O Universo Concentracionário

by David Rousset, João Tiago Proença (Translator)

O Universo Concentracionário (1945) é o primeiro olhar político sobre os campos de concentração e o impacto físico e mental das condições de vida neles impostas. Desmontando lucidamente o funcionamento da máquina de extermínio e de produção de terror concebida por Hitler, David Rousset centra-se nas molas psicológicas, nos métodos de repressão e nas hierarquias estabelecidas nos campos, pondo em causa, em última instância, a transitoriedade destes locais de horror, tão duradouros como os totalitarismos que eternamente se sucedem. A especificidade deste livro de referência, o seu sangue-frio e o despojamento das suas linhas precederam as obras de Primo Levi e de Robert Antelme e influenciaram determinantemente Hannah Arendt n’ As Origens do Totalitarismo.

David Rousset (1912-1997), filósofo e autor francês, foi capturado pela Gestapo em 1943 e deportado para Buchenwald e Neuengamme. Libertado em 1945, redige poucos meses depois O Universo Concentracionário, o primeiro testemunho dos campos de concentração e do sistema que neles operava. No pós-guerra, teve um papel essencial na denúncia dos crimes cometidos pelo regime comunista na União Soviética, tendo sido ostracizado pela Esquerda francesa em 1949, por ter denunciado na imprensa a realidade dos gulags. Dedicou a sua vida à elaboração da mais precisa geografia do mundo concentracionário e é autor de Les Jours de notre mort (1947) e de Sur la guerre (1987), entre outras obras.

Genres: History, Holocaust, Nonfiction, World War II, Biography

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

David Rousset (January 18, 1912 in Roanne, Loire – December 13, 1997) was a French writer and political activist, a recipient of Prix Renaudot, a French literary award. A survivor of the Neuengamme concentration camp and the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp, he is famous for his books about concentration camps.

Rousset was the first person to use the term "Gulag" in the French language, revealing to the French the Soviet system of labor camps. In 1949, learning that while the concentration camps in Nazi Germany had been destroyed, camps still existed in the Soviet Union, he appealed to former inmates of Nazi camps to form a commission to inspect the USSR camps, which became the "International Commission Against Concentrationist Regimes".

For his efforts he was attacked by Pierre Daix in the French communist newspaper Les Lettres Françaises, which accused him of slandering the Soviet Union, forging the texts of the Soviet laws, and spreading misinformation. Rousset brought libel charges against the newspaper, and in 1951 he won the case.

Along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Gerard Rosenthal, Rousset was a founder of the left-wing Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Democratic Rally), which called for a European federation on democratic socialist lines.
In 1968 he was elected as a deputy to the French National Assembly as a left-wing Gaullist.

Reviews

[Gabrielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Rousset, ehemaliger trotsistische Anführer geriet wegen seiner politischen Aktivismus (u.a. das Flugblatt Arbeiter und Soldat) in den KZ Buchenwald, Porta Westfalica, Neuengamme und Helmstedt. Aus diesem Erfahrung entstand diese Bericht, der sich v.a. die Machtstrukturen der KZ-Leben seine Bürokratie und seine Machtkämpfe widmet.

[VAUQUIER Dominique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Témoignage clinique sur l'organisation et le fonctionnement des camps de concentration, leurs castes, leurs règles.
Il faudrait lire et relire tous ces témoignages... pour ne pas oublier, bien sûr, mais aussi pour reconnaître les signes dans le monde contemporain. Qui peut croire que l'humanité a changé après les enseignements tirés des catastrophes historiques ?

[Fernando Pestana da Costa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, the Portuguese translation of the French original L'Univers Concentrationnaire first published in 1945, is arguably the first written work about the Nazis' concentration camps. It was based on the author's experience as a prisoner in Buchenwald and Neuengamme camps, but it is much more than a description of everyday life in the camps, being a first political and sociological analysis of that aspect of the Nazi regime. Of course, the author, David Rousset, later became famous for his denunciation of concentrationary regimes, including that of the Soviet gulag and its concentration camps for which he was shun by the political Left in France from the 1950s. (An extremely interesting account of the judicial process against him filled by French Communist Party members in 1950 can be read in Le Rapport Parisien, by Julius Margolin, included in the book Le Procès Eichmann et Autres Essais, published in 2016 by Le Bruit du Temps.)

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Gli uomini normali non sanno che tutto è possibile. Anche se le testimonianze costringono la loro intelligenza ad ammetterlo, il corpo si rifiuta. Gli internati sanno. [...] Hanno vissuto faccia a faccia con la morte tutte le ore della loro esistenza. [...] Hanno sperimentato l'umiliazione delle percosse, la debolezza del corpo sotto la frusta. Hanno constatato le devastazioni che produce la fame. Hanno camminato per anni nello scenario indicibile della distruzione di ogni dignità. Sono separati dagli altri da un'esperienza impossibile a trasmettersi." (p. 123)

[Tânia]

https://www.publico.pt/culturaipsilon...

