Journal articles on the topic 'Holocaust memorials – Poland'

Commemoration of the Holocaust, scholar Halina Taborska recently argued, has entered a new stage in Poland. For more than a decade after communist rule ended in 1989, politicized slogans remained on many Holocaust memorials and other forms of commemoration, remnants of the period “when politicians and ideologues, the ruling powers and the ruled, artists and administrators accepted a definitive version of events as true and obligatory,” she wrote in a collection of articles. Only in recent years has Holocaust commemoration sought to grapple with the “falsified semantic expressions” of Holocaust memory and to depoliticize commemoration in the public sphere.

As Andrea Huyssen observes, since the 1990s the preservation of Holocaust heritage has become a worldwide phenomenon, and this “difficult heritage” has also led to the rise of “dark tourism.” Neither as sensationally traumatic as Auschwitz’s termination concentration camp in Poland nor as aesthetic as the forms of many modern Jewish museums in Germany and the United States, the Terezín Memorial in the Czech Republic provides a different way to present memorials of atrocity: it juxtaposes the original deadly site with the musical heritage that shows the will to live.

The report informs about the conference organized by the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno titled „Places of memory: from building exhibitions to education in museums / memorials“, which took place on 10 and 11 November 2021 in Villa Stiassini and in the area of Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial in Hodonín by Kunštát. This international conference was held in a hybrid form in the Czech and Polish language, with the attendees from both the Czech Republic and Poland. The report summarizes the individual contributions as well as the accompanying program.

How is the memory of the Holocaust and Auschwitz seen today among young Poles and Germans, is it different from that of the past? What are the differences in the memory space and education about the Holocaust between the two countries, and what do they have in common? The article is based on three pillars, and what served as foundations for them was a survey conducted with Polish and German youth in late April and May 2013, immediately after their visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first part concerns the individual and family memory of young people from Poland and Germany, who came to the Memorial and Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau (MMA-B); there are also issues related to the intergenerational transmission of war fate of the relatives. The second pillar takes on teaching about the Holocaust at school and the evaluation of historical education from the student’s point of view. There are presented the opinions of many historians, teachers and educators struggling with the effects of the reform of history teaching. The third and most extensive part of the article presents the issues related to historical education in the memorial site and young people confronting their past experience, knowledge, notions with the authenticity of MMA-B. Fundamental questions has been raised about the sense of maintaining authenticity of the memorial site and the reason that makes the memory of the Holocaust such an important task for future generations.

AbstractThe Polish and the Hungarian governing party, PiS and Fidesz, are mnemonic warriors who had already tried to enforce their memory politics during their first government terms, as their flagship museums, the Warsaw Rising Museum, opened in 2004, and the House of Terror in Budapest, opened in 2002, show. In museums they ‘inherited’ from their predecessors, the current governments either change content, as PiS at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, or ‘only’ battle against the directors in office, as happened at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest. Yet even mnemonic warriors cannot ignore international developments like the ‘universalization of the Holocaust’. As the author shows, the Polish and the Hungarian governments favored opening new museums over changing existing museums identified as ‘Jewish’, including those that explicitly deal with Polish and Hungarian complicity. New museums, like the Ulma Family Museum in southeastern Poland, the House of Fates in Budapest, and the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, focus on rescuers of Jews and uplifting messages of Polish and Hungarian heroism.

Envisioned by its founders as a storehouse of historical evidence — material artifacts, written and oral testimonies, photographs and films — the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC is the repository of a significant archive of music salvaged from the Nazi ghettos and camps. This paper focuses on the Museum’s single largest music collection, that of the Polish camp survivor Aleksander Kulisiewicz (1918—1982). A native of Kraków, Poland, who spent over five years as a political prisoner in Sachsenhausen, Kulisiewicz in later life grew obsessed with documenting the repertoire that his fellow Poles and an international cadre of musicians, authors, and artistes created and performed while captives of the Germans. The collection he amassed during his final decades consists of hundreds of songs, choral works and instrumental pieces gathered from survivor memoirs, manuscripts, and multiple recorded interviews with former inmates. Approximately 70,000 pages of documentation encompass music-related artworks, biographical details of camp poets and composers, and copious additional corroborating material. Apart from providing an overview of the collection, the paper will discuss Kulisiewicz’s cultural and intellectual background in interwar Poland, and postwar career as a performer, activist and author. Music illustrations will be drawn from Kulisiewicz’s archive of sound recordings, including selections from his own series of autobiographical songs written in Sachsenhausen. A final set of musical examples demonstrates the collection’s utility as a resource for musicians and programmers seeking overlooked, yet revivable repertoire, and for composers inspired to create new works based on “rescued” music preserved in the Museum’s archive.

