Awards

• Commended for National Jewish Book Award (Holocaust) 2008

Overview

Under the Third Reich, Nazi Germany undertook an unprecedented effort to refashion the city of Lodz. Home to prewar Poland's second most populous Jewish community, this was to become a German city of enchantment - a modern, clean, and orderly showcase of urban planning and the arts. Central to the undertaking, however, was a crime of unparalleled dimension: the ghettoization, exploitation, and ultimate annihilation of the city's entire Jewish population. Ghettostadt is the terrifying examination of the Jewish ghetto's place in the Nazi worldview. Exploring ghetto life in its broadest context, it deftly maneuvers between the perspectives and actions of Lodz's beleaguered Jewish community, the Germans who oversaw and administered the ghetto's affairs, and the ordinary inhabitants of the once Polish city. Horwitz reveals patterns of exchange, interactions, and interdependence within the city that are stunning in their extent and intimacy. He shows how the Nazis, exercising unbounded force and deception, exploited Jewish institutional traditions, social divisions, faith in rationality, and hope for survival to achieve their wider goal of Jewish elimination from the city and the world.With unusual narrative force, the work brings to light the crushing moral dilemmas facing one of the most significant Jewish communities of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, while simultaneously exploring the ideological underpinnings and cultural, economic, and social realities within which the Holocaust took shape and flourished.This lucid, powerful, and harrowing account of the daily life of the new German city, both within and beyond the ghetto of Lodz, is an extraordinary revelation of the making of the Holocaust.

Full Product Details

9780674027992

Table of Contents

Reviews

In this rich and suggestive book, Horwitz tells a tale of two cities: Litzmannstadt, the Nazi name for Lodz, which was to be a model for a German future, and the Ghetto, a doomed remnant of a sordid past. The two were linked: for Litzmannstadt to succeed, the Ghetto and its Jews had to disappear...What makes Horwitz's book so illuminating is his urban perspective. He tells how mass murder unfolded in the context of a particular city...[A] very important book. -- Samuel D. Krassow New Republic (05/06/2009)

Litzmannstadt, City of the Future, was designated by Hitler as a special center of urban development. As resources were poured in from the Reich, it would, declared its new German mayor, become a magnet for German immigrants from the East. And yet, as Gordon J. Horwitz points out in Ghettostadt , his brilliantly readable book on the city during World War II, there was a dark side to this glowing picture, a side barely mentioned at all by the mayor and his cohorts. For the process of becoming German also involved ridding the city of its Jews...Horwitz's vivid narrative makes effective use of unpublished sources in German, Yiddish, and Polish to paint a detailed picture of how the German population was strengthened by more than 20,000 ethnic German immigrants from Galicia, Volhynia, and further afield, within a few months of the German conquest. The Jews were removed from their sight by being forced into a ghetto.--Richard J. Evans New York Review of Books (06/26/2008)

Author Information

Gordon J. Horwitz is Associate Professor of History at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available