The Dictionary of Human Geography

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explanation and a marginalization of a ‘spatial

imagination’; but there are many practitioners

of New Historicism who have no problem

in attending to both the historicity and the

spatialityof their objects of enquiry. dg

Suggested reading

Hamilton (1996).

history of geography See geography,

history of

holocaust Most generally, the systematic

deaths of large numbers of people, but most

specifically the campaign ofgenocidepursued

by Hitler’s Third Reich during the Second

World War (1939–45) and identified by its ini-

tial capital: the Holocaust. Both usages depend

on political and cultural processes of distinction

and exclusion (seeracism) and a studied indif-

ference to the suffering of those construed

as radically ‘Other’ (see bare life). Thus

Thornton (1990) and Stannard (1992) connect

Europeancolonialismto the mass destruction

of indigenous societies in theamericas, Davis

(2002) identifies a series of late-nineteenth-

century famines across the global South as a

‘cultural genocide’ brought about by the logics

of imperial power and free trade, and all histor-

ians of the Nazi genocide acknowledge its roots

in a racial fantasy of ‘Aryan’ supremacy and

a profound anti-Semitism (see alsofascism).

The Nazis did not confine their predations

to Jews. They also systematically murdered

millions of non-Jewish Soviet and Polish cit-

izens, hundreds of thousands of Roma and

Sinti (Gypsies), mentally and physically dis-

abled people, gay men, religious dissidents

and political opponents, including trades

unionists, communists and socialists; the first

concentrationcampthat the Nazis established

at Dachau in 1933 was for political prisoners.

But the (capitalized) Holocaust is increasingly

and usually reserved for their concerted mur-

der of approximately 6 million European Jews

who died through malnutrition, medical ex-

perimentation and slave labour in concentra-

tion camps, who were shot or gassed by mobile

killing units, or who were killed in gas cham-

bers. This particular usage is problematic,

however: in its original Greek form, ‘holo-

caust’ denoted sacrifice by fire, and while

these spiritual connotations may resonate

with the role Christianity played in legitimiz-

ing the deaths visited on indigenous peoples

by European colonialism, their inappropriate-

ness to describe the mass murder of European

Jews has prompted many scholars to prefer the

HebrewShoah(‘catastrophe’) (though this in

turn may evoke the biblical sense of retribu-

tion found in the book of Isaiah).

Whichever term is preferred, Cole and

Smith (1995, p. 30) identified the Nazi

Holocaust as ‘the most remarkable blank-spot

in geographical research’. It is strange that

it should have attracted so little analytical

attention, even by Israeli historical geogra-

phers, not merely because the Holocaust ‘had’

a geography – it was distributed over space and

varied from place to place (Gilbert, 2009) – but

more fundamentally becausegeographyas

both discipline and knowledge was central to

the project (Charlesworth, 1992):

(1) Particular conceptions of space and

spacing were indispensable to the concep-

tion of the Nazi Holocaust. Clark, Doel

andMcDonough(1996)identifytwocru-

cial spatial templates. The first was devel-

oped through a racist version of

geopolitikthat asserted the right to an

expandedlebensraumfor the master-

race, but such a project for ‘mastery of

concrete, de-populated, physical space’

was inseparable from a second spacing,

Entfernung: ‘an effective removal of the

Jews from the life-world of the German

race’ (Bauman, 1991, p. 120). To these

three writers, Bauman’s cardinal contri-

bution was ‘his recognition of the ruptur-

ing of the imaginary social space of the

Reich by the diasporic space of the Jews’.

The non-national space of thediaspora

was ‘a wholly Other conception of social

space’, they argue, a fundamental contra-

diction to the project of National

Socialism and its territorial inscription of

the ‘Aryan’ Same: in short, ‘a void’

(Clarke, Doel and McDonough, 1996,

pp. 474–5; see also Doel and Clarke,

1998).

(2) The realization of Lebensraum and

Entfernung entailed at once a de-

territorialization of physical space and

its re-territorialization as social space.

This involved the conjoint production of

a series of physical and social spaces (a)

from which Jews were excluded,

(b) within which they were gathered and

sequestered, and (c) through which they

were subsequently transported to the

camps. These spatial strategies – which

might be thought of as ‘a series of concen-

tric circles that, like waves, incessantly

wash up against a central non-place’

(Agamben, 1999, pp. 51–2) – produced a

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HOLOCAUST