In this article I discuss both the recent threats as well as opportunities posed by social media to the activities of museums, taking into account social media’s importance as an evolving space of both social outreach and social activism. Recalling the controversies around the U.S. and UK museums’ social media responses to George Floyd’s death, I argue that museums run the risk of politicization and entanglement in controversial issues which are not necessarily linked to their profile and mission. I analyse museums’ social media guidelines, good practices, and mission statements, and posit that they play a fundamental role in integrating the new realm of the Web 2.0 into traditional museum activities. My main case study and example of good practice is the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. It has constantly embedded general ethical and educational principles and guidelines of Holocaust commemoration and education into its more than 60-years’ experience in dealing with and taming political and cultural controversies surrounding this memory site of universal importance, and this embeddedness lies at the core of its social media activity. Defined as an “online community of remembrance”, it consists of well-thought-out initiatives which aim at informing the public about the everyday history of the camp, involving itself in the current commemorations and anniversaries, and rectifying simplifications and misinformation about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. I also analyse the fundamental role played by the official social media profiles in managing the crisis which arose at the beginning of 2018 with the amendment of the socalled “Holocaust Law” in Poland.

Every year around 3000 British school pupils and teachers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as participants on a Lessons from Auschwitz Project organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Each visit ends with a memorial ceremony held at the end of the railway tracks at Birkenau. This article analyses interview and survey data from participating students and educators to explore their experiences of these ceremonies. The research findings indicate that the context and content of the ceremony are significant for both groups, with a general consensus that the ceremony is an important and appropriate way to end the day visit to Poland and the museum. The students’ responses also particularly raise issues around their emotional engagement with the ceremony and the impact it had on them in this way. In conclusion, this article suggests how similar reflective spaces might be created in other educational contexts at similar sites of memory.

This article discusses the portrayal of German-Polish relations in Robert Thalheim's 2007 film Am Ende kommen Touristen. Situated within present day Oświęcim, Poland—more commonly known as Auschwitz, the historical site of Nazi perpetration—Touristen shifts viewer attention toward contemporary concerns surrounding historical memories of Auschwitz and the present day transnational encounters at the memorial site. This article discusses memory constellations as well as the intercultural and intergenerational issues depicted in the film. By showing how the past still continues to affect contemporary relationships between Germans and Poles, the film calls for continued engagement and dialogue to work through the shared past in the European present. This article furthermore discusses the status of Touristen as a “third wave” Holocaust film that distances itself from cinematic, historical reconstruction on a visual and narrative level by rather focusing attention on the pieces of the past that continue to affect contemporary German-Polish relationships.

The interview is an important historical source of studying the problematic issues of the history of Ukraine in the XX century. The interview has a lot of factual materials, interpretations, impressions, observations, and development of the interviewees about the described events. Between the two world wars, Western Volhynia remained a part of Poland. About 10% of its population was Jews. This article examines historical evidence of the life of the Jewish population in the cities of Volhynian Voivodeship in the interwar period from the collection of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). USHMM documents, studies, and interprets the history of the Holocaust. The mission of the museum, due to the museum's strategy, is to help citizens of the world to fight hatred, to prevent genocide, to promote human dignity and to strengthen democracy. Interviews from the USHMM collection are semi-structured and focused, thus aimed at studying a person’s "experience" of individual historical divisions and situations that arose. The examined memoirs show the construction and spread of Jewish public cities of Volhynian Voivodeship, which was inhabited by about two-thirds of their inhabitants. Education issues are most often addressed to in interviews for those reasons that the interwar period lead to the formation and maturation of respondents. The articles describe the construction, professional employment, religious and social life, as well as the perception of urban space. The analysis of memories gives us idea of a young resident of the Jewish community. On average, this was a person from a religious family which had own small business. Such person attended public and religious school, had acquaintances or friends from different ethnic groups, knew several languages and was not interested in politics at all. The material presented in this article represents the experience of Holocaust victims. Attention of the researchers in this group is evidence of one-sidedness — one of the main methodological problems of oral historical research. The exploitation of traumatic experience in this article is changed due to the chronological limits of the interwar period. Despite the above problem of oral historical research, methods permit us to add some kind of personal to the general narrative.

