Atopic objects: The afterlives of gold teeth stolen from Holocaust dead

Abstract

Transfers of property are an integral part of armed conflicts and instances of mass political violence. Not just the state and the military, but also civilians confiscate, dispossess, loot and redistribute wealth across ethnic, national, class or religious lines, in the process re-enacting and sustaining the boundaries of othering and belonging that stand behind the conflict. In this way, economic violence takes on an essentially political dimension. Although, to date, rarely conceptualized as such, even grave robbery perpetrated at the burial sites of a defeated enemy or a member of othered minority constitutes a practice of alterity and dehumanization. And while, in the aftermath of violence, this very fact has the ability to invest things taken from mass graves with a particularly disturbing potential, this article reflects on the practices and affective dynamics surrounding objects of a distinctively unsettling status: golden teeth and dental bridges in their ambivalent condition between material objects (valuables) and bodily remains of the dead. They are considered in this article through the conceptual lens of ‘atopic objects’, a notion designed to bring to the fore both the out-of-place quality and the at once as-well-as/neither-nor character of those things, suspended on the threshold between human remains and material objects, private possessions and body parts of othered and violently dispossessed people. In this article, the author asks how this uneasy ontological status is experienced, acted upon and negotiated by the new (and rarely rightful) ‘owners’ and offers an insight into the practical, affective, political and also legal framings through which ‘atopic objects’ are being constructed and reconstructed either as things or as body parts and, at the cost of their unsettling quality, become embedded in the postwar orders, both in the intimate order of the body and in the political–economic order of the state.