Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

Resumen del libro

Otto Dov Kulka's Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, translated by Ralph Mandel, is a memoir of astounding literary and emotional power, exploring the permanent and indelible marks left by the Holocaust and a childhood spent in Auschwitz. As a child the distinguished historian Otto Dov Kulka was sent first to the ghetto of Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. As one of the few survivors he has spent much of his life studying Nazism and the Holocaust, but always as a discipline requiring the greatest dispassion and objectivity, with his personal story set to one side.

He has nevertheless remained haunted by specific memories and images, thoughts he has been unable to shake off. The extraordinary result of this is Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death - a unique and powerful experiment in how one man has tried to understand his past (and our history). Reviews: "This is one of the most remarkable testimonies to inhumanity that I know.

The deeply moving recollections of 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).

"Astonishing... Landscapes is, quite simply, extraordinary ...a sort of Modernist precipitate of a historical work, something strange and powerful formed from, but separate to, the solution of history...I can't see how this book could be bettered". (Robert Eaglestone, Times Higher Education).