Roma Caravan Memorial as an example of pro motion of knowledge about Roma by the Ethnographic Muse um in TarnówThe first Roma Caravan Memorial set off from outside the Ethnographic Museum in Tarnów in 1996. It was organised by Adam Bartosz, an expert on Roma culture, history and language, and Adam Andrasz, the president of the Association of Roma in Tarnów. The Caravan is to commemorate Roma Holocaust. Members of the Roma community can thus learn about the history of extermination from local priests and authors of historical publications. Participants of the Caravan visit the following places of martyrdom: Żabno where possibly 49 of German and 12 of Hungarian Romas were shot by the Nazis in summer 1943), the grave in Borzęcin Dolny where anonymous 28 Romas, killed in the nearby forests, were buried, and Szczurowa where Germans murdered almost an entire Roma settlement of 93 people; the victims were buried in the local cemetery; it is probably the biggest grave of Roma people on the present territory of Poland. The Caravan Memorial is a project that integrates the Roma and the local community, also friendly villagers, journalists and sometimes passers-by join it. Tabor Pamięci Romów jako przykład promowania wiedzy o Romach przez Muzeum Etnograficzne w TarnowiePierwszy „Cygański Tabor Pamięci Romów”, który później nazwany został „Międzynarodowym Taborem Pamięci Romów”, wyruszył sprzed dziedzińca tarnowskiego Muzeum Etnograficznego w lipcu 1996 roku. Jedną z głównych idei, która przyświecała organizatorom „Taboru” było upamiętnienie zagłady Romów, którym podobnie jak Żydom naziści odmówili prawa do życia i skazali na całkowitą eksterminację. Tabor jest swego rodzaju „pielgrzymką” upamiętniającą kaźń Romów, jak i oddaniem pomordowanym hołdu w miejscu ich wiecznego spoczynku. „Tabor Pamięci Romów” stanowi istotny element dziedzictwa kulturowego Romów zamieszkujących ziemie polskie. Sięganie do tego dziedzictwa, nawiązywanie do niego i ukazywanie w jak najszerszym zakresie niewątpliwie przyczyniać się będzie do głębszego poznania kultury romskiej.

Art Spiegelman abrió con Maus (1980-1991) un nuevo camino para la novela gráfica a nivel internacional: entrevistando a su padre, que le cuenta sus memorias sobre el Holocausto, presenta una historia de carácter confesional, inédita hasta entonces en este ámbito de manifestación artístico-literaria. Junto con la impactante representación de los personajes, destaca especialmente la historia de supervivencia en primera persona. En este trabajo, analizamos la importancia del lenguaje en Maus, y más concretamente los rasgos lingüísticos que caracterizan la forma de expresión del protagonista, cuya lengua materna no era el inglés, sino el polaco. Son numerosas las incoherencias y errores intencionados en el original (por ejemplo, “… I can tell you other stories, but such private things, I don’t want you should mention”). Para ello, trataremos de determinar si existen en estas incoherencias parámetros recurrentes y posibles influencias de otra(s) lengua(s). Finalmente, analizaremos cómo han podido interferir estas pautas en la traducción al español de una de las novelas gráficas más destacadas del siglo XX y la primera ganadora del Premio Pulitzer en 1992.

This paper, intended as a contribution to transnational memory studies, analyzes museums devoted to people who helped Jews during the Holocaust that recently opened in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Lithuania, and Poland. The author’s particular interest lies in the “traveling motifs” of the “Righteous” narratives. This category encompasses symbols such as a list of names of the help-providers, a fruit tree/orchard, or a wall with photographs of Holocaust victims, which recur in many of the examined exhibitions and are a clear reference to Yad Vashem and other well-established Holocaust memorials. At first sight, they seem to point to a “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust remembrance and to the emergence of a common reservoir of historical notions and images. However, on closer inspection one discovers that the use of these symbols varies and that they refer to differing ways of understanding and telling history.

