Drawing from the ideas of critical geography and based on extensive archival research, Cole brilliantly reconstructs the formation of the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust, focusing primarily on the ghetto in Budapest, Hungary--one of the largest created during the war, but rarely examined. Cole maps the city illustrating how spaces--cafes, theaters, bars, bathhouses--became divided in two. Throughout the book, Cole discusses how the creation of this Jewish ghetto, just like the others being built across occupied Europe, tells us a great deal about the nature of Nazism, what life was like under Nazi-occupation, and the role the ghetto actually played in the Final Solution.
"A bold contribution to our understanding of the Shoah. Cole patiently unravels the layered complex of ideological motivations, economic ambitions, social realities and military contingencies that informed the decisions of politicians and officials who set out to separate Jews from gentiles in war-time Budapest. Holocaust City is an important book that, like Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, will inspire a new genre of analysis of the Shoah as the greatest catastrophe western civilization both endured and permitted." -- Robert Jan van Pelt, co-author of Holocaust: A History
"Tim Cole's new cultural history takes the study of space, cityscape, and the very role of the ghetto in the mass murder of Europe's Jews to revealing new levels. It will provoke and challenge readers to re-think and re-see the ghetto for what it was-an actual place and way station to death, and something that also had to be imagined conceptually and then graphically designed by the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews. This is a provocative and important book." -- James E. Young, author of The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning
"Cole's analysis of the subtle dynamics between state and local policy and the use of space goes a long way towards clarifying how ghettoization became an act of urban planning in Nazi-dominated Europe." -- Paul B. Jaskot, author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy
"This a unique and interesting study of the phenomenology of the Jewish ghettos of the Nazi era." -- Jewish Book World
"A bold contribution to our understanding of the Shoah. Cole patiently unravels the layered complex of ideological motivations, economic ambitions, social realities and military contingencies that informed the decisions of politicians and officials who set out to separate Jews from gentiles in war-time Budapest. Holocaust City is an important book that, like Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, will inspire a new genre of analysis of the Shoah as the greatest catastrophe western civilization both endured and permitted." -- Robert Jan van Pelt, co-author of Holocaust: A History
"Tim Cole's new cultural history takes the study of space, cityscape, and the very role of the ghetto in the mass murder of Europe's Jews to revealing new levels. It will provoke and challenge readers to re-think and re-see the ghetto for what it was-an actual place and way station to death, and something that also had to be imagined conceptually and then graphically designed by the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews. This is a provocative and important book." -- -James E. Young, author of The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning
"Cole's analysis of the subtle dynamics between state and local policy and the use of space goes a long way towards clarifying how ghettoization became an act of urban planning in Nazi-dominated Europe." -- -Paul B. Jaskot, author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy
"Tim Cole's new cultural history takes the study of space, cityscape, and the very role of the ghetto in the mass murder of Europe's Jews to revealing new levels. It will provoke and challenge readers to re-think and re-see the ghetto for what it was--an actual place and way station to death, and something that also had to be imagined conceptually and then graphically designed by the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews. This is a provocative and important book." -- James E. Young, author of The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning
"Tim Cole's new cultural history takes the study of space, cityscape, and the very role of the ghetto in the mass murder of Europe's Jews to revealing new levels. It will provoke and challenge readers to re-think and re-see the ghetto for what it was-an actual place and way station to death, and something that also had to be imagined conceptually and then graphically designed by the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews. This is a provocative and important book." -- James E. Young, author of The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning
"Cole's analysis of the subtle dynamics between state and local policy and the use of space goes a long way towards clarifying how ghettoization became an act of urban planning in Nazi-dominated Europe." -- Paul B. Jaskot, author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy
"This a unique and interesting study of the phenomenology of the Jewish ghettos of the Nazi era." -- Jewish Book World
"A bold contribution to our understanding of the Shoah. Cole patiently unravels the layered complex of ideological motivations, economic ambitions, social realities and military contingencies that informed the decisions of politicians and officials who set out to separate Jews from gentiles in war-time Budapest. Holocaust City is an important book that, like Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, will inspire a new genre of analysis of the Shoah as the greatest catastrophe western civilization both endured and permitted." -- Robert Jan van Pelt, co-author of Holocaust: A History
"Tim Cole's new cultural history takes the study of space, cityscape, and the very role of the ghetto in the mass murder of Europe's Jews to revealing new levels. It will provoke and challenge readers to re-think and re-see the ghetto for what it was-an actual place and way station to death, and something that also had to be imagined conceptually and then graphically designed by the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews. This is a provocative and important book." -- -James E. Young, author of The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning
"Cole's analysis of the subtle dynamics between state and local policy and the use of space goes a long way towards clarifying how ghettoization became an act of urban planning in Nazi-dominated Europe." -- -Paul B. Jaskot, author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy
"Tim Cole's new cultural history takes the study of space, cityscape, and the very role of the ghetto in the mass murder of Europe's Jews to revealing new levels. It will provoke and challenge readers to re-think and re-see the ghetto for what it was--an actual place and way station to death, and something that also had to be imagined conceptually and then graphically designed by the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews. This is a provocative and important book." -- James E. Young, author of The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning