Lecture | Book Roundtable
Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness
- Kate Brackney, Eva Pfanzelter, Zoe Roth, Frank van Vree
- Date
- Monday 10 February 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden - Room
- Faculty Club
The Leiden Jewish Studies Association (LJSA) and Centre for Austrian Studies invite you a Book Roundtable with author Kathryn L. Brackney, Institute for History, Leiden University in conversation with Eva Pfanzelter, University of Innsbruck, Zoe Roth, Durham University and FRank van Vree, University of Amsterdam.
Surreal Geographies, Winner of the George L. Mosse First Book Prize, University of Wisconsin Press, recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Through a wide selection of art, literature, and other media, Dr. Brackney shows show how portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors have shifted over time from an otherworldly “Planet Auschwitz” to the spare, intimate spaces of eye-witness interviews that characterize Holocaust remembrance today. In so doing, she demonstrates that the Holocaust has been understood not only through canonical works of documentary realism and postmodern fragmentation so often described by other scholars but also through an alternative, surreal mode of meaning making. By tracking long-term, transnational shifts in the aesthetic conventions of Holocaust remembrance, the book reveals the slow cultural processes by which victims of genocide have been enframed as fully human, “grievable lives” beyond survivor communities.