Over time, the live memories of survivors have disappeared, and it has become clear that the memory of the Jewish Holocaust could disappear entirely in the absence of institutional efforts to preserve it. The understanding that collective memory can be preserved only through proactive efforts led to the development of formal and informal curricula for Holocaust education. The main assumption is that Holocaust education has the potential to generate a moral transformation. In light of this conclusion the question is: What kind of changes do we seek and how should we accomplish them? This study deals with a case study of one of the constitutive historical events of the 20th century: commemoration of the Holocaust. The study focuses on the Experiential Learning Method of educating about Holocaust remembrance and commemoration and about Holocaust monuments. Over the years memorial centers have been added, which contain additional monuments commemorating the story of a specific place and/or personal stories. One of the currently customary methods of commemoration in Israel is the journey to Poland, to the labor, concentration, and death camps, to the various memorial sites and monuments. This journey is undertaken by young and old, groups and singles, from all over the world and particularly from Israel. Since many of those taking the journey are young people at an age when personal, national, and historical identity is formed, a time when the young acquire their educational values, it is particularly important to ascertain who is charged with passing on the beacon of memory. This leads to weighty questions regarding the identity of the guides who lead these journeys and the contents they choose to impart to the participants, the guidance sites, and the method of guidance. Who will tell the story? How will the story be told? What will remain of the story? This study discusses in addition, a case study of guides from Israel charged with imparting this chapter of human history. In order to explore their impact, interviews were held with 47 guides, the large majority of whom are Israeli born, a majority academics, and many hold advanced degrees. The research findings indicate that they aim the commemoration beacon primarily at guidance sites in Poland. The study explored other diverse essential parameters regarding the profile of “guides to Poland” – where did they study? What is their personal affiliation with the subject? What is their position on the universal and Jewish narrative of the Holocaust? In light of the interviews conducted, it appears that almost all of them have the necessary tools to convey the most complete and comprehensive educational message. Accordingly, this issue was explored and most of the guides reported that the most influential message of commemoration is conveyed primarily through visits to camps and ghettos in Poland. This conclusion generates a theoretical, practical, philosophical, moral, and educational question indicating the “exporting of historical memory”. Should our entire educational focus indeed be exclusively on Poland? How can we preserve the ethos of the affiliation between the Holocaust of the Jews and heroism in the Holocaust, as well as heroism in Israel and its building, if we disregard the many commemoration and memorial sites within Israel? Do the journeys to the camps and to the valley of death in Poland, which are led by these guides, not create a distortion in the instilling of Holocaust remembrance and heritage, by disregarding the many commemoration sites and monuments throughout Israel? Aiming the beacon of commemoration at Poland, outside Israel, prevents exposure of the public, and particularly teenagers, to the natural association formed in Israel between Holocaust and revival, which preserves the connecting link between the generations.

Resumen: Acompañada por su familia, María Teresa León recorre el campo de exterminio de Auschwitz. La impresión de esa experiencia angustiosa fue evocada en sus memorias y seguramente la indujo a escribir Iremos con vosotros hasta el fin. En esta obra, concebida como un guion de teatro radiofónico, María Teresa ensalza la solidaridad y el sacrificio de un matrimonio polaco, que tiene a su cargo a un grupo de niños judíos polacos. Cuando los niños son seleccionados para entrar en la cámara de gas de Auschwitz, en la primavera de 1943, deciden no abandonarlos y morir junto a ellos. Iremos con vosotros hasta el fin es un homenaje a las víctimas, una exhortación a presentes y futuras generaciones para que recuerden el horror del Holocausto, porque el olvido conlleva el resurgimiento del Mal.Palabras clave: Holocausto, judíos, María Teresa León, Polonia, Auschwitz, ficción.Abstract: Along with by her family, María Teresa León walks through the Auschwitz death camp. The reflection of this anguished experience was evoked in her memories and surely induced her to write Iremos con vosotros hasta el fin. In this work, conceived as a radio theatrical script, María Teresa praises the solidarity and sacrifice of a Polish couple, who shelter of a group of Polish Jewish children. When the children were selected to enter the gas chambers of Auschwitz in the spring of 1943, they decided not to abandon them and die next to them. Iremos con vosotros hasta el fin is a tribute to the victims, an exhortation to present and future generations to remember the horror of the Holocaust, because forgetfulness leads to the resurgence of evil.Keywords: Holocaust, Jews, María Teresa León, Poland, Auschwitz, fiction.

