Topographies of Suffering

<p> Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of monument fatigue a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment or more particularly the ways in which the natural environment co-opted in the process of killing becomes a medium for remembrance.</p>