This is one of the most remarkable testimonies to inhumanity that I know. The deeply moving recollections of Otto Dov Kulka's boyhood years in Auschwitz, interwoven with reflections of elegiac, poetic quality, vividly convey the horror of the death-camp, the trauma of family and friends, and the indelible imprint left on the memory of a young boy who became a distinguished historian of the Holocaust. An extraordinarily important work which needs to be read. -- Sir Ian Kershaw
Otto Dov Kulka is Rosenbloom Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is a work of inner
truth, depicted through images, memories, and feelings. It is thus
pervaded by a sense of paradox: a meticulous historian reflecting
upon the intangible; a collection of exquisite, often individual
pieces about a single harsh event, and a very readable book about
an unimaginable event. Above all, this is a book that enriches the
reader, to an extent much belied by its slim appearance...
Underpinning every page is a sense of the historian ruefully
shaking his head over the power of memory... The adult Kulka
attempts to come to terms with his memories, but at the heart of
the book is the child Kulka. It is he who experienced the events,
and he invented his own language in his dreams of the camp. It was
his Auschwitz, in the way he lived it and understood
it, as a child. He knew that death was the only certainty in the
camp--'the immutable law of death,' as he puts it--but he
ultimately he survived, twice, through chance. The adult relives
the death and the survival repeatedly, seemingly unable to accept
that he was exempted from the overriding logic of Auschwitz.
'However much I know that I must be caught,' Kulka writes, 'I
always know, too, that I must be spared.' It is the dialogue
between the child and the man that makes this volume so compelling.
There is often an unspoken trade-off in Holocaust books. We are
curiously reading about the horrors, but we are also providing the
service of remembrance. But Landscapes of the Metropolis of
Death is a very different kind of Holocaust book. There is no
blatant horror. Kulka imparts the unspeakable crimes through
beautiful little segments of dreams and imagination. There are
three poems, published here for the first time, from an unknown
young woman who thrust them into the hands of a Kapo as she went
into the gas chamber. The Kapo gave them to Kulka's father. And
throughout the pages there are photographs of the past and the
present, the people and the places. In just 144 pages a vast
emotional terrain is revealed, and made real. It is a metropolis of
death, as lived throughout a life. -- Ilana Bet-El * The Daily
Beast *
It is almost unclassifiable...It tries to penetrate the maze of
established fact and personal experience in order to arrive at what
seems unreachable...Nothing else I have read comes close to this
profound examination of what the Holocaust means. Kulka
looks everywhere for loopholes in the immutability of death. His
journey strikes me as a quest similar to the attempt to describe
the face of God or the structure of the universe. They are too vast
and too mysterious. Not that this stops us, or this author, from
trying. -- Linda Grant * New Statesman *
This is a great book: read it. And be grateful...So startling and
so beautiful. -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *
[An] astonishing book...In its essence this is not so much a book
about Auschwitz as one about coming to terms with the shock of
survival. Like the 11-year-old Kulka, who came within a few
hundred meters of the crematoria, assuming that he would perish
there, the writing hovers around the incineration, as he puts it,
'like a moth circles a flame.' ...What, ultimately, makes Kulka's
book unlike any other first-hand account written about the camps is
the authenticity of its vision of an 11-year-old boy...Whether or
not setting all this down has done anything to relieve the
unrelenting grip the 'metropolis of death' holds on his mind, or
whether it has tightened that hold, Kulka does not say. But since
he has done the rest of us--and the world--so great a kindness by
writing his book, one hopes for his sake the former. -- Simon
Schama * Financial Times *
There are almost 50 old photographs and drawings dispersed
throughout the book; it looks like W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz,
and in some small sections drifts off into the memorial haze that
many people appreciate in Sebald's last novel. Kulka's
memoir--though he would deny the label--is both more haunting and
more knowing...This is the product of a master historian--ironic,
probing, present in the past, able to connect the particular with
the cosmic. His memory is in the service of deep historical
understanding, rendered in evocative prose that is here eloquently
translated from Hebrew. -- Thomas Laqueur * The Guardian *
