Historians have mainly seen the ghettos established by the Nazis in German-occupied Eastern Europe as spaces marked by brutality, tyranny, and the systematic murder of the Jewish population. Drawing on examples from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos, Dance on the Razor's Edge explores how, in fact, highly improvised legal spheres emerged in these coerced and heterogeneous ghetto communities.

Looking at sources from multiple archives and countries, Svenja Bethke investigates how the Jewish Councils, set up on German orders and composed of ghetto inhabitants, formulated new definitions of criminal offenses and established legal institutions on their own initiative, as a desperate attempt to ensure the survival of the ghetto communities. Bethke explores how people under these circumstances tried to make sense of everyday lives that had been turned upside down, bringing with them pre-war notions of justice and morality, and she considers the extent to which this rupture led to new judgments on human behaviour. In doing so, Bethke aims to understand how people attempted to use their very limited scope for action in order to survive. Set against the background of a Holocaust historiography that often still seeks for clear categories of "good" and "bad" behaviours, Dance on the Razor's Edge calls for a new understanding of the ghettos as complex communities in an unprecedented emergency situation.

About the Author
Svenja Bethke is a lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leicester. Sharon Howe is a freelance literary translator working from German. She is based in the UK.

Reviews

"The author has written a highly competent, very readable, and [...] fair-minded account of a disputed issue in the historiography of the Holocaust, one that makes a [...] useful contribution to the literature. Both the subject itself and the author's treatment of it seem to me deserving of scholarly and public attention."

-- Michael A. Livingston, Rutgers Law School * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *
"To expert readers, this book provides an important contribution to the examination of ghetto life by adding a well-researched study on legal institutions in the ghettos...To non-expert readers, this book will be eye-opening as it plunges them into the messy, uncomfortable 'choiceless choices' that made up everyday life in the ghettos." -- Amy Simon, Michigan State University * Central European History *
"[Bethke's] careful examination presents the nitty-gritty everyday of the last years and months of hundreds of thousands of people in horrible conditions. Bethke portrays them without false sentimentality as acting and thinking people who adapted, hoped, and tried to survive. Dance on the Razor's Edge is a bold and important study on how negotiating and breaching rules shows Holocaust victims not as immoral but rather as human." -- Anna Hajkova, University of Warwick * American Historical Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9781487523541
Author Svenja Bethke
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint University of Toronto Press
Publisher University of Toronto Press
Weight(grams) 420g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 18mm