This significant new study is concerned with the role of interpreting in Nazi concentration camps, where prisoners were of 30 to 40 different nationalities. With German as the only official language in the lager, communication was vital to the prisoners' survival. While in the last few decades there has been extensive research on the language used by the camp inmates, investigation into the mediating role of interpreters between SS guards and prisoners on the one hand, and among inmates on the other, has been almost nonexistent.

On the basis of Primo Levi's considerations on communication in the Nazi concentrationary system, this book investigates the ambivalent role of interpreting in the camps. One of the central questions is what the role of interpreting was in the wider context of shaping life in concentration camps. And in what way did the knowledge of languages, and accordingly, certain communication skills, contribute to the survival of concentration camp inmates and of the interpreting person? The main sources under investigation are both archive materials and survivors' memoirs and testimonials in various languages.

On a different level, Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps also asks in what way the study of communication in concentration camps enhances our understanding of the ambiguous role of interpreting in more general terms. And in what way does the study of interpreting in concentration camps shape an interpreting concept which can help us to better understand the violent nature of interpreting in contexts other than the Holocaust?

List of figures
Notes on contributors

Interpreting in Nazi concentration camps: Challenging the “order of terror”?
Michaela Wolf, University of Graz, Austria

PART 1 The Concentrationary Universe
1. The camp society: Approaches to social structure and ordinary life in the concentration camps
Alexander Prenninger, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Research, Austria
2. Vernacular interpreters, expert discourses, and the concentrationary universe: Toward a translation archaeology for the National Socialist era
David Gramling, University of Arizona, USA

PART 2 Language Diversity in the Camps
3. Linguistic terror in Nazi concentration camps: “Lucien” and “Gilbert” – two portraits of interpreters
Heidi Aschenberg, University of Tübingen, Germany
4. Primo Levi and “Lagersprache“
Zaia Alexander, Berlin, Germany
5. On translating and being translated
Primo Levi

PART 3Interpreting in the Camps
6. “...whoever did not understand or speak German was barbarian by definition”:
Interpreting in the concentration camp of Mauthausen
Michaela Wolf, University of Graz, Austria
7. Interpreters in the concentration camp of Majdanek (1941-1944)
Malgorzata Tryuk, University of Warsaw, Poland
8. Deaf lives and communication in Nazi concentration camps
Mark Zaurov, University of Hamburg, Germany

PART 4Translating the Legacy of the Holocaust
9. “L'écrit reste. L'écrit est une trace, tandis que les paroles s'envolent”: On the hermeneutics of Holocaust survivor memoirs
Peter Kuon, University of Salzburg, Austria
10. The ambiguous task of the interpreter in Lanzmann's films Shoah and Sobibor: Between the director, the survivors of camps and ghettos and the eye of the movie camera
Francine Kaufmann, Bar Ilan University, Israel
11. The illusion of the “authentic”: The translation of video testimonies by survivors of National Socialist terror for use in educational work
Sylvia Degen, University of Aberystwyth, Wales

PART 5Limits of Permeability
12. Interpreters in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps: Beyond the “unsayable”?
Viktor Milosevic, University of Graz, Austria
13. Interpreting under pressure: From collaboration to resistance
Piotor Kuhiwczak, British Red Cross

Index