Cities Under a Sky of Mud: Landscapes of Mourning in Holocaust Texts

Abstract

Abstract:This chapter examines the relationship between landscape, memory and mourning in Holocaust literature, with a particular focus on the work of Anne Michaels. After outlining the spatial disruptions and displacements entailed in both Holocaust experience itself and the Holocaust memory of later generations, it explores the degree to which images of landscape offer a meaningful and ethically-sound means of negotiating these issues.Key names and concepts: Anne Michaels - Fugitive Pieces - The Winter Vault - ethics - Holocaust memory - landscape - mourning - postmemory.We do not descend, but rise from our histories.If cut open memory would resemblea cross-section of the earth's core,a table of geographical time.(Michaels, 'Lake of Two Rivers' 2000: 9)Landscape is an often unacknowledged factor in memory: the landscapes of past experience both populate memory and are populated by it. Not only is place often the subject matter of memory, but the processes of memory and mourning frequently depend upon both the physical context of the rememberer and the degree to which past experience may be located in an image of place. As Juhani Pallasmaa suggests, [w]e have projected and hidden parts of our lives in lived landscapes and houses, exactly as the orators placed themes of thenspeeches in the context of imagined buildings (Pallasmaa 2009: 1920). But what happens when this relationship between the individual and the landscape is disrupted by displacement or traumatic loss, and when the losses themselves take place in a landscape which appears to retain no trace of these histories?This essay aims to address such questions in the specific context of Holocaust memory and postmemory, examining the ways in which experiences of the Holocaust and its aftermath challenge a sense of spatial continuity for survivors and their children.1 Focusing on Anne Michaels' 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces, I examine the ways in which images of landscape may be deployed as a means of responding to these individuals' dislocated relationships to the places and events of an unwitnessed familial past, through a compensatory yet ethically questionable poetics of preservation, recuperation and plenitude. After tracing the presence of, and resistance to, such uses of landscape imagery in works including W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2002), Georges Perec's W or the Memory of Childhood (1975) and Anne Michaels' recent work The Winter Vault (2009), this essay aims to arrive at a nuanced and ethically sensitive appraisal of the consolatory and reparative role of landscape in postmemory.1. Landscape and the HolocaustThe Holocaust is frequently interpreted as an event which stands in radical disruption of the necessarily close affiliation between memory and sense of place. As Ulrich Baer notes, [s]urvivor accounts often recount the deportation to a non-place and the destruction of the symbolic notion of a 'place' that could hold experience together (2000: 46). This sense of the spatial and experiential dislocation entailed within concentration camp experience is expressed particularly effectively in the words of Charlotte Delbo, who notes of her fellow deportees that [s]ome of them have travelled in all the countries in the world, businessmen. They were familiar with all manner of landscape, but they do not recognize this one (Delbo 1995: 5). Delbo's articulation of the alterity of the Holocaust landscape is further echoed in the following lines from Auschwitz and After, in which the incomprehension of the Holocaust's victims is sharply contrasted with what Delbo perceives as post-Holocaust culture's assumption of familiarity with the geography of genocide:From all the countries of Europefrom all the points on the horizontrains convergedtoward the nameless placeloaded with millions of humanspoured out there unknowing of where[...]burnedwithout knowingwhere they were. …