- Landscapes of Holocaust Memory
At the start of the twenty-first century, Holocaust memory can be found in the most surprising of places. For both Brett Ashley Kaplan and Janet Jacobs, the sites of Holocaust memory—or following Marianne Hirsch's terminology as Kaplan does, postmemory—stretch far beyond Europe to material and literary landscapes in Australia, the United States, and South Africa. The final third of Kaplan's study explores the use of Holocaust analogies by the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee. In her closing reflections, Jacobs takes us to a Holocaust museum "amidst the strip malls and fast-food restaurants" in Indiana (146) and another in a former dance studio on a side street in Melbourne, Australia.
But the center of gravity in all three volumes is the varied European landscapes where the Holocaust was enacted and has subsequently been both forgotten and remembered. Kaplan homes in on Germany, moving from the recreational space of the Nazi elite in the Bavarian Alps to the route of one of the death marches that took place at the end of the war. Jacobs pushes our horizons further. Alongside examining the "bounded geographies of Nazi terror" found at the site of the former concentration camp at Ravensbrück as well as the "urban memoryscapes of Kristallnacht" in contemporary German cities (85) she expands the analysis to take in sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. There her concerns are with gendered representations at the most notorious of Holocaust memory landscapes, Auschwitz, as well as the varied landscapes of Jewish pre-war life in Central and Eastern Europe. Winstone's useful gazetteer pushes the geographical stretch of Holocaust landscapes much farther north, south, east, and west. That "thousands of locations across Europe were associated with the tragedy," (1) is made clear in the hundreds of entries detailing [End Page 71] the sites of former camps, ghettos, and massacres. While the best known of these sites were purpose-built killing installations, less well known are the hundreds of ordinary places reworked for extraordinary purposes. As Winstone notes, "apparently innocent buildings—a cycling stadium in Paris, a theatre in Amsterdam, an exhibition hall in Prague—became stations on this sorrowful journey" to death. (7) And not only the rail network but also the road network was implicated, meaning that, as Kaplan suggests, "if all death marches were marked, many European roads would bear endless signs memorializing traumatic events" (116). The entire European landscape was the setting for genocide, leaving contemporary Germany—in the words of Collier Schorr, one of three post war photographers at the heart of Kaplan's study—a place where "the landscape feels so loaded." (122)
One question that these three books raise and answer rather differently is why anyone would choose to visit these sites where Jews lived and died in prewar and wartime Europe. For Winstone, in a book intended as a travel guide providing historical context to visitors to those very sites, the act of physically being there is seen to add "another dimension to one's understanding" of this past generally accessed through memoirs and history books. (2) Winstone and Kaplan both signal a growing importance to Holocaust landscapes, identifying a tendency to transfer memory from people, notably a survivor generation that is dying out, to places, the physical sites where they survived the war. For Kaplan, "as the generation of survivors shrinks, the cultural weight of maintaining memory shifts not only to subsequent generations also in some sense to the landscape itself." (1) Both Winstone and Kaplan, however, are quick to point out the problems with assuming the memorial veracity of these sites. "It would be fatuous," claims Winstone, "to pretend that by visiting these sites one can ever truly comprehend the awfulness of what occurred there." (2) As both are well aware, these sites have...