Dominique Hipp
EHRI-Fellow (11/2016)
Narratives of Violence. Reports on Dachau, Mauthausen and Ravensbrück
This project focusses on an interdisciplinary study of reports about the concentration camps at Dachau, Ravensbrück, and Mauthausen. The sources are statements by perpetrators made in the course of trials of Nazi crimes between 1945 and 1955. The corpus is made up of the main Dachau trial, two German trials against women from the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, and the Volksgericht trials concerning the camp at Mauthausen. Trials constitute a special form of communication and dialogue which has to be taken account of in analysis. Examinations of the statements of the defendants shifts from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ of the narrative and requires the employment of narratological methods. The question of how space and situation in the camps was described by the perpetrators and how they narratively positioned themselves therein is a central focus of the analysis. The statements evince specific strategies of fictionalisation and a particular form of rhetoric. The application of models from literary criticism for the examination of non-fictional texts lends itself to two connected goals: It promises new historiographical insights while contributing a new research methodology.
Dominique Hipp is a PhD candidate at the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg Faktuales und fiktionales Erzählen (Factual and Fictional Narration) at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg. From 2013 to 2015 she was a research assistant in the start-up phase of the Centre for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, worked on the creation of the permanent exhibition of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, and was involved in the projects of the Jewish Museum in Augsburg.