The History of Nazi Neuroscience: Tracing Evidence Through Voids

Authors

Angela Gushue, Claremont McKenna CollegeFollow

Abstract

During the Holocaust (1933-1945), voids were created by the destruction of ethics, morality, and human life. We can detect this absence because of material traces of the events. My paper applies the theory of relational ontology of absence to a collection of empty jars on display at the Josephinum, a medical history museum in Vienna. The jars once contained human remains of children murdered in the “euthanasia” program at Am Spiegelgrund, a psychiatric clinic in Vienna where 789 were killed during the Nazi era. These victims were not commemorated until the early 2000s, when the specimen jars were emptied and displayed as a memorial. Their public viewing prompted further debate on the ethics of handling and displaying human remains, privacy laws for the victims, and the curatorial technique of absence as commemoration. Treating absence as a “thing” acknowledges the missing, destroyed or hidden, making the invisible victim, visible.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Gushue, Angela (2025) "The History of Nazi Neuroscience: Tracing Evidence Through Voids," Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union: Vol. 2025, Article 9.
Available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/urceu/vol2025/iss1/9