Notes on Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness (Transcript Summary)
Overview and Context
Event: Discussion of Surreal Geographies, a new history of Holocaust consciousness (2024), published by the University of Wisconsin Press; Mosse program recognition; George L. Mosse First Book Prize winner mentioned.
Host and setting: Professor Chad Gibbs, director of the Zucker Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston, chairs the event and introduces speakers.
Purpose of the talk: Present a comprehensive argument about how Holocaust memory was imagined and represented across borders and media before the 1980s, emphasizing a transnational, eclectic, surreal tradition of remembrance that predates the dominant memorial conventions of later decades.
Key framing idea: Holocaust memory has long relied on more than realist or testimonial forms; it also includes surreal imagery, planetary metaphors, and other imaginative geographies that helped memorialize victims and communicate trauma across cultural boundaries.
Aesthetic consensus in memory spaces: Across memorial museums in places like DC, Jerusalem, Paris, Berlin, there is a common aesthetic idiom—abstract minimalism, realism, and postmodern fragmentation—that the book interrogates by tracing earlier, less conventional forms of memory.
Central claim: Zitzkover’s Green Aquarium and Elsa Susanna Langer’s self-portrait are not outliers; they belong to an earlier, transnational surreal tradition that shapes how the Holocaust has been linked to other traumas and forms of catastrophe.
Structure of the book (as presented): Each chapter centers on a different spatial or imaginative geography where Holocaust memory has been staged, tracing shifts in representation from the postwar era to the era of documentary testimony and beyond.
Key Concepts and Theoretical Frame
Surreal memory before 1980s: An eclectic, international, visually imaginative approach to remembering the Holocaust that preceded and partly shaped later canonical memoirs and institutional memorials.
Planet Auschwitz as a motif: A recurring, otherworldly frame used to describe the Holocaust era—where memory is located in a different “space” or “laws of nature” rather than ordinary historical time.
The critique of “memory realism”: The book argues that the realist mode (e.g., diaries, straightforward narratives) is not the only legitimate mode of Holocaust memory; other modes can reveal different ethical and affective truths.
“Eclectic surreal tradition”: Includes poetry, painting, novels, and film imagery that blend dreamlike, hallucinatory, or symbolic visuals with memory and loss, challenging the notion that Holocaust memory must be strictly literal or documentary.
Memory modalities and humanization of victims: The project tracks how representations contribute to making Jewish victims and survivors recognizably human and grievable across borders and generations.
International and transnational memory: Memory cultures circulate across national contexts, creating a shared, though contested, vocabulary of memory beyond any single nation-state.
Ethical and practical implications: How memory forms shape public understanding, policy, and the politics of remembrance; the tension between universal claims of memory and particular Jewish experiences.
Terminology and imagery: The book foregrounds terms like “planet Auschwitz,” “surreal imagery,” “video testimony,” and “domesticated memory” to describe shifting memorial practices.
All numerical references and historical anchors are captured in LaTeX where relevant in notes; see timeline below for key dates.
Chapter 1 (1944–early 1960s): Surreal visual vocabularies of Jewish refugee artists
Core idea: Jewish refugee artists and writers scattered across the globe turned to surreal visual vocabularies and hallucinatory imagery to memorialize destroyed communities and grapple with postwar indeterminacy.
Key figures and works referenced:
Zitzkover and his Green Aquarium: in which a green-themed memory of Vilna’s survivors is articulated through symbolic, otherworldly imagery.
The green palette and imagery include a green knife, a half moon with green eyes, a green wave, a green aquarium; these images connect the dead to a mythic, cosmic space.
Elsa Susanna Langer’s self-portrait donated to Yad Vashem: a survivor painting with asymmetrical eyes seen through a watery scrim; associated with expressionism and the pre-Holocaust memory regime rather than postwar realism.
Other refugee artists/writers noted: Pitzkerberg, Akshagal, Selam, and Amam Khuz (spelling as in transcript).
Theoretical point: These works illustrate how memory could be staged in the interim spaces between water and sky—an “intermediate” afterlife where memory persists yet defies ordinary realism.
Distinction from prewar surrealists: Post-Holocaust surreal imagery aimed not at remaking political futures (as some surrealists hoped) but at passing through and making sense of the past’s collapse.
Chapter’s analytic arc: Demonstrates that a global, surreal memory culture existed before the dominant realist canon and that it influenced later transnational memory practices and artistic representations.
Chapter 2 (early 1960s–late 1970s): The emergence of Planet Auschwitz in Cold War memory discourse
Central hinge: The chapter traces the “Planet Auschwitz” figure as it appears in both popular and high culture during the Cold War when global attention to the Holocaust intensifies.
