The biological inescapability of the Nazi ghettos (7.14) also has an echo on the material plane: the use of barbed wire as a basic construction material for the barriers surrounding their paradeisos. The deployment of the ghettos was particularly fast and efficient because of this technology, invented in the second half of the 19th century. Inexpensive and effective, says Duneier,

it had been first used by cattlemen in the American West as well as by the British in the Boer Wars and World War I to contain civilian enemies and prisoners of war. It also enabled Nazis to create ghettos at a moment’s notice, as evident in a memo by a German official: “[The Lodz ghetto] will be established suddenly on a day to be chosen by me, i.e, at a certain time the boundaries of the ghetto … will be blocked off by barbed wire, barricades and other barriers.¹

With this technological advance the barriers of the terrible place become simultaneously impermeable and mobile; it is possible to draw an impenetrable barrier in a matter of hours. The brick and stone walls begin to disappear, the barriers become increasingly lighter. The implicit inescapability of this new type of barrier is a radical intensification of the exclusion implicit in the medieval ghettoes. Their permeability, which admitted entry and exit twice a day and allowed, albeit partially, for Jews to interact with the rest of the population, disappears completely in the Nazi model; the attempt to escape the hunting park is paid with one’s life. Scholars like Duneier argue that these ghettos were something completely new—and up to a point they could be deemed “functionally” revolutionary—but in truth they a particularly aggressive evolution of the same topology. 

In fact, the Nazi ghetto and its derivations could be understood in Agambenian terms as an artificial reserve of bare life (zoē), of alterity, that is left unconditionally at the sovereign’s disposal.

---

1. Duneier, Ghetto, 18.  ↩︎