Blood and Soil in Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces: The Pastoral in Holocaust Literature

Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces diverges from earlier literature of the Holocaust in its engagement with the pastoral tradition. While the pastoral had been appropriated by the Nazis as part of their Blood and Soil ideology, Michaels reclaims and revises the pastoral and its sister genre, the elegy. She creates a traumatic pastoral focused on geological cataclysm and redefines Blood and Soil through images of soil soaked with blood. Michaels allows an anthropomorphized nature to grieve, but by presenting images of infertility rather than fertility she refuses the traditional compensatory apparatus of the elegy.