ABSTRACT
What does it mean that President Obama was inaugurated in virtually the same space where slaves were sold? How do the spaces of the past stay with us through representations-whether literary or photographic? How has the Holocaust registered in our increasingly globally connected consciousness? What does it mean that this European event is often used as an interpretive or representational touchstone for genocides and traumas internationally? Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory is about the geographical and psychological landscapes of the aftereffects of the Nazi genocide; it grapples with how space and memory connect and how the Holocaust travels through contemporary geographies. This book looks at historically and culturally diverse spaces, photographs, and texts that are all concerned with the physical and mental landscape of the Holocaust and its transformations from the postwar period to the early twenty-fi rst century. On the one hand, natural spaces have a tendency to reclaim landscapes; on the other hand, we have a tendency to build vast monumental structures in order to remember traumatic events. A stark contrast always exists between reclamation-spaces moving on, landscapes encroachingand memorialization-either in the more traditional monumental strain or the more experimental countermonumental strain. Yet sometimes monumental structures erase rather than commemorate. The tension between memory and forgetting is always brightly evident. As the generation of survivors shrinks, the cultural weight of maintaining memory shifts not only to subsequent generations but also in some sense to the landscape itself. As this project moves through physical spaces crucial to the Third Reich to photographs that grapple with representing trauma to literature that demonstrates the geographical reach of the Holocaust, the diversity of means of commemoration (and sometimes means of forgetting) comes into focus. Landscapes are aesthetic, representational, material; by employing the term in the context of discourses on the aftereffects of the Nazi genocide this book offers a new interpretation of how space, memory, and the multinational reach of the Holocaust intersect.
