Notes for the Breitenau room of The workhouse

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In this notebook, sociology professor Avery F. Gordon offers a portrait of Breitenau, a twelfth-century Benedictine monastery located twenty kilometers south of Kassel. Turned into a workhouse in 1874, Breitenau became a Nazi concentration camp in the Second World War, then a girls' reformatory until the 1970s, and is now an open psychiatric residential treatment facility and a rehabilitation center, as well as a Gedenkstatte memorial and research center. Here, Gordon, with the help of the memorial's cofounder and director Gunnar Richter, recalls Breitenau's function as a place for the enclosure of "disobedient social subjects," developing "a kind of encyclopedia of the prisoner."