Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2024 The Ernst Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Holocaust Library.

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9780197744000

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Can a history of waste management be heartrending? Anne Berg's study of recycling, labor, and race in Nazi Germany shows that it not only can be but has to be if we are to understand the extraordinary violence of the Nazi regime and the continued centrality of garbage practices to the maintenance of social order in today's world. Empire of Rags and Bones is a deeply researched and strikingly innovative look at Nazi Germany and the discourse of zero waste. * Etienne Benson, Author of Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms * Occasionally, a book comes along that exposes extraordinary evil in the everyday, even in progressive practices of social reproduction. Anne Berg's Empire of Rags and Bones tells an epic story about the Nazi empire's quest for resource self-sufficiency and its increasingly maniacal policies of garbage reclamation and repurposing that were predicated on slave labor and implicated in genocide. Never again can recycling be regarded in the same way. * A. Dirk Moses, Author of The Problems of Genocide * Empire of Rags and Bones demonstrates that the generation, management, reuse, and minimization, if not elimination, of waste were integral to the economy and society of Nazi Germany. It is a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of national socialism, its economy, and the reasons it appealed and resonated with people in their everyday lives, as well as to the new field of waste studies, and within that to an analysis of the relationship between waste, labor, racism, and colonialism. * Zsuzsa Gille, co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies *

Author Information

Anne Berg is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of On Screen and Off: Cinema and the Making of Nazi Hamburg.

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