Essays

This introductory essay presents the origins and aims of the special issue. It examines how objects marked by violence and loss acquire dimensions of sacrality and affect, and highlights the essential—often invisible—professional labor of care and conservation in sustaining historical memory.

Objects shape and legitimate human identity, especially in terms of interpersonal relations. In this article, Stone compares and contrasts how the Arolsen Archives and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum care for the objects in their possession. The varying approaches of the two institutions leads to different sorts of knowledge about the past, and has much to tell us about contemporary understandings of Holocaust museum curatorship and Holocaust memory.

Suitcases, and their smaller cousins, the briefcase, hold things. They are both object and container, possessing a range of physical properties and material connections. They are also inherently material in their demands for care and curation, creating challenges for institutions that hold them to make sense of violent and traumatic pasts.

An exploration of how Holocaust museums and archives confront and contextualize perpetrator materials, addressing the ethical challenges of exhibiting “disgraceful” objects, this essay examines curatorial and archival approaches to preservation, interpretation, and display, and reflects on how these materials shape public engagement, historical understanding, and moral responsibility.

This article presents four objects, all relating to the Treblinka death camp, that would have been worn on the bodies of Holocaust victims. Each one, however, illustrates differences in the journeys, uses, spatialities, and temporalities of proximity. These items give pause to reflect on how value and sacrality are affected when objects have been in extremely close physical contact with the (living or dead) human body, and how the context in which they are found may affect their perceived status.

Covertly constructed from scrap or excess metal in forced labor factories and workshops, pendants, pins, bracelets, and other metal objects made in Holocaust-era ghettos and camps by prisoners were largely given as gifts to friends and family or exchanged for food or other resources. A consideration of these rare surviving objects reveals how prisoners understood the conditions they were living in and represented them in material culture, and by doing so asserted a form of material agency amid confinement and forced labor. 

At the close of World War II, numerous Jewish brides in a Displaced Persons camp wore a remarkable parachute wedding dress now in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) a parachute is "something which inflates to control the descent of a falling body." Not all who wore this dress or the others like it in the UHSMM collection experienced soft landings. Wedding dresses never come with guarantees.   

The importance of the Holocaust for Jewish and general memory has led to scholarly discussion of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in religious terms. The USHMM, like many other Holocaust memorial museums, is not, however, owned or run by a religious community and does not serve as a space of prayer. Yet visitors treat the museum space and its objects with a sense of reverence reserved for ritual spaces and relics. But what happens if such religious objects are not on display? In this article, the author turns to Armin Loeb’s tallit katan to show the value of analyzing inaccessible objects.

This article examines a rosary and missal given to Beatrice "Trixie" Muchman for her confirmation while she was hiding in a small French town during the Holocaust. Although she returned to her Jewish faith following the war, she still revered the objects, keeping them long after donating the rest of her Holocaust-related materials to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for safekeeping. The article explores the multiple layers of sacredness imbued in Muchman's rosary and missal, and considers how a federal, non-denominational institution such as the USHMM should curate and display such objects.

Pal Szegö’s Holocaust diary is written in the only book he had available, a Hungarian language copy of the New Testament. While the diary entries are a rich text that merits attention, examining the diary as a unique bound object that preserves traces of the diarist’s interactions with it and some of the experiences detailed in the entries foregrounds Szegö’s individuality and agency amid changing circumstances, offers insight into his complex identity as a devoted Christian convert persecuted for being Jewish, and emphasizes the significance of the diary as a survivor object.

In September 1942, in the Warsaw ghetto in German-occupied Poland, Maria and Maximilian Wortman hastily wrote a letter to their daughter, Dziunia, from whom they had become separated. The couple had been selected for deportation to the death camp Treblinka, and they were gathered on the Umschlagplatz, the railway siding from where the deportation trains departed. Their final words to their daughter are written on the reverse of a scrap of paper no larger than 11 x 15 cm. 

