Awards

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

Overview

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.Illuminating how the Nazis inverted the economy of value, rescuing discards and murdering people, Empire of Rags and Bones offers an original perspective on genocide, racial ideology, and World War II.

Full Product Details

9780197744000

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Reviews

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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