Susan Silas’s Helmbrechts Walk

In a Holocaust context, landscape photographs take on entirely different meanings: what may have seemed an innocent constellation of trees can quickly turn into a signifi er of lost witnessing, an agent of amnesia covering crimes, or a sinister cluster of branches obfuscating evidence of genocide. Indeed, the relationship between landscape and memory is always unstable: how much do we know about the history of certain places? How will natural growth change the topography of traumatic sites? In the absence of memorials, what traces of the past remain? How can we read spaces decades after a traumatic event? As I argued in the fi rst part of this book, the landscape of a place like the Obersalzberg offers an unstable series of memory possibilities. This chapter examines the tensions between space and violence, amnesia and memorialization, and the uses of the forest by examining Susan Silas’s Helmbrechts Walk. Her compelling photographs contribute to the work of geographers, historians, landscape architects, literary critics, and others concerned with the connection between space and memory by bringing the past into the present. In discussing the arresting, abstracted photographs Alan Cohen took of Dachau, Auschwitz, the Berlin Wall, and other traumatic spaces, Jonathan Bordo notes, “these photographs offer themselves as the vicarious bearers of these traumatic traces; and as viewers, merely by looking at them, we might consider ourselves to be memory-bearers” (95).1 Silas’s photographs engage with a habitation of such spaces and have the capacity sometimes to turn viewers into memory-bearers.