The führer gives the Jews a town: Impression management, homo dramaticus, and bare life in Theresienstadt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1941, the Czech garrison town of Terezín (or, in German, Theresienstadt) was selected by the Nazis to serve as a ghetto and transport camp. 2 But Theresienstadt is perhaps most well known as the stage upon which the Nazis enacted a massive charade. Imagined as a ‘model ghetto’ since the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, Theresienstadt was eventually ‘beautified’ in preparation for a June 1944 visit by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Danish government, as well as to serve as the set for a documentary about life in the camp, filmed that same year. In this paper, I draw upon Erving Goffman’s (1993/1959) dramaturgy and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990a, 1990b) practice theory to identify various mechanisms of misrepresentation that made possible the adoption of a ‘normalizing performativity’ within Theresienstadt’s carceral space. This theoretical approach serves two purposes. First, it is used to describe the technical details of how the Nazi regime attempted to foster and manage a false impression of Theresienstadt. Second, the performativity of Theresienstadt is argued to offer a compelling frame for understanding contemporary biopolitical life, and therefore is presented as a competing metaphor of ‘camp’, which Agamben (2000: 44.5) describes as the ‘new biopolitical nomos of the planet’. In particular, it is suggested that Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer reduced to bare life fails to capture the persistence of human agency and performativity (homo dramaticus) in even the most regimented and brutal conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".