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Chapter Two The Material Letter J . . . because the Jew, you know, what does he have that belongs to him, that isn’t lent, borrowed, never given back . . . —Paul Celan The semantic of property denotes both a character feature and material goods. In either case, property is something that belongs to and defines a subject or an object. In close relationship to it is propriety, which defines a more specific character trait such as decency as well as ownership, and generally refers to the human world. Thus, the meanings of property and propriety overlap when one considers the relationship between and attribute of a human subject and ownership. The Holocaust saw an extreme manner of intermingling of the terms. Never before had a more simplified relationship existed between material goods and their owners, between property and its proprietor. Within the sphere of representation, this interrelationship, reduced to an equation, erased and replaced the neo-Platonic practice of subjectivity projected onto objects in highly individualized, almost infinite manners. Identity, as a perennial and universal problem, is often revised and constructed anew by political and scientific discourses. If one considers the discourse according to a more particular practice, that of Jewish identity, one observes its historical trajectory from essentialism through its erasure in the name of Difference to the reemergence of the moderate Essential Design in recent years. Historically speaking, narratives about identity and material culture attained epic dimensions in such disciplines as cultural anthropology and archeology. An interpretation of material objects within disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, and archeology is reevaluated in a manner parallel to understanding local contexts. Usually, the interdependence between an object and its context (be it national, ethnic, cultural, historical, or economic) has a circular character. A material object is used to define a cultural context and identity and, in turn, such an object is defined through a meaning present and is retrieved from its context.1 I would like to pick up one minor, yet telling, thread from the rich history of this interrelationship as linked to the infamous German archeologist Gustaf Kosinna The Material Letter J 37 (1858–1931), who extracted his conception of the relationship between ethnicity, nationality, and material objects from a reading of Herder’s and Fichte’s philosophies . Volk—as the principle that organized this discourse—led Kosinna to believe that the Aryan and early German cultures were superior because they were marked by a high level of cultural productivity.2 Since he overvalued their cultural productivity, he consequently and with relative ease relegated non-Aryan cultures to an inferior position. Another step that paved the way to the premises of genocide was taken in the discourse of German jurists, who interpreted the concept of sovereign power and its interdependence within the state of exception. Carl Schmitt opened his Political Theology with the well-known definition of authoritarian power as one that decides on the state of exception as indispensable to society.3 The most palpable results of these politico-philosophical notions were the introduction of the state of exception and, prompted by Hitler’s ascent to power, the Nuremberg Laws. While the latter can be viewed as a phase in the process of essentialization of race, the Laws also produced a clear racial distinction between the German-Aryan citizen and the German-Jewish citizen. Furthermore , considering German Jews only “nationals” and proclaiming that they therefore had no political rights, the Nuremberg Laws excluded Jews from the society of the Third Reich.4 With the change of this legal status, the GermanJewish rights of ownership were abolished in praxis, although no law legalized the dispossession of this part of the Jewish-German population. The perception of these people as culturally and racially inferior, excluded from the protection of law and, simultaneously, subjugated to law in matters of death and punishment quickly led to further racist distortions. Over the course of history, Jewishness was characterized in various ways, most often through engagement of the categories of religious faith and ethnicity. In the 1930s and 1940s, the biologically construed form of Jewish identity was projected—no matter how shifting this identity proved to be—on everybody who fit the precisely defined racial criteria and, by extension, on the world of their material possessions. In this way, property and propriety became one. In the light of these legal, cultural, economic, and political processes, which were applied in various ways in the territories occupied by Germany during World War II, we will now consider the following object...

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