ABSTRACT Holocaust and Gulag studies are witnessing the belated emergence of the Soviet experience of Jewish escapees from Nazi-occupied Poland as a lieu de mémoire in its own right. Although not commemorated in official ritual, museum spaces, or memorial sites, the sheer mass of published testimonies by survivors of this experience far outweighs the previous lack of attention to the refugees’ story. It was the agency of the refugee survivors themselves which subsequently put their Soviet experience on the mnemonic map of World War II. This article discusses both the reasons for that lack of attention and the current growing interest in their accounts. It proposes a typology based on questions of victimhood and perpetratorship, analyzed through the contrast between the way the Jewish exiles in the USSR interpreted their experiences and how those who experienced the Holocaust directly interpreted theirs. The article thus asks, whose victims did the refugees consider themselves, the Germans’ or the Soviets’?

The article challenges the widely shared thesis in memory studies that the antifascist memory of the Second World War suppressed the Holocaust. Instead of exploring exceptions to this rule by looking for single cases of antifascist memory that represent some aspects of the Holocaust, we argue that antifascist memory presented a distinct cultural regime for remembering the past. Our claim is that antifascist memory, understood as a particular historical phenomenon on a transnational scale, opened up specific ways to commemorate the Jewish genocide. Our article relies on two pillars: first, on recent memory studies scholarship that challenged “the myth of silence” in relation to the postwar decades; second, on recent studies revisiting antifascism itself, demonstrating its transnational and ideologically diverse nature. We argue that a contested but at least until the 1970s still commonly held pan-European antifascist legacy fostered not only intra-Eastern bloc but also cross–Cold War mnemonic cooperation. We present an empirical comparative study that discusses the 1965 Hungarian exhibition at the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Hungarian section at the permanent exhibition at the Museum of the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr in Paris that opened in the same year. Based on archival documents in Budapest, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Paris, we prove that both exhibitions displayed a coherent, historically accurate, and comprehensive account of the genocide that articulated unambiguously the Jewish identity of those perished and persecuted. At the same time, they both operated under discursive conditions informed by antifascist legacies in Poland, Hungary, and France.

Purpose of the study: The article contains information on the forced labor performed by Jews for the benefit of Germans during the Second World War. The research area was narrowed down to the area of the Szydłowiec ghetto and its vicinity (the Radom district in the General Government. The text presents the types of work performed by Jews, forms of forcing them to take up forced labor, and their attempts to bypass German restrictions. Methodology: This article is based on a comparative-historical method, the aim of which is to enable the researcher to identify Jews as a separate social group that was used by the Germans for forced labor. The use of this method is aimed at learning about the historical processes and mechanisms of functioning of selected Nazi restrictions in Poland. In addition, prosopographic and inductive methods as well as a method based on the grounded theory will be used. Moreover, due to the nature of the subject of the work, the research conducted in this field also requires the use of oral history. Main Findings: Extremely burdensome, in many aspects, compulsion for Jews was the almost slave labor they performed for the benefit of the Germans. Every Jew had to work at least one day a week for the Third Reich. Jews were used for various types of work, including snow removal from roads. Slave labor for the benefit of the Nazis was one of the causes of the increasing poverty of Jews. Application: The results of the research make a significant contribution to the knowledge of the history of Jews from Szydłowiec. This research not only broadens the knowledge about the history of the functioning of the Jewish community in Szydłowiec during World War II, but also broadens the knowledge about the history of the Holocaust and the mechanisms of crimes. These studies can be used to further analyze the situation of Jews during the German occupation in the territory of the Radom district, or more broadly, in the territory of the General Government. Novelty/Originality of the study: For the first time in this study, many fragments of Jewish diaries from the Memorial Book of Szydłowiec were used (some of the memoirs were published only in Yiddish). The article is the basis for further research on the history of Jews during World War II in the area of the Radom district.

