EVENT DETAILS

The Odor of Repression: Fascist Smellscapes - Colloquium with Hans-Jürg Rindisbacher

The Nazi regime was keenly aware of its smellscapes, at both extremes of the spectrum: the pleasant space of perfumes, toiletry, and cosmetics and the horrid space of dirt, death, and putrefaction. This lecture explores the atmosphere of the Nazi period. It provides a reasoned collage of olfactory snapshots of personal spaces, the public sphere and political decision-making. It assembles statements by Nazis and their victims, comments by contemporary observers and visitors, and analyses by historians, cultural critics, and researchers in retrospect.

In doing so the lecture addresses topics from femininity and gender roles to consumer culture, rationing, the stench of war, and the Holocaust.

The olfactory rarely has a direct causative function in history but the revelatory power of smellscapes and their ability to characterize things as they really are, accompany and reflect historical events as their indelible pneumatic trace.