[A] profound and melancholy book of remembrance...Death is in these
pages a constant and close companion to the living... This is a
grave, poetic and horrifying account of the Holocaust which does
not so much revisit the Auschwitz of the past, but the Auschwitz of
Kulka's inner world. It is his own internalized city, with
its own enduring horror. -- Arifa Akbar * The Independent *
Powerful and haunting...In [some] places the book reads like a
poisoned dream. -- George Walden * Bloomberg.com *
In this moving and poignant testimony, distinguished historian
Otto Dov Kulka draws the reader into the horror of the
death-camp through a montage of historical research, essays and
poetical images of memory. -- Shereen Low * Northern Echo *
[Kulka's] aim is not to provide a precise record of his time
in the camp, but rather, to evoke something of the mythscape of
what he repeatedly calls 'the metropolis of death,' a place whose
sole purpose (at least after the departure of international
monitors) is to murder as many people in as efficient a manner as
possible...Some readers of the volume may be frustrated by its lack
of explicit condemnation or moral outrage, its insistence on
personal rumination rather than broad critique. That, though, seems
for Kulka to be the business of historiography; here he is
interested in something very different: evoking the experience of a
place and time that existed beyond the farthest reaches of
comprehension. -- James Williams * PopMatters *
Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death makes for deeply
disturbing but ultimately very rewarding reading, and is unlike any
Holocaust memoir I have ever come across...This book is not a
memoir in the conventional sense, but an extraordinary collection
of some of the memories, ideas and dreams that make up
Kulka's internal landscape. -- Keith Lowe * The Telegraph
*
This memoir, which is more a book of moments, hauntings and dreams
than a narrative, is not primarily about the mechanics of survival
or even about the conditions of the camp. It is about death as city
and death as law. In that respect it is unremitting and touches us
all...If the whole has a hallucinatory power it is because the
precisions coincide with the dreams. -- George Szirtes * The Times
*
[An] astonishing book...There are enough Holocaust survivor memoirs
by historians to make a little canon. One of these, When Memory
Comes, by the great Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, is a
classic of this small but fascinating and important genre.
Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death deserves a place with
that volume. It is, quite simply, extraordinary. -- Robert
Eaglestone * Times Higher Education *
Personal accounts of the Holocaust face the difficult task of
bringing fresh perspective to one of the most well-documented
events in modern history. Jewish History professor Kulka
delivers his own tale with a refreshing mix of immediacy, imagery,
and adroit historicism, a combination which masterfully depicts the
mental gymnastics he's gone through to understand this seminal time
in his past. Kulka draws from his own journal entries and audio
monologues in describing his time at family camps inside
Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, places he considers part of the
Metropolis of Death. * Publishers Weekly *
This is one of the most remarkable testimonies to inhumanity that I
know. The deeply moving recollections of Otto Dov Kulka's
boyhood years in Auschwitz, interwoven with reflections of elegiac,
poetic quality, vividly convey the horror of the death-camp, the
trauma of family and friends, and the indelible imprint left on the
memory of a young boy who became a distinguished historian of the
Holocaust. An extraordinarily important work which needs to be
read. -- Sir Ian Kershaw
Otto Dov Kulka has performed a minor miracle. He has written
a masterpiece about his childhood in Auschwitz. With that he joins
the select company of survivors who have dealt humanely with their
experience of hell. But he comes late to his subject, and profits
from long years of reflection. This lends his tone a rare richness
and subtlety...Interspersed throughout are pithy abstractions,
notably 'the immutable law' (echoing Kafka) and 'the Great Death'
(recalling Rilke), which lend a lyrical, incantatory quality to the
book. The narrative is also enriched with documentary photographs
in the style of W. G. Sebald, showing painful memories: railway
lines, piles of shoes, corpses in the snow. Yet for all its
experimental character, and perhaps because of it, the story is
lucid and direct...Kulka's well-honed writing--excellently rendered
into English by Ralph Mandel--bears witness to the worst that man
can do to man, and in doing so testifies to the enduring power of
the human spirit. -- Jeremy Adler * Times Literary Supplement *
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