Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany

Books are under attack in the United States. According to PEN America, the latter half of 2023 saw an unprecedented surge of book bans: 4,349 bans across 23 states. More books were banned in those six months that in the previous twelve. Protesting that culture of censorship and suppression, the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity (Graduate Center—City University of New York), in cooperation with Marion Kaplan, Professor Emerita of Hebrew and Judaic Studies (NYU) and Raz Segal, Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide (Stockton University), will host a year-long virtual series, “In Praise of Books.” We celebrate new scholarship by emerging as well as established scholars, prizing their creativity and rigor. “Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany” Scholar and human rights advocate Raz Segal will engage award-winning author Anne Berg in a conversation about her new book, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany. Over the course of the 1930s, the Nazi regime developed an economic rationale that linked waste utilization, imperial expansion, and internal purging. The concentration camp system became an essential part of the regime’s waste management infrastructure, moving people and things into and out of the category of waste in a desperate effort to meet competing demands of the war economy and the security apparatus. Prof Raz Segal, Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide (Stockton University) and Prof Anne Berg (University of Pennsylvania), will discuss Berg’s startling – and wholly original — argument that waste management was at the center of the Nazi regime’s imperialist practice, its genocidal war, and the Holocaust. Empire of Rags and Bones was awarded the 2023 Ernst Fraenkel Prize. Chair: Center Director, Debórah Dwork