The Eichmann trial (Jerusalem, 1961) and witness Yahiel Dinor (also cited as Dinor; pen name Kacetnik):
Dinor presents a highly symbolic, otherworldly account of Auschwitz that cannot be easily conveyed within courtroom questions.
His testimony includes lines like: "I myself was at the Auschwitz Camp for two years. The time there is not a concept as it is here on our planet." And: "Their name was a number, Petsetnik, number so and so."
The trial scene includes Dinor collapsing under the pressure to narrate; observers interpret the collapse as a powerful witness to trauma, sometimes seen as more fitting than the literal words he could utter.
The imagery of an alien planet as a metaphor for Auschwitz: Used to articulate the radical difference of survivor experience and to place Jewish persecution in a broader, cosmic frame.
Contextual factors shaping reception:
Postwar Israeli writers (e.g., Primo Levi, Steven Spielberg) and their wartime/postwar reflections begin to weave in cosmic and universalist themes, while still addressing particular Jewish suffering.
The space race and planetary imagery become a backdrop for Holocaust memory, linking ascent and catastrophe in a single cultural constellation.
The space-age cultural corpus and memory: The front pages of 1961–1962 era newspapers juxtapose Eichmann’s trial with Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight, highlighting a tension between technological achievement and atrocity.
NYT front page example: "Soviet orbits man and recovers him" alongside reportage of Eichmann’s trial (illustrating concurrent horizons of human achievement and catastrophe).
Intellectual currents and literary works tied to Planet Auschwitz:
Primo Levi’s science-fiction and allegory in Natural Stories (1966) and later works; stories such as The Hard Sellers, which imagines souls being installed into human bodies with a racial and moral dimension.
Isaac Basheva Singer’s Cafeteria (1968), a story translated for The New Yorker that presents a Holocaust survivor’s perspective on American racialized space and memory—an unsettled memory that challenges linear time.
Levi’s and Singer’s works exemplify how memory is refracted through science fiction, race, and cosmic imaginaries.
Popular cinema and planetary imagery:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): the film’s iconography of space travel, aliens, and encounters resonates with the Planet Auschwitz framework, embedding Holocaust-era otherworldliness in mainstream cinema.
The Gray Alien archetype (H. G. Wells’ science fiction lineage) appears in Spielberg’s film and gains a broader interpretive proximity to Holocaust memory through visual rhymes with concentrationary landscapes.
Betty and Barney Hill (1961): real-world alien abduction case influencing public imagination about encounter and difference.
Cross-cultural and cross-genre linkage:
Susan Lebsseter (Lebsselter) explores links between alien abduction narratives and earlier Native American captivity narratives, arguing that the memory of colonization and genocide bleeds into space-age memory metaphors.
Solbello’s Mister Sandler’s Planet (1969): a novel imagines viewing American social disintegration from the vantage point of the Moon through a Holocaust survivor’s lens; culminates in a dialogue about civilization’s crisis and spacefaring hope.
The overlapping tropes in Close Encounters, Solbello, and Levi/Singer point to a broader coherence in how memory speaks through space, technology, and alienness.
The transition from planet Auschwitz to domestic, intimate memory:
The era’s imagery raises questions about how memory travels from alien, cosmic scales to intimate, individual testimonies and documentary forms.
The Fortunoff Archive and the shift toward testimony (foreshadowed): The chapter primes the move toward the late-1970s–1980s shift in memory culture where first-person testimony becomes central.
Chapter 3 (late 1970s–early 2000s): Video testimony, therapy-inflected remembrance, and the domestication of memory
Emergence of video testimony as a dominant mode: The Fortunoff Archive (founded 1979) brings survivors’ voices into a mass archive, shaping the standard way memory is collected, stored, and interpreted.
Key historical milestones and figures:
Marianne (post-expressionist painter) and the film Ecce Homo (early 1970s): Marianne creates a visceral testimonial film with Kenny Schneider; uses intense, confrontational imagery to stage the survivor’s memory (e.g., My Lai massacre; KKK hooded figures; moon rocket; concentration camp imagery).
The film opens with cantorial singing by Pierre Pinschek and intercuts with images of violence; Marianne’s personal story of Zhuzov (Zhuzov or equivalent) becomes a pivot for linking Holocaust trauma to broader political struggles (antiwar, racism, and the nature of man).
The contrast between Marianne’s existential interrogation of humanity and the later documentary realism underscores a transitional mode from surreal, symbolic memory to intimate, personal testimony.