This essay examines Hedda Sterne's 1941 Romanian passport and her little-known photomontages from Life magazine as parallel "documents of exile." The passport traces her perilous flight from Europe, serving as an unintended autobiography of survival. Her photomontages, composed from magazine clippings, became visual testimonies that confront the dissonance between American popular culture and her feelings of anxiety as a refugee. This study uses a conservation and art history lens to explore how paper, in both bureaucratic and artistic forms, mediated Sterne's identity and experience of displacement.

What is evoked when one encounters a child’s nametag, exhumed from the soil of a former Nazi death camp? For Holocaust archaeologists, such moments collapse temporal distance, raising pressing affective and ethical questions about the persistence of the past within the material present. When such objects enter museum narratives, they bring the emotional labor and spiritual attachments of families with them, complicating the “afterlives” of things displaced by war.

Beijing's Tibetan Buddhist temples have always been places through which diverse groups of people moved. During the Qing, these were spaces where elites from different backgrounds met, collaborated, and enacted the multicultural character of the empire within the capital. The temples themselves announced the pluralistic nature of the Qing dynasty, as well as its grandeur, through their public display of signs and stelae aimed at the multi-ethnic audiences of the empire.

Fleming’s trilogy illustrates the complex dynamics of race, religion, and visual arts in the interwar United States. Though the extant scholarship highlights the increasing Anglo-Saxonization of Jesus’s body in American visual culture in this era, Fleming’s story reveals a virtually opposite impulse in liberal Protestantism: to search for multiple colors of Christ.

Kati Curts and Alex Kaloyanides introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to examining four key categories: “Material,” “Economies,” “Religion,” and “America(s).” The ambition of this issue is that the collective inquiries of its authors, which span various interpretive histories and genealogical fragments, can offer ways to better understand their assorted conveyances, as well as the powerful grip of their critical conjunction.

For many Indigenous people of Turtle Island, also known as North America, treaty medals are material reminders of sacred promises made between their nations and the British Crown or the U.S. Government. Settlers and colonial officials, by contrast, have often treated these medals as mere trinkets.

Anna Bigelow and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to Material Islam. It explores devotional objects, the Islamic sensorium, the book as a material object, the Muslim body, and the various roles of the mosque as a social, political, and spiritual space. Taken together, its varied essays demonstrate an incredibly wide-ranging, rich, and exciting arena of study.

This article examines the genealogy of Afro-Brazilian mosques, answering some of the most immediate and puzzling questions that they force all who see them to ask. The answers to these questions demonstrate the fluidity of categories such as European, African, Islamic, and Christian, and how West African Muslims effectively drew on an architectural vocabulary with connections to three continents to forge an emergent cosmopolitan identity.

This article traces a fourteenth-century Persian history from Anatolia, Bazm wa Razm (Feasting and Fighting), written by ʿAzīz al-Dīn Astarābādī, from its presentation copy to its various recensions down to the modern period, examining how each era visually refigures this textual manifestation of its original patron, Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad (r. 783-800 AH/1381-1398 CE), for a new purpose.

Ubiquitous across the medieval Islamic world, khalwa is the practice of self-isolation, typically in a small cell, in order to focus on pious devotions. This article offers one possible approach to theorizing the heterogenous elements of khalwa coherently by insisting that we take the material and the social as seriously as we do the human and the spiritual.

As part of their activities in Kongo and Angola Capuchin Franciscan friars created dozens of images and wrote hundreds of pages of text in works that they called "practical guides." These Capuchin didactic images form an exceptionally important corpus that enriches our knowledge of central Africa and dramatically multiplies the European-format visual record about the African continent before 1800.

Early modern central Africa comes to life in the images that Capuchin friars. This Capuchin central African corpus consists today in four extant manuscripts connected by form and content. This essay offers additional visual material from the corpus by featuring details of each individual vignette that comprise the 1650s poster now in the Museo Francescano, as well as the unpublished versos of the Parma Watercolors that feature text.