Abstract
The German and Allied bombing of Rotterdam in the Second World War caused thousands of dead and hundreds of missing, and severely damaged the Dutch port city. The joint destruction of people and their built environment made the ruins and rubble stand metonymically for the dead when they could not be mentioned in the censored press. The contiguity of ruins, rubble, corpses and human remains was not only semantic but also material because of the intermingling and even amalgamation of organic and inorganic remains into anthropomineral debris. The hybrid matter was dumped in rivers and canals to create broad avenues and a modern city centre. This article argues that Rotterdam’s semantic and material metonyms of destruction were generated by the contiguity, entanglement, and post-mortem and post-ruination agencies of the dead and the destroyed city centre. This analysis provides insight into the interaction and co-constitution of human and material remains in war.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 324-343 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Journal of Material Culture |
Volume | 26 |
Issue number | 3 |
Early online date | 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Sept 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,and/or publication of this article: The archival research for this article was supported by the Department of Cultural Anthropology of Utrecht University in The Netherlands.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,and/or publication of this article: The archival research for this article was supported by the Department of Cultural Anthropology of Utrecht University in The Netherlands.
Keywords
- bombardments
- metonymy
- rubble
- Second World War
- The Netherlands