by Jonathon Catlin
Kathryn L. Brackney is an Assistant Professor of History at Leiden University and the author of Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), which won the George L. Mosse First Book Prize. While depictions of and memorials to the Nazi Judeocide today tend to emphasize absence through minimalism, this was not always so. In her incisive cultural history of Holocaust representation, Brackney recovers traditions of surrealist, fantastical, and otherworldly aesthetics associated with “Planet Auschwitz” in early literary and visual representations created by survivors grappling with unprecedented horrors they had just experienced amidst the backdrop of the Cold War and the space race. By historicizing today’s austere “distanced realism” (3) and intimate testimonies as products of recent decades, she denaturalizes the notion that the Holocaust uniquely defies the “limits of representation” and shows that this idea resulted from feedback loops between popular (sometimes “kitsch”), testimonial, psychotherapeutic, and minimalist representational strategies. Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin interviewed Brackney about her book.
Jonathon Catlin: I want to start by saying that I loved this book. You succeed in historicizing a vast period of cultural and intellectual history that has long been the subject of debates about the Holocaust and “theory,” while also bringing to light many original sources from forgotten survivors, artists, writers, and intellectuals. It’s clear that you spent a great deal of time with this material for your analysis to crystallize so sharply. Can you talk about the origins of this project?
Kathryn Brackney: I am so glad to hear you liked the book. The origins of the project date back to when I was an undergraduate in comparative literature at Brown University in the early 2000s, when some of theory wars about Holocaust representation outlined in chapter 4 were cresting. Years later, when I returned to graduate school, I was told these debates were “passé” in comparative literature; historians, however, can begin to imagine a moment as a discrete object of analysis precisely when it becomes passé. I began to wonder why questions of Holocaust representation were so important then—and how these questions were posed and approached before. I ended up studying under Carolyn Dean at Yale, whose fluency in media studies and capacity to meta-analyze her own historical discipline was crucial for helping me approach such a broad and unwieldy inquiry.
I started formulating some concrete and surprising answers to these questions about earlier representational frameworks for the Holocaust through contingent encounters in the archive. For example, while I had read many times about K-Tzetnik’s fainting on the witness stand at the Eichmann trial, it wasn’t until I heard his cosmological testimony in the trial recordings and saw the juxtaposition of cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin and Eichmann in international media coverage from 1961 that I began seeing “otherworldly” characterizations of the Holocaust everywhere in the source material that I was looking at. Those discoveries gave birth to what became chapter 2 on “Planet Auschwitz” as a figure of Holocaust memory during the Cold War. Chapter 2 was the pivot point—the before and after moment—that oriented my subsequent research.
In the end, I think training in multiple disciplines and the time between my undergraduate and graduate studies gave the work a broader, reflexive arc. But, my time to work on the book was complicated by other factors. Between filing my dissertation in 2019 and publishing the book in 2024, I moved to three cities (with a baby in tow) to take three different jobs, which were either temporary or threatened by budget cuts. While I have been lucky to work at excellent institutions and am proud of the book, there is more I would have done with the manuscript with professional stability. It is important to acknowledge how the precarity of academic labor is shaping research today.
JC: Your book starts with early representations of the Shoah by survivors in the 1940s and 1950s, a time when the Nazi mass murder of 6 million Jews still had no name and was rarely distinguished from the general suffering of the Second World War. Many victims struggled tofind the recognition afforded to survivors today and encountered “mute alienation” instead (39). One might expect that this would have led to realist attempts to document their persecution, but instead many likened their experiences to a strange afterlife as “the living dead,” both in the camps and returning to the earthly realm of the living. You write that your ultimate aim is “to show how the humanity of Jewish victims has been produced, undermined, and guaranteed through evolving scripts for acknowledging and mourning mass violence” (8). What are some of the “surreal” imaginaries that survivors drew upon in their attempts to assert that humanity? How did their double otherness as both Jews and witnesses to horror inform these creative strategies?
KB: Starting from the earliest years after the war, many survivors used realist strategies as well as abstract modes of representation to document their experiences to the world, both in literature and art. Because some of those works shaped the canons of Holocaust memory we’ve inherited today, other more eclectic approaches to representation have slipped out of sight. The transition that the book tracks is not so much from surreal to realist but rather from eclectic to more fixed and transnationally uniform aesthetics of memory.