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or willpower” (Sebald, Vertigo 34). Moser writes how “the hidden order that lies behind the peripatetic movement becomes visible retroactively – only after the walker has consulted a map. It is the map that allows Sebald to decode the ‘writing’ of his steps” (48). Wandering in place enables digressions and preoccupations, which then constitute the landscape ultimately represented. Wandering and reading the map of one’s steps afterwards form part of the same process: the attempt to piece together—to create a landscape—that uncovers lost or hidden histories. Sebald’s Vertigo, divided into four parts, layers the narrator’s personal wandering through Italy, Austria, and Germany, with the stories of those who were there before him, including the writers Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova. An opposing factor to memory is a landscape’s capacity to forget; or rather, since landscape conceived here is a construction of our own minds, to reflect our own amnesia. Lewis observes that Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo “is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape”. Sebald’s narrator describes Henri Beyle (the writer Stendhal) and his experience visiting the location of the Battle of Marengo as such:The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion […] In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom. (17-18)The “vertiginous sense of confusion” signals a preoccupation with attempting to interpret sites of memory and, importantly, what Nora calls a “consciousness of a break with the past” (Nora 7) that characterises an interest in lieux de memoire. The confusion and feeling of unknowing is, I suggest, a characteristic of a wandering narrator. They do not quite know what they are looking for, nor what would constitute a finished wandering experience. This lack of resolution is a hallmark of the wandering narrative. A parallel can be drawn here with trauma fiction theory, which categorises a particular kind of literature that aims to recognise and represent the ethical and psychological impediments to representing trauma (Whitehead). Baumgarten describes the affective response to Sebald’s works:Here there are neither answers nor questions but a haunted presence. Unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed. (272)Sebald’s narrators are illustrative literary wanderers. They demonstrate a conception of landscape that theorists such as Polster, Baer, and Ingold articulate: landscapes tell stories for those who investigate them, and are constituted by a synthesis of personal experience, the historical record, and the present condition of a place. This way of encountering a place is necessarily fragmented and can be informed by the tenets of trauma fiction, which seeks ways of representing traumatic histories by resisting linear narratives and conclusive resolutions. Modiano: Wandering in Place in ParisModiano’s The Search Warrant is another literary example of wandering in place. This autobiographical novel similarly illustrates the notion of landscape as a construction of a narrator who wanders through cities and forms landscape through an amalgamation of perception, knowledge, and memory.Although Modiano’s wandering narrator appears to be searching the Paris of the 1990s for traces of a Jewish girl, missing since the Second World War, he is also conducting an “aimless” wandering in search of traces of his own past in Paris. The novel opens with the narrator reading an old newspaper article, dated 1942, and reporting a missing fourteen-year-old girl in Paris. The narrator becomes consumed with a need to learn the fate of the girl. The search also becomes a search for his own past, as the streets of Paris from which Dora Bruder disappeared are also the streets his father worked among during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. They are also the same streets along which the narrator walked as an angst-ridden youth in the 1960s.Throughout the novel, the narrator uses a combination of facts uncovered by research, documentary evidence, and imagination, which combine with his own memories of walking in Paris. Although the fragmentation of sources creates a sense of uncertainty, together there is an affective weight, akin to Sebald’s “haunted presence”, in the layers Modiano’s narrator compiles. One chapter opens with an entry from the Clignancourt police station logbook, which records the disappearance of Dora Bruder:27 December 1941. Bruder, Dora, born Paris.12, 25/2/26, living at 41 Boulevard Ornano.Interview with Bruder, Ernest, age 42, father. (Modiano 69)However, the written record is ambiguous. “The following figures”, the narrator continues, “are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12” (Modiano 69). Moreover, the physical record of the interview with Dora’s father is missing from the police archives. All he knows is that Dora’s father waited thirteen days before reporting her disappearance, likely wary of drawing attention to her: a Jewish girl in Occupied Paris. Confronted by uncertainty, the narrator recalls his own experience of running away as a youth in Paris: “I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 – an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke […] Running away – it seems – is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide” (Modiano 71). The narrator’s construction of landscape is multi-layered: his past, Dora’s past, his present. Overhanging this is the history of Nazi-occupied Paris and the cultural memory of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.With the aid of other police documents, the narrator traces Dora’s return home, and then her arrest and detainment in the Tourelles barracks in Paris. From Tourelles, detainees were deported to Drancy concentration camp. However, the narrator cannot confirm whether Dora was deported to Drancy. In the absence of evidence, the narrator supplies other documents: profiles of those known to be deported, in an attempt to construct a story.Hena: I shall call her by her forename. She was nineteen … What I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at no. 