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Loading... Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imaginationby Otto Dov Kulka
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) eachurch | Apr 6, 2013 | 
Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis Death is an anomalous text in regard to both sides of this opposition. We could describe it as a memoir, given that Kulka’s own boyhood experiences in Auschwitz are at its centre. But the term memoir barely seems adequate to the introspective, often poetic, sometimes hallucinatory moments that it captures. The book is little more than a hundred pages long, it has almost no interest in the construction of a sequential narrative, and for the most part it avoids direct encounters with what Kulka identifies as the stock material of survivor memoirs and testimonies: ‘I mean the violence, the cruelty, the torture, the individual killings, which, as far as I can work out – though I generally avoid reading such texts – are portrayed as the everyday routine of that world of the camps.’ In sharp contrast to what we might expect from a first-hand account of Auschwitz, Kulka in fact claims not to remember much of this at all. ‘What’s puzzling,’ he writes, ‘is that I possess almost no such memories; I have to think hard and scan the images that remain engraved in one form or another – as experiences, as colours, as impressions – in order to isolate in them something of a type that I could describe as violence.’ Awards
Historian Otto Dov Kulka has dedicated his life to studying and writing about Nazism and the Holocaust. Until now he has always set to one side his personal experiences as a child inmate at Auschwitz. Breaking years of silence, Kulka brings together the personal and historical, in a devastating, at times poetic, account of the concentration camps and the private mythology one man constructed around his experiences. Auschwitz is for the author a vast repository of images, memories, and reveries: “the Metropolis of Death” over which rules the immutable Law of Death. Between 1991 and 2001, Kulka made audio recordings of these memories as they welled up, and in Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death he sifts through these fragments, attempting to make sense of them. He describes the Family Camp’s children’s choir in which he and others performed “Ode to Joy” within yards of the crematoria, his final, indelible parting from his mother when the camp was liquidated, and the “black stains” along the roadside during the winter death march. Amidst so much death Kulka finds moments of haunting, almost unbearable beauty (for beauty, too, Kulka says, is an inescapable law). As the author maps his interior world, readers gain a new sense of what it was to experience the Shoah from inside the camps—both at the time, and long afterward. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is a unique and powerful experiment in how one man has tried to understand his past, and our shared history. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.531853858092History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- World War II Social, political, economic history; Holocaust Holocaust Ghettos and Extermination Camps Germany & Central Europe PolandLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.08)
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