“Er ist doch ohne Übertreibung die Personifikation des Kategorischen Imperativs. Possibilities and limits of inner-discourse critique on the basis of selected textual communicates of the Litzmannstadt ghetto

While forms of resistance and criticism of Nazi actors by jewish prisoners in concentration camps and jewish ghetto inhabitants have already been described, linguistic analyses of communicative conflicts within ghettos are still mostly lacking. Conflicts existed not only because of the heterogeneous social, ethnic, etc. compositions of the ghettos, but also because of internal power struggles. A power hierarchy arising from these struggles within the ghetto can be demonstrated for the Polish ghetto Litzmannstadt: a “ghetto elite” stood in sharp contrast to the majority of the ghetto population. In the context of this proceedings paper, the possibilities and limits of inner-discursive forms of critique on the basis of the power-axis “ghetto-elite”-ghetto-population will be reflected. During this, a contrastive perspective will be additionally adopted in order to compare different text genres, such as the diary, but also the ghetto chronicle and the ghetto encyclopedia, which are unique to the Litzmannstadt ghetto. These texts differ, among other things, in their degree of publicity and thus offer the possibility of being able to grasp the various conditions, functions, possibilities and limits of inner- discursive criticism of power.