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed. (111)Unable to make conclusions about Dora’s story, the narrator is drawn back to a physical location: the Tourelles barracks. He describes a walk he took there in 1996: “Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des-Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the uphill slope of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived” (Modiano 124). The narrator combines what he experiences in the city with the documentary evidence left behind, to create a landscape. He reaches the Tourelles barracks: “the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep I could hear the rustling of the planes”. When he sees a sign that says “MILITARY ZONE. FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED”, the cumulative effect of his solitary and uncertain wandering results in despair at the difficulty of preserving the past: “I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond that wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion” (Modiano 124). The wandering process here, including the narrator’s layering of his own experience with Hena’s life, the lack of resolution, and the wandering narrator’s disbelief at the seemingly incongruous appearance of a place today in relation to its past, mirrors the feeling of Sebald’s narrator at the site of the Battle of Marengo, quoted above.Earlier in the novel, after frustrated attempts to find information about Dora’s mother and father, the narrator reflects that “they are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous” (Modiano 23). He remarks that Dora’s parents are “inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived” (Modiano 23). There is a disjunction between knowledge and something deeper, the undefined impetus that drives the narrator to walk, to search, and therefore to write: “often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown” (Modiano 23). This contrast of topographical precision and the “unknown” echoes the feeling of Sebald’s narrator when contemplating sites of memory. One may wander “in place” yet still feel a sense of confusion and gaps in knowledge: this is, I suggest, an intended aesthetic effect by both authors. Reader and narrator alike feel a sense of yearning and melancholy as a result of the narrator’s wandering. Wandering out of Place in Moscow and St PetersburgWhen I travelled to Russia in 2015, I sought to document, with a Sebaldian wandering methodology, processes of finding memory both in and out of place. Like Sebald and Modiano, I was invested in hidden histories and the relationship between the physical environment and memory. Yet unlike those authors, I focused my wandering mostly on places that reflected or referenced events that occurred elsewhere rather than events that happened in that specific place. As such, I was wandering out of place.The importance of memory, both in and out of place, is a central concept in my novel The Memory Artist. The narrator, Pasha, reflects the concerns of current and past members of Russia’s civic organisation named Memorial, which seeks to document and preserve the memory of victims of Communism. Contemporary activists lament that in modern Russia the traumas of the Gulag labour camps, collectivisation, and the “Terror” of executions under Joseph Stalin, are inadequately commemorated. In a 2012 interview, Irina Flige, co-founder of the civic body Memorial Society in St Petersburg, encapsulated activists’ disappointment at seeing burial sites of Terror victims fall into oblivion:By the beginning of 2000s these newly-found sites of mass burials had been lost. Even those that had been marked by signs were lost for a second time! Just imagine: a place was found [...] people came and held vigils in memory of those who were buried there. But then this generation passed on and a new generation forgot the way to these sites – both literally and metaphorically. (Flige quoted in Karp)A shift in generation, and a culture of secrecy or inaction surrounding efforts to preserve the locations of graves or former labour camps, perpetuate a “structural deficit of knowledge”, whereby knowledge of the physical locations of memory is lost (Anstett 2). This, in turn, affects the way people and societies construct their memories. When sites of past trauma are not documented or acknowledged as such, it is more difficult to construct a narrative about those places, particularly those that confront and document a violent past. Physical absence in the landscape permits a deficit of storytelling.This “structural deficit of knowledge” is exacerbated when sites of memory are located in distant locations. The former Soviet labour camps and locations of some mass graves are