Kathryn Brackney's Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness is an insightful and original contribution to the study of the public, artistic, literary, and scholarly views on the Holocaust. The author skillfully moves between art, literary genres, photography, philosophy, and historiography to present a broad intellectual history of Holocaust representation and how it shaped our understanding of humanity, from the early postwar years to the present. The book starts by noting the widespread tendency to describe the Holocaust as an event that defies representation, and asks: “How did this transnational cultural consensus on the ‘limits of representation’ develop? How did writers, artists, and filmmakers imagine the Holocaust before the powerful strategies of distanced realism, abstraction, and postmodern fragmentation became predominant?” (p. 4). Against the discourse on the impossibility of representation, the book identifies a different tradition, examining canonical and lesser-known works and artists who remembered and depicted the Holocaust through surreal imagery.

The book provides a historicization of Holocaust memory that is critical of the view about Holocaust awareness as progressing from postwar silence to the “era of the witness” (Annette Wieviorka) and further to the looming death of the last witnesses. Instead, the book points to the different ways in which the Holocaust was described and traces the various international shifts and models of addressing the genocide since the end of World War II. Brackney notes that whereas the often-preferred aesthetic mode of Holocaust representation is realism (with diaries, memoirs, and photographs at the center), postwar poems, artworks, novels, and films invoked fantastical, dreamlike, and hallucinatory, outer- and otherworldly images of suffering and death in the Holocaust. This is made especially clear in the book's first two chapters, which are the strongest and most fascinating to read, before turning to reflect on changes that took place in the 1970s.

The first chapter weaves together diverse works such as poems by Abraham Shutzkever, Paul Celan, and Uri Zvi Greenberg, paintings by Marc Chagall, Maryan, and Yehuda Bacon, and Anna Langfus's novel The Lost Shore (1962), which share themes and patterns of addressing death and loss. These different textual and visual works from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, by people from different countries and experiences, “are united in their effort to imagine interim worlds for bodies that were never buried” (p. 18). To mourn the dead and create some intimacy with them, they portrayed “outerworldly spaces—green aquariums, graves in the air” (p. 18), flowing and floating forms that fluctuate between earth and sky, water and earth, dream and waking reality.

In examining imaginary landscapes and hybrid disturbing figures, Surreal Geographies adds to the recent scholarship on the gothic, monstrous, and supernatural in Jewish history and literature, which explores how Jews invoked monsters to address threats and challenges to their communities in different times, to provide counter-images to antisemitic demonization, and to express a sense of horror and crisis (see, e.g. Maya Barzilai, Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters, 2016; Iris Idelson-Shein and Christian Wiese, eds., Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity, 2019; Karen Grumberg, Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution, 2019; and Brian E. Crim, Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television, 2020). Yet, whereas much of this research revolves around the horror genre, Brackney's focus on the surreal enables her to explore how disturbing and animalistic figures in art were used not (only) to represent Nazi monstrosity, but to present a dynamic and fluid relationship between life and death and communicate with the dead. In this sense, the book echoes recent scholarship on haunting. Alexander Etkind, for instance, has shown that ghosts provide an avenue for mourning in the case of Soviet ghosts of the Gulag. (See Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, 2013; Zuzanna Dziuban, ed., The “Spectral Turn”: Jewish Ghosts in the Polish Post-Holocaust Imaginaire, 2019; Kobi Kabalek, “Ghosts, Vampires, Zombies,” in Gerd Sebald et al., eds., Handbuch Sozialwissenschaftliche Gedächtnisforschung, 2023, 365–375.) In addition, Avery Gordon has recognized in cases of haunting the continuous impact of former abusive and oppressive systems of power on current everyday life: “Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way … we are notified that what's been concealed is very much alive and present” (Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2008, xvi).

The second chapter of Surreal Geographies explores the impact of the Cold War's space race in the 1960s and 1970s on depictions of Holocaust survivors as beings from a different world. Brackney brings together Yehiel Dinur's collapse on the stand at the Eichmann Trial after defining Auschwitz as an “other planet” in June 1961 and Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space two months earlier to reflect on their connections and reflections about humanity and imagination. She explores the mixture of fantasy and reality in the fascinating ties between Primo Levi's writing as a survivor and his science fiction literature, as well as Holocaust echoes in Steven Spielberg's sci-fi films. The chapter beautifully shows how historical discourse about the Holocaust responded to, and integrated, the imagination of space exploration at the time. Nevertheless, references to the Nazi camps and ghettos as extraterrestrial places appeared already during World War II, as victims of Nazi camps reflected on their unbelievable reality by imagining it as external to the world one knew before. For example, an inmate in Dachau wrote in his diary on April 1, 1943, after a brutal day: “Soon I'll believe that we're actually living on the moon” (Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Dachauer Tagebücher: Die Aufzeichnungen des Häftlings 24,814, 1997, 53).

The third chapter presents the beginning of the current focus on the impossibility of representation when diverse, seemingly competing media and genres established a shared idea: “From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, popular melodrama, the expansion of archival collections, the emergent discourse of human rights, and the collection of a new genre of remembrance—video testimony—all contributed to the re-embodiment of Holocaust memory in the individual voice” (p. 80). The chapter reflects on the combined impact of the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, the film Schindler's List, the Fortunoff audiovisual archive, and the connection between psychological trauma and video interviews on the present focus on individual suffering, trauma, and survival.

Chapter four pays attention to the growing public status of Holocaust survivors and the tendency to view them as embodying the past they have experienced and witnessed. The discussion revolves around Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah (1985), which “ascribed an almost sacred status to survivors and their voices” (p. 111) and an authority greater than any other source. Brackney analyzes Shoah's liturgical logic, which aims to create a community of mourning and call for an ethical commitment to commemorate the dead. Although “Lanzmann's film does not describe the Holocaust as unrepresentable,” it nevertheless “performatively makes it so. By drawing ritual boundaries around what had been spaces of violation, the film provides a means of negotiating mournful desires for contact with a past that seems to provide simultaneously too much [information, testimonies, voices, images, etc.] and too little to history, justice, and art” (p. 139).

The final chapter nicely connects back to the early chapters with more recent adaptations of surreal images. It shows the recurrence of the sea, fluid landscapes, and fusions between human and animal in literary works from the 1990s, with a focus on Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (1996) and W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1995). The new model for these images is that of natural history and man-made destruction, topics that the author pursues further in the conclusion.

Kathryn Brackney's Surreal Geographies provides fascinating new insights into the study of Holocaust representation and memory. By guiding our focus to surreal images, she draws new connections between diverse works of art, research, and literature from the early postwar years onwards. The book shows us alternative models of Holocaust expression and articulation, and, more importantly, allows us to historicize the prevalent assumptions and concepts in current research and commemoration about the genocide.