Product Description

At the terrible heart of the modern age lies Auschwitz. In a total inversion of earlier hopes about the use of science and technology to improve, extend and protect human life, Auschwitz manipulated the same systems to quite different ends. In Sybille Steinbacher’s terse, powerful new book, the reader is led through the process by which something unthinkable to any European in the 1930s had become a sprawling, industrial reality during the course of the world war. How Auschwitz grew and mutated into an entire dreadful city, how both those who managed it and those who were killed by it came to be in Poland in the 1940s, and how it was allowed to happen, is something everyone needs to understand.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43746 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

About the Author
Sybille Steinbacher teaches at The University of Bochum. She is currently Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. Shaun Whiteside is a previous winner of The Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translations, and translator of The Birth of Tragedy and Musil’s The Confessions of Young Törless for Penguin Classics. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

An interesting and unusual record
This relatively short book contains few of the harrowing personal accounts of survival in Auschwitz that many other books on the subject concentrate on. Instead the author focusses on the history of the town of Auschwitz, the reasons for its selection as a camp, and the construction, with the enthusiastic participation of German industy, of initially a forced labour camp and with the expansion of Birkenau of an industrialised extermination centre.
The writing style is factual and restrained and manages to be more powerful and condemning as a result.
This is a short, but excellent book that I would thoroughly recommend. For those seeking something with a more vivid personal account, then look no further than Primo Levi.