Sprache:
Englisch
Erscheinungsjahr:
2022
Titel der Quelle:
Jewish Social Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
27,1 (2022) 43-82
Schlagwort(e):
Nassy, Joseph Johan Cosmo,
;
Ilag VII (Concentration camp)
;
Nazi concentration camp inmates as artists
;
Crypto-Jews
;
Jewish artists Biography
;
Jewish artists Biography
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
Kurzfassung:
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s largely unknown Josef Nassy Collection is situated at the intersection of multiple cultural histories of migration and oppression. Josef Nassy (1904-1976) was an artist of African, Sephardi, and European descent from the Dutch Caribbean colony of Surinam. In 1934 he went to study art in Belgium. In December 1941, as he had an American passport, he was interned by the Belgian police for several months and then sent by the Nazis to a camp for "enemy aliens" in Laufen, Germany until 1945. During his imprisonment Nassy created a visual diary that brings into view unfamiliar facets of the Nazi camp system, as well as unexpected points of intersection between Jewish and African diaspora experience. This article traces the story of Nassy's ca. 200 drawings and their postwar reception to illustrate how entrenched categories of art and victimhood can obstruct our access to the past. In contrast to this reception history, Nassy’s artworks encourage a relational approach to Holocaust studies, one that is attuned to the entanglement of European and colonial wartime experience and the diversity of Jewish identities.
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