In the preface to his landmark memoir If This Is a Man (1947), Primo Levi wrote that among survivors, “The need to tell our story to ‘the rest’” took on “before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs” (9). While his memoir is written in a realist mode, the first chapter of my book highlights Jewish refugees who turned to fantasy and dream imagery to satisfy another sort of need. How could these artists mourn so many victims who were never buried? What sort of afterlife could they imagine for their loved ones in the wake of mass murder? One of the eclectic forms that proliferated in the first fifteen years after the Holocaust were images of animality and hybrid humanity in the works of artists like Abraham Sutzkever, Marc Chagall, Yehuda Bakon, and Paul Celan. When artists turned to this sort of imagery, it wasn’t just to highlight man’s inhumanity toward man during the Holocaust. Instead, Sutzkever’s honeybee with a human soul who stings the poet’s heart when he remembers Vilna or Celan’s angel with a blistered ankle who wanders over the destroyed Jewish world of Vitebsk both suggest a proximate afterlife in which the unburied do not transcend this world but remain close to it in hybrid corporal forms.
These images convey both an enduring fantasy of intimacy with the dead and, conversely, alienation from the living. In a work like The Lost Shore (1962) by Anna Langfus, we can see the discomfort and suspicion that many Jewish survivors who later gave video testimony remember encountering in the early years after the war, even among family members who took them in as refugees. Over the last fifteen years, historians have challenged “the myth of silence” during a supposed latency period before the resurgence of Holocaust memory, showing that survivors did in fact document and commemorate the Holocaust from the liberation onward. While I think this research is enormously important, I want to argue that “the myth” should not be dismissed entirely; it can also be true that Jewish refugees who attempted to share their experiences beyond the circles of their fellow survivors encountered listeners who were alienated by and unable to apprehend their extraordinary experiences.
JC: The book’s second chapter explores ways of remembering the Holocaust during the Cold War and space race through paradigms likening the experience of the camps to fantastical encounters on another planet. For example, Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur (Ka-Tzetnik), wrote of “Planet Auschwitz” as a place with “a different wheel of time” and where inhabitants “breathed and lived according to different laws of nature” (54). You even describe uncanny crossovers with Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) decades before he would make the iconic Holocaust film Schindler’s List (1993). Some of these representations can seem to exoticize or mystify perpetrators, rather than holding up a mirror to the perpetrator societies and seeking specific accountability and justice. How do they hold up today?
KB: Yes, I absolutely agree. While I was moved by many of the hybrid worlds and animal images in the earliest works identified in the book, the otherworldly paradigm of remembrance that I track particularly after the Eichmann trial yielded a number of highly problematic works through the 1960s and 1970s that project the Holocaust onto a distant “Planet Auschwitz,” where the humanity of Jewish survivors is subject to question. A work like Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969)—in which the Holocaust appears as a philosophical device, through the figure of a sage and alienated survivor who occasionally lectures at Columbia and contemplates colonizing the moon from the Upper West Side—certainly doesn’t hold up today. Close Encounters (1977) I read as a transitional work; in the film’s happy ending, the tension between the human/other status of the Jewish Muselmann is subliminally reconciled by contact and communication behind barbed wire between earthlings and humanoid aliens, who return to this planet with a group of men and women that disappeared during World War II. In some ways, the “otherworldly” paradigm of remembrance that predominated during that period justifies the intensive polemics over the ethics of representing the Holocaust that would emerge later, especially in the wake of Claude Lanzmnan’s landmark film Shoah (1985). And while Lanzmann and his ilk certainly rejected it, the miniseries Holocaust (1978) also represents an important shift away from “Planet Auschwitz,” with its sentimental focus on a relatable family, broadcast on the small screen to millions of living rooms across North America and Western Europe.
JC: This brings us to your third chapter, which shows how by the 1980s cosmic metaphors began to fade and “this past would come back to earth” (77) as survivors found platforms to give their own testimony, enabling “the re-embodiment of Holocaust memory in the individual voice and face” (80). Pathbreaking figures like Dori Laub combined psychoanalytic notions of working-through with what Annette Wieviorka calls“artisanal” (111) ways for survivors to tell their stories on their own terms, free from the sentimentalism and staging of Hollywood dramas. Your work uncovering links between postmodern notions of unrepresentability and the turn to video testimony seems to subvert Wievorka’s “dichotomy between minimalist testimony versus fictional melodrama” by historicizing it (81). You argue these competing representational strategies actually developed at the same time in a feedback loop: for example, survivors seeing inaccurate or stylized depictions on TV then feeling compelled to give their own testimony to correct the record. Also, while realist scholars like Deborah Lipstadt inveighed against postmodernist relativism when it came to the Holocaust, you show that “it was precisely deconstructionist interest in traumatized narration from marginalized voices that in part led to the study of testimony from Holocaust survivors” (87). The “theory wars” between the likes of Lipstadt and intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra have long passed, but does that tension still exist today?
