The human core of the public realm: women prisoners’ performed ‘radio’ at the Majdanek concentration camp

Abstract

The article elaborates Hannah Arendt’s thought on the public realm to analyse the performed ‘radio’ that women prisoners ‘produced’ with their voice at the Majdanek concentration camp, Poland, in Spring 1943. The authors reconstruct the rationale that clarifies why an image of a radio was meaningful at a death camp. The documented memories reveal that the ‘radio’ created a resistant, harm-preventing and despair-relieving space. Mobilizing the meanings Arendt gives to the public realm as the shared reference and shared belonging, the authors show that the memories point towards the prisoners’ efforts to break their exclusion by decisively continuing their belonging to the public world through their own performance. In Arendt’s concepts, ‘broadcasting’ and listening to ‘programmes’ actualized prisoners’ being and subjectivity, both of which were under constant assaults. Conceptualized through Arendt’s thought, the performed ‘radio’ reveals amid the extreme exclusion, isolation and cruelty of the death camp how profoundly meaningful the public realm is to humans.