The Wiener Holocaust Library is delighted to host the 2023 winner of the Ernst Fraenkel Prize, Prof Anne Berg, who will speak about her prize-winning book, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany in this special online event.
Paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones-the Nazi empire demanded its population obsessively collect anything that could be reused or recycled. Entrepreneurs, policy makers, and ordinary citizens conjured up countless schemes to squeeze value from waste or invent new purposes for defunct or spent material, no matter the cost to people or the environment. As World War II dragged on, rescued loot-much of it waste-clogged transport routes and piled up in warehouses across Europe.
Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Fostering cooperation between the administration, the party, the German Army, the SS, and industry, resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors.
Throughout Nazi occupied-Europe, Jews, POWs, concentration camp inmates, and enemy civilians were forced to recycle the loot, discards, and debris of the Nazi race war. In the end, the materials that were fully exploited and the people who had been bled dry were cast aside, buried, burned, or left to rot. Nonetheless, waste reclamation did not have the power to win the war.
The Fraenkel Prize judges found it to be “a brilliant, ambitious and highly original work which will make a great impact on the field.”
About the Speaker
Anne Berg is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies the histories of waste and recycling, film and cities, racism and genocide. Trained as a historian of modern Germany and Europe, Anne increasingly ventures into more global terrain. Her research proceeds along a number of parallel tracks, connected by a sustained interest in the visual, the spatial and the material. Berg has published articles on the history of waste in Nazi Germany, the United States and South Africa. At Penn, Anne teaches courses on the history of National Socialism, world history, environmental history and the history of garbage. Her book, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.