scattered across vast locations far from Russia’s main cities. Yet for some, those cities now act as holding environments for the memory of lost camp locations, mass graves, and histories. For example, a monument in Moscow may commemorate victims of an overseas labour camp. Lieux de memoire shift from being “in place” to existing “out of place”, in monuments and memorials. As I walked through Moscow and St Petersburg, I had the sensation I was wandering both in and out of place, as I encountered the histories of memories physically close but also geographically distant.For example, I arrived early one morning at the Lubyanka building in central Moscow, a pre-revolutionary building with yellow walls and terracotta borders, the longstanding headquarters of the Soviet and now Russian secret police (image 1). Many victims of the worst repressive years under Stalin were either shot here or awaited deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia and other remote areas. The place is both a site of memory and one that gestures to traumatic pasts inflicted elsewhere.Image 1: The Lubyanka, in Central MoscowA monument to victims of political repression was erected near the Lubyanka Building in 1990. The monument takes the form of a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the far north, on the White Sea, and the location of the Solovetsky Monastery that Lenin turned into a prison camp in 1921 (image 2). The Solovetsky Stone rests in view of the Lubyanka. In the 1980s, the stone was taken by boat to Arkhangelsk and then by train to Moscow. The wanderer encounters memory in place, in the stone and building, and also out of place, in the signified trauma that occurred elsewhere. Wandering out of place thus has the potential to connect a wanderer, and a reader, to geographically remote histories, not unlike war memorials that commemorate overseas battles. This has important implications for the preservation of stories. The narrator of The Memory Artist reflects that “the act of taking a stone all the way from Solovetsky to Moscow … was surely a sign that we give things and objects and matter a little of our own minds … in a way I understood that [the stone’s] presence would be a kind of return for those who did not, that somehow the stone had already been there, in Moscow” (Brabon 177).Image 2: The Monument to Victims of Political Repression, Near the LubyankaIn some ways, wandering out of place is similar to the examples of wandering in place considered here: in both instances the person wandering constructs a landscape that is a synthesis of their present perception, their individual history, and their knowledge of the history of a place. Yet wandering out of place offers a nuanced understanding of wandering by revealing the ways one can encounter the history, trauma, and memory that occur in distant places, highlighting the importance of symbols, memorials, and preserved knowledge. Image 3: Reflectons of the LubyankaConclusionThe ways a writer encounters and represents the stories that constitute a landscape, including traumatic histories that took place there, are varied and well-suited to a wandering methodology. There are notable traits of a wandering narrator: the digressive, associative form of thinking and writing, the unmapped journeys that are, despite themselves, full of compulsive purpose, and the lack of finality or answers inherent in a wanderer’s narrative. Wandering permits an encounter with memory out of place. The Solovetsky Islands remain a place I have never been, yet my encounter with the symbolic stone at the Lubyanka in Moscow lingers as a historical reminder. This sense of never arriving, of not reaching answers, echoes the narrators of Sebald and Modiano. Continued narrative uncertainty generates a sense of perpetual wandering, symbolic of the writer’s shadowy task of representing the past.ReferencesAnstett, Elisabeth. “Memory of Political Repression in Post-Soviet Russia: The Example of the Gulag.” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 13 Sep. 2011. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/memory-political-repression-post-soviet-russia-example-gulag>.Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” Representations 69 (2000): 38–62.Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267–87.Brabon, Katherine. The Memory Artist. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2016.Gussow, Mel. “W.G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57.” The New York Times 15 Dec. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html>.Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25.2 (1993): 152–174.Jaggi, Maya. “The Last Word: An Interview with WG Sebald.” The Guardian 22 Sep. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation>.Karp, Masha. “An Interview with Irina Flige.” RightsinRussia.com 11 Apr. 2012. 2 Aug. 2019 <http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/interviews-1/irina-flige/masha-karp>.Lewis, Tess. “WG Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” New Criterion 20 (2001).MacDonald, Anna. “‘Pictures in a Rebus’: Puzzling Out W.G. Sebald’s Monstrous Geographies.” In Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier. Eds. Niculae Liviu Gheran and Ken Monteith. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2013. 115–25.Modiano, Patrick. The Search Warrant. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin. 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