"A useful concept that... captures the agency of "ordinary" people within the power structure is that of Herrschaft als soziale Praxis—domination as social practice. With its historiographical roots in the history of everyday life, it intends to break open the binary and static opposition of rulers against the ruled encountered in traditional theories of power and domination. The concept turns the ruled into actors who themselves have the power to accept domination, obey orders, acquiesce in rule—or not. As argues, the concept... denotes a "field of forces in which actors relate to and deal with each other even if they sidestep and ignore each other. This field ...change[s] to the extent in which actors become operative or remain passive." In the Nazi dictatorship, the terrorization of the victims was connected to the appeal felt by supporters, abbetors, and accomplices of participating in an "ultimate power to kill." Inside the concentration camps the field of forces was... extremely constricted and unbalanced, with prisoners exposed to near-omnipotent guards who were in a position to violently dominate the inmates' every move. Wolfgang Sofsky has described this setting with the term "absolute power"..."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Kim Wünschmann, Before Auschwitz (2015)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Concentration_camp
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Concentration camp
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