Dory Laub and the Fortunoff Archive (1979): Laub, a psychoanalyst and survivor, advocates for systematically studying interviews with survivors as a discipline; his Patterns of Prejudice article addresses resurgent Holocaust denialism and memory politics in the 1970s.
Laub’s analytical stance on memory and psyche:
He characterizes traumatized survivors as occupying a “shipwrecked” psyche, oscillating between fantasy and reality—a framing that resonates with earlier, eclectic memory forms rather than straightforward documentary testimony.
He uses Yerzy Kaczynski’s The Painted Bird to illustrate how literature can blur fact and fiction in survivor experience; the Painted Bird becomes a touchstone for discussing memory’s reliability, myth, and moral imagination.
The Fortunoff archive’s methodological and ethical dimensions:
Initial memory work in the US blends psychological approaches (self-disclosure, memory recovery) with therapeutic aims, but the archive’s later expansion into tens of thousands of interviews creates a vast, public repository that shapes how memory is archived and consumed.
The archive contributes to a broader cultural shift: survivors increasingly occupy public-facing, intimate frames in film, television, documentary art, and museum exhibitions—memory becomes both personal therapy and public history.
Continuities and tensions with the earlier surreal tradition:
While video testimony foregrounds individual voices and domestic settings, earlier memory forms (Planet Auschwitz, surreal imagery) continue to influence how survivors’ narratives are framed, heard, and interpreted in the modern era.
The shift marks a move toward a more universal, human-centered memory regime while still allowing for the complexity and ambiguity of trauma to persist.
The broader implications for memory scholarship and practice:
The book examines how early forms of memory—surreal, cosmic, and allegorical—inform contemporary understandings of trauma, representation, and the humanity of victims.
It also interrogates the ethical implications of making trauma legible through therapy, testimony, and mass archives.
Notable cross-cutting themes:
The struggle to balance universal human rights with particular Jewish experiences; the ongoing tension between remembering as moral obligation and memory as historical interpretation.
The role of media technologies (film, television, archives) in shaping how memory is accessed, curated, and politically mobilized.
Visual, Cultural, and Theoretical Threads Across Chapters
Aesthetic devices and memory spaces:
Surreal imagery vs. documentary realism as competing or complementary modalities of memory.
Planet Auschwitz (image of an alternate planetary system) vs. intimate video testimony (home-based, personal narrations).
The use of space, water, and planetary metaphors to convey the incomprehensibility of genocide.
Thematic connections:
The idea that memory is not a single, linear narrative but a constellation of forms—poetry, painting, fiction, film, autobiography, and archival recording.
The transnational flow of memory: how European, American, Israeli, and global audiences engage with Holocaust memory through diverse genres.
The shift from representing victims as alienated figures to recognizing their humanity and right to mourning and commemoration across cultures.
Ethical and political implications:
How different representation modes influence public understanding, policy, and the politics of remembrance.
The need to acknowledge and analyze memorial formats that challenge or complicate straightforward historical critique.
The recognition of trauma’s complexity in memory work, including the interplay between therapy, testimony, and cultural production.
Key Figures, Works, and Terms to Know
Yitzhak Sutzkever (Zitzkover): Green Aquarium, early postwar surrealism; postwar memory via symbolist poetry.
Elsa Susanna Langer: Self-portrait with watery scrim; expressionist memory of survival; linked to postwar memory aesthetics.
Yahiel Dinor (Dinor) / Kacetnik: Eichmann trial witness whose symbolic, otherworldly testimony exemplifies the limits of courtroom narration under trauma.
Levi (Primo Levi): Natural Stories (1966); science-fiction allegory addressing memory, humanity, and the cosmos.
Isaac Basheva Singer: Cafeteria (1968); memory of the Holocaust refracted through American racial dynamics and time-lapse perception.
Planet Auschwitz: A recurring motif used to symbolize memory as an otherworldly, differently governed space.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): Popular cinema embedding space-age iconography with extraterrestrial imagery that resonates with memory of the Holocaust.
Betty and Barney Hill: Real-world alien encounter narratives influencing popular imagination about contact with the unknown.
Solbello: Mister Sandler’s Planet (1969): A novel imagining memory and civilization from a Moon vantage point.
Claude Lanzmann: Shoah (1985): A touchstone documentary that foregrounds in-depth survivor interviews and challenging representation, referenced in contrast with earlier surreal modes.
Marianne (Marian) and Kenny Schneider: Ecce Homo (early 1970s): Experimental testimonial film weaving personal trauma with broader political critique; blends art and memory.
Dory Laub: Co-founder of the Fortunoff Archive (1979); psychoanalytic framework for survivor interviews; Patterns of Prejudice article on denialism; memory, trauma, and reality testing.