[Otto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nach Rudolf Kalmar 1946 veröffentlichtem Bericht über das Konzentrationslager Dachau (ich habe darüber geschrieben) also nun der ebenfalls bereits 1946 erschienene Bericht des Franzosen Rousset über Buchenwald. Aber Roussets Buchenwald-Bericht ist mehr als ein Erlebnisbericht eines KZ-Häftlings, Rousset versucht das System Konzentrationslager, seinen Bürokratismus, seine Audbauorganisation, seine Hierarchien zu beschreiben und auch, wie Angst, Terror verbunden mit hierarchischer Organisation auch unter den Häftlingen, eine Organisation, die beim Einzelnen die Hoffnung auf Überleben durch Aufstieg förderte, unter den Häftlingen Lagerbildung und Misstrauen stärkte es einer kleiner Gruppe (SS) ermöglichte, riesige Menschenmassen zu terrorisieren und in Schach zu halten. Dies macht für mich dieses Werk mit seinen intensiven 100 Seiten so lesenswert, das erst 2022 (sic!) ins Deutsche übertragen wurde.

[Juancho Vizcaino · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ El hombre corriente no tiene ni idea de que todo es posible. Por más que los testimonios le obliguen a reconocerlo, los sentidos no se lo permiten. Los concentracionarios lo saben. El combatiente que ha estado durante meses en escenarios de guerra, ha tenido conocimiento de la muerte. La muerte habitaba entre los concentracionario durante todas las horas de su existencia. Ella les ha mostrado todos sus rostros. Ellos palparon sus despojos. Vivieron la angustia como una obsesión siempre presente. Supieron de la humillación de los golpes, de la debilidad del cuerpo bajo el látigo. Sintieron los estragos del hambre. Durante años se encaminaron por el fantástico escenario de todas las dignidades destruidas. Se separaron de los otros por una experiencia imposible de transmitir. “

[Débora · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Seria um logro, e criminoso, pretender que é impossível aos outros povos fazerem uma experiência semelhante por terem uma natureza diferente. A Alemanha interpretou com a originalidade inerente à sua história a crise que a levou ao universo concentracionário. Mas a existência e o mecanismo desta crise ligam-se aos fundamentos económicos e sociais do capitalismo e do imperialismo. Sob um novo figurino, ainda podem aparecer amanhã efeitos semelhantes."

[Alizee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un témoignage qui à la différence des autres ne racontent pas exactement la vie dans les camps mais s’appliquent plutôt à en analyser et à en expliquer le fonctionnement. C’est une approche très interessante et qui en apprend beaucoup. Cependant, il y avait pas mal de tournures de phrases assez ampoulées à mon goût qui ont fait qu’il y a pas mal de momens où j’ai décroché et où j’ai dû relire plusieurs fois les mêmes phrases pour bien en saisir le sens.

[Edwin Jaime · Rating 4 out of 5]

El autor describe las dinámicas de los campos de concentración más allá de todos los crímenes cometidos y explica las dinámicas sociales que ayudaron en parte a su sostenimiento durante la guerra.

[Mariona Folguera Blasco · Rating 5 out of 5]

El llibre de Rousset esdevé indispensable per a poder entendre el funcionament i l'estructura dels camps de concentració nazis.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Rousset was a prisoner in several of the camps. He describes the various power plays in both the SS hierarchy, the hierarchy of prisoners running the camp, and the interactions between the two.

The center of the book, or the "why?" chapter is Chapter 12: "The mysticism of the SS."

The purpose of the camps is indeed physical destruction, but the actual aim of the concentrationary universe goes far beyond this. The SS does not conceive of his adversary as a normal man. The enemy, according to the philosophy of the SS, is the physical and intellectual embodiment of the Power of Evil. The Communist, the Socialist, the German liberal, the revolutionary, the resistants in foreign countries, are the active manifestations of Evil. But the very existence of certain peoples, of certain races, such as the Jews, the Poles, and the Russians, is the static expression of evil. ... he is by birth, by predestination, a non-assimilable heretic doomed ot hell-fire. Death therefore is not enough. Only expiation can assuage and soothe the Master Race. The concentration camps are an amazing and complex mechanism of expiation.

(my edition p 109)

The blind hatred that ordains and presides over all these enterprises is the outcropping of all the rancors, all the thwarted petty ambitions, all the cravings and despair engendered by the extraordinary dissolution the the German middle class in the period between the two wars. To attribute it to any racial atavism is only to echo the very fallacy on which the SS mentality is based. At each economic cataclysm, each financial collapse, whole sections of German society crumbled away. Tens of thousands of persons were torn from the tradition forms of existence to which they physically belonged, and condemned to a social death that was a degradation and a torture for them. Amid the corpses of faiths and the haunting memory of erstwhile comforts, the most established intellectual horizons gone askew, there remained only an extraordinary nakedness made up of impotent rage, and a sullen and criminal thirst for revenge.

(my edition p 114)
Mr. Rousset made these observations during his internment in the various camps, and published them in 1947.

Konrad Heiden makes very similar observations in his Der Fuhrer: Hitler's Rise to Power published in 1944.

Hannah Arendt uses these insights in The Origins of Totalitarianism to support her contention that :

What prepared men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.