ABSTRACT
Studying the Nazi past, archaeologically or otherwise, is a decision that impacts a number of subjects, ranging from the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust to the generations born after the Second World War. Importantly, it also concerns those who can no longer speak because they, like Margarete Kuttner, did not survive the Holocaust. Exploring the role of material culture in archaeological analyses of sites of Nazi crimes, this paper makes absence a focal point. Agamben (1999) has pointed out that the archive of the Holocaust, while containing numerous testimonies and eyewitness accounts, nevertheless forms around a lacuna, because there is no complete witness. Such witness would be the one who has encountered the whole truth, but she/he is also the one who did not survive the Holocaust (‘the drowned’ in Levi’s [1996] account).
