On the 25th of May, Michael Holden – who has recently joined Royal Holloway to work on the AHRC-funded Music, Migration, and Mobility project – shared with us his recently completed PhD work that explored the ways in which authors and artists have responded to the legacy of the Holocaust through the use of cartography, both literally and metaphorically.
Setting the scene for his focus on contemporary Holocaust culture, Michael began by explaining to us the historical association between the Holocaust and mapping. Often underappreciated beyond the academic study of cartography is the ‘non-neutrality’ of maps, and in the context of Nazi Germany and occupied Europe, they were often utilised to maintain and expand the power of the Nazi state and the oppression of the continent’s Jewish population. They were used, for instance, to portray the (historically inaccurate) migration of Jews as an ‘infestation’ and report on the geographical distribution of their ‘extermination’ in ways that legitimised and emboldened their murderous racist ideology.
However, maps, in various forms, were – and continue to be – just as significant to the victims of the Holocaust. For those in the concentration camps, the process of mapping was often a matter of life or death, whether in relation to the micro-geographies of their position in the soup queue or the production of a sketch map, from memory, by escapees from Auschwitz. But since the end of the Second World War, the Holocaust has remained inextricable from the places in which it occurred. Playing a significant role in shaping this continual process of memorialisation are cultural works such as novels, comics and art that too have used such maps to guide the reader’s interpretation of space and consequentially, the broader narratives of the Holocaust that they create.
Often left unacknowledged, this was where Michael’s own research came in. Using the notion of maps and mapping to encapsulate both cartographic images as well as movements and itineraries, the framing of geographical knowledge, and the tracing of roots and landscapes, he has analysed a range of comics (or graphic novels), novels and artworks to shed light on the ways in which they are used to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust.
To illustrate some of the findings of his work, Michael took us through a number of examples. Focusing specifically on her 2013 graphic novel Letting it Go, he began with the drawings of Miriam Katin; a Hungarian-born American novelist and graphic artist who survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Hungarian countryside with her mother. In this work, maps were used by Miriam to reflect on her changing attitudes towards her son’s choice to apply for Hungarian citizenship and live in Berlin after the decision sparked an uncomfortable reckoning with the past. In the early stages of the text, the depiction of a map within her head symbolised the ways in which her anxiety towards Germany was fixed and frozen in memory. Later, she draws herself tracing the route that her son and his partner will take to work events in Slovakia from the perspective of her past and the places that hold so much of her trauma. But as the narrative progresses, and after she has taken trips to Berlin, maps are used to express a gradual thawing of her reluctance and the realisation that the Europe of today is no longer the Europe of the past.
In contrast, Michael also discussed Amy Kurzweil’s graphic memoir Flying Couch as an example of a piece written and illustrated by a descendant of a Holocaust survivor. Here, he explained, cartography played two distinct roles in the story. Rooted in the present, they help to ‘navigate’ questions of identity and the relationship between the three women in her family; herself, her mother, and her grandmother, who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto. However, they also represented her grandmother’s testimonies and memories, but in a way that attempted to impart something of the affective and embodied spatiality of her experiences in the ghetto and her wanderings across Poland rather than the precise locations of such events.
To round up the discussion, the final case study touched on the linguistic use of maps as a ‘structuring device’ in the novels of W.G. Sebald. As Michael argued, Sebald’s texts – which explore the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust – are fundamentally map-like in character. At the heart of his narratives are a plethora of rural and coastal landscapes and urban environments which are tied to real places and through which his characters wander and depart upon their extended meditations on memory and history. As Michael concluded, Sebald – along with Katin and Kurtzweil – all demonstrate the fluidity and imagination in which maps are included in contemporary Holocaust culture. However, while they may have believed that were including them to authoritatively signal something about the spatiality of their narratives, they nevertheless inject a degree of subjectivity into their recreation.
We would like to thank Michael for sharing with us this fascinating, yet sobering, research, and we look forward to hearing more about his current work exploring the lives of migrant musicians from Nazi-occupied Europe in the future.
Written by: Will Barnes
Edited by: Rosie Knowles
Landscape Surgery 