For Nazi Germany, the ghetto was a conceptual tool used to facilitate social and political exclusion and further their anti-Jewish campaign. For the Jews who lived in them, the ghettos became the center of their lives?even though they were also sites of immense suffering.

Combining thorough historical research with an interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship between space and violence, Violent Space provides a unique insight into the history and the socio-spatial topography of the Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Warsaw (1939–1943). Using rare archival materials and firsthand accounts, many of which have never been translated into English, Anja Nowak traces out the trauma that the space of the ghetto inflicted on its Jewish inhabitants, and how it alienated, disoriented, and harmed them.

While the physical ghetto?its buildings, boundaries, and streets?has been reabsorbed and redefined by modern-day Warsaw's urban structure, Violent Space shows us that its presence still lingers in the narratives of those who were forced into this first phase of the Holocaust.

Anja Nowak's profile page

Anja Nowak received her PhD from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is author of a German monograph on Theodor W. Adorno, Elemente einer Ästhetik des Theatralen in Adornos Ästhetischer Theorie. She is editor (with Bo?ena Karwowska) of The More I Know, The Less I Understand: Young Researchers' Essays on Witnessing Auschwitz. She works as a freelance writer, researcher and educator in Frankfurt, Germany.

"Given its focus on the Warsaw ghetto, Violent Space builds on a number of existing works in important ways through its focus on the topography of the ghetto and the spatial practices of ghetto inhabitants. As the author notes, the destruction of the ghetto means that these places and spaces are no longer present in the contemporary city and the author follows Engelking and Leociak in excavating them and bringing them to life. Here the book will appeal to the general reader given the importance of the Warsaw ghetto within the story of the Holocaust. But Violent Space does more than focus on Warsaw alone and so will be of wider interest to scholars of ghettos and the nascent field of Holocaust geographies, environmental histories of the Holocaust and genocide space."?Tim Cole, author of Holocaust Landscapes

"This is an excellent book. It is well-written, clear, original, and relevant. The author never fails, when discussing these experiences, to frame the conversation around the concept of space, with pertinent examples and quite deep reflections on the personal geographies and stories of the witnesses."?Alberto Giordano, editor of Geographies of the Holocaust

"Anja Nowak's Violent Space marks the advent of mature spatial scholarship on the Holocaust. This astonishingly insightful book is infused with Nowak's profound understanding of Nazi spatial theory and practice and how their violent implementation in the Warsaw ghetto created extreme, constantly changing spaces of human suffering. Nowak's lucid prose makes every chapter coherent and powerful, while building a sustained interpretation of ghettoized space as violence, and violence as a flood of spatial acts. Violent Space is spatial history at its very best: deeply geographical, seeking at every turn to determine how spatial ideas became specific actions that affected Jews' lives. A brilliant contribution to Holocaust studies that spatial scholars across the humanities should read."?Anne Kelly Knowles, University of Maine