Book Review: Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death by Otto Dov Kulka
Haunting reminiscence of inhumanity
Dreamlike and poetic, yet no less lucid for that, Otto Dov Kulka’s personal reflections of his time in Auschwitz is a compelling testament that is both haunting – and haunted, writes Mark Cantrell
First published on Cheshire Today
Certainly, as Kulka himself relays in ‘Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death’, the author is himself struck by the strangeness of the observation, yet as his own words testify “the blue of the sky in this land is many times stronger than any blue one can see anywhere else”. This was in Auschwitz; surrounded by so much senseless death, constrained by the bleak landscape of the camp, the colour blue takes on a whole new intensity.
The strangeness is
compounded by the strangest phenomenon of all, the family camp,
so-called, where the boy Kulka found himself living amidst a strange
discontinuity of normal family and cultural life, yet immersed at the
very same time in the continuation of cultural and social living. In
stark contrast to the by-now-familiar images of Auschwitz, here there
were no striped uniforms, no shaven heads; there were choirs, and
schools maintained, intellectual activity, a semblance of life.
Again, paradoxical, contradictory, the way the inmates of the camp
continued to cling to the norms and practices, one might say the very
fabric of civilised society – indeed that they were allowed to –
amidst the wastelands of death that lay all around them.
But what was the family
camp? A cruelty within a cruelty; a charade to mask the horrific
truth of the existence of murder on an industrial scale, all
established to deceive officials from the International Red Cross.
Once it had served its purpose, the camp was “liquidated”; the
euphemism for the gas chambers and crematoria that gulped down the
inmates in ghoulish swallows to belch from grim chimneys the ash of
their remains.
The image of those
chimneys stands stark in the mind of a young boy who witnessed their
voracious appetite for human flesh, even as he shied away from the
maddening totality of their reality; just as they become essential
sites of visitation for the adult Kulka, finally confronting these
macabre obelisks as they lay in ruins, but no less potent for all
that.
Kulka was born in
Czechoslovakia in 1933. As a child he was first sent to
Theresienstadt ghetto with his mother, and from there to Auschwitz –
the Metropolis of Death – where he survived the lie of the family
camp. He went on to become a respected historian, and dedicated much
of his academic life to studying and researching Nazism and the
Holocaust.
Today, Kulka is
Rosenbloom Professor Emeritus in Jewish History at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, and in publishing ‘Landscapes of the
Metropolis of Death’ he has ‘broken ranks’ from the lifelong
discipline he has maintained in the course of his historical
research; the man has built his reputation on the strictest adherence
to cold objectivity in his subject matter. Now, he breaks a silence
to provide an insight into his own personal history.
The whys and wherefore
of this are best explained by Kulka himself in his introduction to
the book: “[F]ew are aware of the existence within me of a
dimension of silence, of a choice I made to sever the biographical
from the historical past. And fewer still will know that for a decade
(between 1991 and 2001) I made tape-recordings which allowed me to
describe the images that well up in my memory and explore the
remembrance of what in my private mythology is called ‘The
Metropolis of Death’ ... These recordings were neither historical
testimony nor autobiographical memoir, but the reflections of a
person then in his late fifties and sixties, turning over in his mind
those fragments of memory and imagination that have remained from the
world of the wondering child of ten to eleven that I had once been.”
Don’t be fooled,
then, into taking the book as a straightforward autobiographical
account. It isn’t. Yes, there is personal history, drawn from his
diaries, the recordings he mentions, his own recollections; the
essence of the book is a reflection on memory, on imagination, how
the sights and sounds of Auschwitz impact the mindscape of a growing
boy, and the man that boy in time became.
In many respects, it
makes the book difficult to quantify; we are invited to roam through
Kulka’s internal narrative space, to perceive his memories and
recollections and dreams, the metaphors and euphemisms his mind
constructed, as he himself reflects upon their meaning. This is both
an exploration of the horrors of Auschwitz, as it is an exploration
of the conundrums of the place; a reflection on the nature of people
to cling to the trappings of life, in both a denial of mortal doom
and yet, it seems on reading, a kind of defiance.
There is something
almost dreamlike to ‘Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death;
seemingly surreal at times, as dreams can be, poetic in its cadence,
in its allusion to metaphor and visual symbolism, yet for all that,
the book is never less than a lucid account of Kulka’s memories and
reflections. Equally there is a sense of timelessness here, a
disconnection from the conventional passage of years; naturally, for
here in these pages Kulka comes to his Auschwitz from two directions.
First, there is the
conventional chronology of years lived; the actual time in which he
dwelled within – and was fortunate enough to live beyond –
Auschwitz. Then there is the mind slipping back to the memory of
those times, interspersed with his backwards travel through his
chronology, to the memories and recollections of visits to Auschwitz
as an adult, to the memories of the child invoked in those visits, to
the memories of the adult by a still older man. This is a tangled
tapestry of time and space and life and death.
Here, we have an author
haunted by boyhood experience, seemingly no more able to make sense
of the horrors of the camps than distant observers separated from
this Great Death by time and space; in his own words, he explored his
life works as a rigorous scholar, suggestive of building a shell
around the memories of the past.
As he writes, deeper
into the book: “Here, in this safe and well-paved way of scientific
discipline, I believed that I would be able to infuse a consciousness
of the intensity of the experience of those historic events, a
consciousness of their trans-dimensionality, a consciousness of their
vast impersonality, which I experienced through the prism of that
present – its memory and its imagining, from which I flinched and
which I feared, perhaps subconsciously, to confront head-on.
“The fact is that in
all my research I never had to deal with the stage, the dimension, of
the violent end, the murder, the humiliation and the torture of those
human beings. I left, or skirted that dimension – as perhaps I
skirted the piles of skeletons of the corpses that were heaped up in
front of the barracks in Auschwitz on my way to the youth hut – in
order to study the broad background of the ideology and the policy
underlying it all, the historical implications, the dynamics of
society and government, and the society and leadership of those who
were the objects of the ‘Final Solution’ – the Jews – in the
period preceding that stage of a violent, ultimate end.”
Meaning, an ancient
human urge, made all the more painfully poignant here, in its context
of one of the 20th Century’s worst of crimes against
humanity.
Throughout, Kulka
invokes the two great themes of his experiences and recollections of
Auschwitz: the “Metropolis of Death”, and the “immutable Law of
Death” by which the fate of the camp and its inmates seemed
embroiled. In these, he wrestles with the obfuscations of memory,
seeks the vaults of hidden meaning in the euphemisms of language in
camp life, strives to draw meaning out of the incongruities of that
existence’s mental memorial: the sounds of Ode to Joy sung by a
children’s choir opposite the crematoria, the “black stains” he
saw on the snow-clad roadside during a winter march – the frozen
corpses of stragglers too weak to continue. And his mother, a notable
vision in Kulka’s memory and dreams, as she walks towards her death
with never a backward glance.
‘Landscapes of the
Metropolis of Death’ is intense without ever becoming overwhelming,
personal without – apparent – bitterness; the book is intimate,
yet still conveys an aura of detachment. Human and humane, Kulka’s
book is a moving testimony that is both haunted – and haunting.
Details:
Landscapes of the
Metropolis of Death
Reflections on Memory
and Imagination
By Otto Dov Kulka
Translated by Ralph
Mandel
Allen Lane
ISBN: 978-0330519694
Hardback
Price: £14.99
This article first appeared on Cheshire Today, 19 February 2013.
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