Yerzy Kaczynski: The Painted Bird (1965): Used by Laub to discuss the blur between fact and fiction in survivor narratives.
Fortunoff Archive and the Rise of Survivor Video Testimony
Founding ideas and aims:
Established to systematically gather and study survivor interviews as a scholarly resource and a therapeutic tool.
Emerged amid concerns about resurgent Holocaust denialism and the need to preserve firsthand testimony.
Early memory-work and therapy:
Video testimony was initially connected to psychotherapeutic aims (self-disclosure, memory recovery, intimate healing) but evolved into a mass archival practice.
The shift from a surreal, planetary memory to domestic, testimonial memory:
Video testimony brings memory into ordinary settings (homes, interviews) and integrates personal narrative with broader historical context.
Scale and accessibility:
Tens of thousands of interviews in archives, now increasingly digitized and publicly accessible, shaping both scholarship and public memory.
The interplay with earlier memory forms:
While video testimony foregrounds personal voice, the Surreal Geographies framework shows that earlier, more symbolic memory modes influenced how survivors’ testimonies are received and interpreted.
The Ethical Domain: Representation, Memory, and Responsibility
Representation and truth: The book argues memory is not a naïve replica of the past; it is a production formed by aesthetics, genres, and cultural conventions.
Humanization and recognition: A central ethical goal is to render victims as fully human, with lives that deserve mourning and recognition beyond survivor communities alone.
Memory and policy: How memory shapes public policy, museums, education, and cultural discourse across nations.
Denialism and memory culture: The Fortunoff era emerges in the context of denialism; memory work responds with rigorous documentation and scholarly interpretation.
The balance between universal and particular memory: The project raises questions about how to honor universal human rights while preserving the particularities of Jewish survivor experience.
Connections to Broader Historical Narratives and Real-World Relevance
Postwar art, literature, and film: The Surreal Geographies framework connects Holocaust memory to broader currents in postwar modernism, cosmology, and media theory.
Memorial design and curation: The book’s critique helps explain why memorials vary across spaces (walls of names, minimalist spaces, fragmentary installations) and how these forms translate memory to diverse audiences.
Trauma and memory science: The Fortunoff Archive and the discussion of therapy reflect ongoing debates about how trauma is remembered, narrated, and processed both personally and publicly.
Transnational memory politics: The discussion of planetary imagery, space travel, and cross-cultural literary works demonstrates memory’s transnational circulation and negotiation.
Representative Passages and Implied Claims to Remember
Green Aquarium excerpt (illustrative):
"a green knife slit open the earth. It became green. The green of a half moon seen with green eyes from under a wave, and the joyous green of grass bordering a grave. Greens flow into greens, body into body, and the earth stands transformed into a green aquarium. Closer. Come closer to the green whirlpool. I look in. People swim here like fishes. Countless phosphorus faces."
Dinor’s witness statement: "I myself was at the Auschwitz Camp for two years… Their name was a number, Petsetnik, number so and so."
On memory modalities: the shift from planet Auschwitz to video testimony as the fulcrum of public memory.
On Denialism and memory work: Dory Laub’s framing of memory as a scientifically and therapeutically studied field in the face of denialism.
Timeline of Key Anchors (selected)
1961: Eichmann trial; birth of the planet Auschwitz discourse in popular memory.
1966: Primo Levi, Natural Stories (science-fiction themes intersecting Holocaust memory).
1968: Isaac Basheva Singer, Cafeteria (memory seen through American racial dynamics).
1977: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (space-age imagery linked to memory tropes).
1979: Fortunoff Archive founded; Marianne’s Ecce Homo (film) created in the early 1970s but influential in late 1970s–1980s memory culture.
1985: Shoah (Claude Lanzmann) emerges as a paradigmatic documentary that reframes survivor memory in a new documentary idiom.
late 1970s–early 2000s: The growth of video testimony as a dominant form of Holocaust memory and its institutionalization in archives, exhibitions, and education.
Conclusion: What the Notes Add to Your Exam Prep
The Surreal Geographies project shows that Holocaust memory is not a linear tale of progress toward realism; it’s a dynamic, transnational constellation of forms that have shaped how we understand victims, trauma, and memory itself.
Understanding the book’s three-chapter arc helps explain how memory moves from cosmic, surreal representations to intimate, testimonial forms, while still influencing each other across generations and media.
The memory ecosystem includes literature, painting, film, documentary archives, and museum practice—each contributing to a broader ethical project of recognizing and mourning victims as fully human across cultures.
Be able to discuss: what Planet Auschwitz signifies; how early surreal memory interacts with later video testimony; and how trauma theory intersects with memory culture in public life.