KB: When I began studying video testimony at one major archive, an excellent archivist asked jokingly whether I was doing “real history” or just some project about “representation.” That attitude surprised me, given how important literary scholars interested in questions of representation have been in publicizing testimony as a genre and making a case for studying it from the 1980s onward. Comparatively, historians were slow to use testimony archives because of the perceived unreliability of survivor witnesses. (Major scholars of the Holocaust, including Christopher Browning and Omer Bartov have since made strong cases for the evidentiary value of video testimony, particularly for microhistory.)
While I want to emphasize the historical importance of discourse surrounding representation that emerged concurrently with the era of video testimony, my own research in video archives reveals that survivors themselves seemed to offer different opinions about the “representability” of the Holocaust than the literary scholars who studied their testimony. Some criticized depictions of the Holocaust in popular culture whereas others mentioned that watching a documentary or film about the Holocaust on television provided them with an occasion to speak with their families about personal traumas that were otherwise very difficult to approach. In these testimonies, survivors do not always comment on whether what they watched was an accurate or adequate representation; the material point is that movies and television provided an opening for them to tell their own stories.
JC: Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) is still hailed today as a masterpiece. You argue that it developed “an aesthetic principle of the specifically poststructuralist formulation of disaster as an unrepresentable event” but at the same time employed “a pseudo-religious ritual logic that attempts to sacralize the Holocaust by prohibiting its direct depiction” (113). Historicizing these interpretations, you praise Shoah as “a remarkable synthesis of history, elegy, séance, and polemic” that created a “new secularized liturgy for remembering the Holocaust, which enabled and delimited mournful affects and identification with victim” (115). You situate this work amidst the turn to testimony, stressing Lanzmann’s “deep conviction that film could enable a visceral connection to survivors on the ground where genocide as perpetrated” (10). Whereas “kitsch” popular melodramas like Holocaust are often seen as pursuing an opposite representational strategy, you situate them in a kind of dialectic, arguing that both contributed to the “shared transnational aesthetics of mourning” we have today (11). Can you talk more about these two representational poles and how they informed one another? Do you still see these legacies at work in more recent films like Son of Saul (2015)and The Zone of Interest (2024)?
KB: Though he started making Shoah before the international broadcast of Holocaust, Lanzmann framed his documentary artas a reaction against the popular miniseries. And while the contrasts between those two works are obvious and important, my book frames the miniseries, Lanzmann’s film, and the recording of video testimonies from the late 1970s onward as individuating works of remembrance that have each served to reconstitute the alienated survivor’s humanity through intimate storytelling and portraiture. Holocaust and video testimony share the format of the small screen and emphasize (particularly in testimonies from the Shoah Foundation) the victim whose humanity is embedded in the family unit. Moreover, what Shoah and video testimony share is the interview form, where the survivor’s wholeness and dignity are visualized in a minimalist portrait while the victim’s suffering and degradation are only described.In documentary film and video testimonies, the tension between the survivor’s everyday appearance and the stories they tell is key to the cultural work these representations achieve. Lanzmann frames stories of dehumanization in a profoundly humanizing mode of portraiture, generating complex experiences of identification with the Sonderkommandos he interviews. Those interviews—paired with film’s slow and quiet circling around its dark sites of pilgrimage in a figurative posture of averted eyes (Lanzmann famously rejected archival imagery)—ultimately contributed to the development of a set of semi-secular rites that have marked unburied victims of mass murder as worthy of mourning both inside and beyond Jewish communities. By contrasting the frames of representation that emerged after Holocaust, Shoah, and the growth of video testimony with an earlier, otherworldly paradigm of remembrance, the book shows the enormous amount of contingent and transnational cultural work that has been necessary to constitute Jewish victims of the Holocaust as fully human “grievable lives.”
More recently, Zone of Interest is an extraordinary example of the principle of indirection, which I think follows in the line of Lanzmann’s site-based work and the “distanced realism” that Saul Friedländer privileged back in 1990 (17). Son of Saul, on the other hand, breaks many of the rules for representing the Holocaust that have developed since Shoah—but Claude Lanzmann praised it anyway. Fundamentally that film too is about an individuated act of mourning and ritual burial in the depths of Auschwitz that momentarily overcomes the dehumanization of anonymous mass murder.
JC: Your final chapters explore how the Holocaust has become a “usable past” for making sense of our own time and its different catastrophes. On the one hand, there is a worry about the Holocaust becoming an “‘engorged, free-floating’” analogy or “‘bridging metaphor’” for all manner of historical traumas (49, 67). For example, W. G. Sebald seems to risk relativizing the Holocaust by likening mass die-offs of animals to an “ecological holocaust” (162). On the other hand, in the tradition of catastrophic thinkers like Walter Benjamin, it’s important to recognize linkages, both historical and ethical, between the mastery of nature and moral blindness in the Holocaust and similar forms of violence in the histories of colonialism and environmental devastation. It’s a tenet of memory studies that “afterimages” of events like the Holocaust tend to flash up in new moments of danger, though tackling the climate crisis, in particular, will require solidarity not just among humanity but also with all nonhuman life on earth. What are some conclusions or guidelines you arrived at in examining the use and abuse of Holocaust analogies?
