Awards

• Nominated for Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards 2014
• Nominated for Sophie Brody Medal 2014

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780674072893

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Reviews

[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 (01/24/2013)

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 (02/08/2013)

Author Information

Otto Dov Kulka is Rosenbloom Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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