Description
Book Synopsis Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of “monument fatigue”, a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment, or, more particularly, the ways in which the natural environment, co-opted in the process of killing, becomes a medium for remembrance.
Trade Review “Jessica Rapson’s book Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice represents an important and innovative contribution to the burgeoning field of memory studies… The result is a rich, multi-perspective study that is both strong in its comparative dimension and in its attention to interconnections.” • Central Europe
“Jessica Rapson has written a fascinating book… that can be immensely inspiring. One may not agree with her all the time, but this makes her discourse contribution even more valuable.” • H-Soz-Kult
“This book is a clear interdisciplinary innovation in debates over memory. Making controversial and important new arguments, through very well-chosen and well-balanced case studies, it is a significant intervention in the field and should be widely read.” • Robert Eaglestone, University of London
“…An interesting and original work, which… prompts us to reflect on memories as dynamic elements and presents the past as a challenging arena always in connection with the present.” • Alexandre Dessingué, University of Stavanger
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: BUCHENWALD
Chapter 1. Defining and Redefining Buchenwald
Chapter 2. Semprun’s Buchenwald
Chapter 3. Buchenwald to New Orleans
PART II: BABI YAR
Chapter 4. Marginalized Memories
Chapter 5. Babi Yar’s Literary Journey
Chapter 6. Kiev to Denver
PART III: LIDICE
Chapter 7. Between the Past and the Future
Chapter 8. Lidice Travels
Chapter 9. Twinning Lidice
Conclusion: Travelling to Remember
Bibliography
Index