KB: The conclusion on the Anthropocene is the part of the book that readers most frequently ask me about. I should start by saying that I am not interested in forbidding analogies. That sort of Analogieverbot in Holocaust Studies has been deeply problematic for the practice of history, politics, and representation. Likewise, I don’t find it intellectually or politically productive to reject the fascism analogy today in debates over American politics. Rather, I support Michael Rothberg’s formulation that we must compare the comparisons. When, as you aptly put it, afterimages of the Holocaust “flash up in new moments of danger,” how can we identify and work through comparisons that help to clarify our ethical obligations in our own historical moment?
On one end of the analogy spectrum, Ari Brostoff has linked together climate change, Holocaust memory, and indigenous cosmology in a Benjaminian “constellation” to think through how the past might help us confront the present. On the other end, you have James Lovelock, whose in-depth expertise on climate change collides with a dangerous and superficial gloss on history when he naturalizes genocide, calling for the Global North to determine who gets to be saved on their nation-state life rafts as the oceans heat up. Between Brostoff and Lovelock is Haraway, who has been criticized for her writing on reducing birth rates, but who also makes important remarks about the role of mourning past “scandals of population control” that were formulated in the “muck of racism, classism, modernism, and imperialism” (6). Her works suggests that the act of mourning those pasts should inform radical approaches to addressing the climate catastrophe that our planet faces today.
There are many parallels between the material on the Anthropocene and chapter 2, which also identifies a spectrum of sources that range from evocative to disturbing. In the 1960s, the strange convergence of the space race, re-emergent Holocaust memory, and decolonization raised questions about what it means to be human, who can be recognized as such, and what our relationship is to the planet. Today, rapidly changing environmental conditions on our planet are raising related questions about what kinds of (post)human life demand recognition, mourning, and justice. In the face of these questions, Amitav Ghosh has pointed out that science fiction is one of the few literary genres that has confronted the “unique form of resistance that the Anthropocene” (72) poses to representation.
It is important to acknowledge that part of this “resistance” to representation is due to disinformation. The unthinkable climate apocalypse that is already unfolding has prompted powerful corporate interests to disseminate denialism, whose strategies will appear all too familiar to scholars of the Holocaust. In the face of major thinkers and scientists who are using the past to “think” our future on an overheating planet—and in the face of denialists who are trying to obscure that future for their own profit—scholars in Holocaust Studies have an obligation to offer what I see as essential historical and ethical criticisms.
JC: I hate to end on a note of catastrophe, but we live in dark times. In your acknowledgements, you reflect on the shifting landscape of Holocaust memory since October 7 and Israel’s ensuing ruthless campaign in Gaza: “Historians study the past, but in the face of catastrophes in my own historical moment, what am I doing?” (xi). Figures like Marianne Hirsch and Pankaj Mishra have powerfully explored how these events have reactivated Jewish trauma and at the same time given new moral force to the universalistic claim that “Never Again” means never again for everyone.In teaching this material, what still resonates for you and your students? What keeps you going?
KB: Like so many others in Jewish Studies, I’ve spent sleepless nights agonizing over the fate of the hostages and the survival of Gaza, but have struggled to speak in a campus environment that oscillates between silence and protest. The moral courage and historical integrity of people I’ve admired most in Holocaust Studies over the years—including Marianne Hirsch and Omer Bartov—have helped me find ways to talk with my students and colleagues about Hamas’s crimes against humanity on October 7 and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Working with testimony in Holocaust Studies has also pushed me to locate and listen to Palestinian voices, who have been consistently erased from European and American coverage of what is happening on the ground in Gaza. I know how important it is—and how much work it can take—for marginalized voices to enter the public sphere in a way that renders them as human beings, rather than alien others whose suffering only registers distantly from somewhere “over there.” This is one of the most important universal lessons I derive from Holocaust Studies: that we must heed the concrete, individual testimony of victims who suffer collectively as a group.
Jonathon Catlin holds a Ph.D. from Princeton and is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester. He is currently writing a history of the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century European thought. He has contributed to and edited for the JHI Blog since 2016. He is on X at @planetdenken and Bluesky at @joncatlin.bsky.social.
Edited by Jacob Saliba
Featured image: Cover art for Damiano Malabaila [a pen name of Primo Levi], Storie naturali (Einaudi, 1966).
