing the Other. In so doing, they also produced an aesthetic of horror. The very mentioning of cannibalism awakens images and tales that arouse both disgust and fear – two elements that define what we call horror. I therefore argue that in attempting to express a sense of the radical dehumanization in the Nazi camps and convey its horror to their audience, some survivors’ testimonies reconstruct the appalling reality of the camps as parallels to familiar stories set in remote, barbaric places fraught with atrocity and devoid of civilization.
Body Politics. Zeitschrift für Körpergeschichte (Special Issue: Gewaltverhältnisse, ed. Pascal Eitler), 2013
English abstract: In the wake of Foucauldian thought, the self and its identity are often regarded as the result of disciplinary practices and technologies, inscribing the law into the body which is depicted as a passive, pliable matter. This account echoes the binary divisions between nature/culture, mind/body, and sex/gender. Feminist scholars have repeatedly questioned this Cartesian dichotomy. This essay explores the potential of DeleuzoGuattarian feminist theory to capture the affective momentum of the body as an agent in its own right: its capacity to establish affective, visceral, carnal connections and thereby to transform itself. It focusses on the case of Peter Kürten, a serial sex criminal, and his incarceration in early twentieth-century Germany. Following Elizabeth Grosz's suggestion to imagine body and mind, matter and discourse as locked to each other in a Möbius strip, it argues that even in extreme situations of confinement and discipline, we can detect the interconnectedness of disciplinary power and bodily potentia without presuming one has supremacy over the other.
Budapest Butchers, the Jewish Question, and Holocaust Survivors
Hungarian Historical Review 9/3, 2020
This article focuses on a denazification procedure within the professional group of the Budapest butchers. Through the retelling of wartime anti-Jewish incidents and other conflicts, these processes reveal a complex picture of how a certain professional group tried to cope with the upheavals of the war and the attempts of outside interventions. In the framework of the anti-Jewish exclusionary atmosphere of the epoch, I investigate questions about professional competition, leadership, respectability, professionalization, and the marginalization of Jewish professionals. By answering these questions, I reconstruct a wartime internal dynamism within the butchers’ trade, where meat gradually became a scarcity, and therefore ousting Jewish colleagues was understood more and more as an urging necessity. In these circumstances, I am interested in the ways of solidarity and animosity showed by the Budapest butchers towards persecuted colleagues and towards Jews in general. By using a micro-historical method, I detail the professional problems of Budapest butchers, and I explain how the denazification check interestingly took over some functions of the “master’s exam,” after the Second World War.
Regurgitated bodies: presenting and representing trauma in 'The Act of Killing
2016
Focusing on The Act of Killing, this chapter examines how an “ethics of realism” operates on three key cinematic arenas: genre, authorship and spectatorship. As far as genre is concerned, the film’s realist commitment emerges from where it is least expected, namely from Hollywood genres, such as the musical, the film noir and the western, which are used as documentary, that is to say, as a fantasy realm where perpetrators can confess to their crimes without restraints or fear of punishment, but which nonetheless retains the evidentiary weight of the audiovisual medium. Authorship, in turn, translates as Oppenheimer’s unmistakable auteur signature through his role of self-confessed “infiltrator” who disguises as a sympathiser of the criminals in order to gain first-hand access to the full picture of their acts. One of them, the protagonist Anwar Congo, is clearly affected by post-traumatic stress disorder, and his repetitive reliving of his killings is made to flare up in front of th...