As part of the Humanities Center’s Fall 2025 speaker series on New Histories of Fascism, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, Kathryn L. Brackney (Leiden University) will present her book Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), which won the George L. Mosse First Book Prize. While depictions of and memorials to the Nazi Judeocide today tend to emphasize absence through minimalism, this was not always so. In her incisive cultural history of Holocaust representation, Brackney recovers traditions of surrealist, fantastical, and otherworldly aesthetics associated with “Planet Auschwitz” in early literary and visual representations created by survivors grappling with unprecedented horrors they had just experienced amidst the backdrop of the Cold War and the space race. By historicizing today’s austere “distanced realism” and intimate testimonies as products of recent decades, she denaturalizes the notion that the Holocaust uniquely defies the “limits of representation” and shows that this idea resulted from feedback loops between popular (sometimes “kitsch”), testimonial, psychotherapeutic, and minimalist representational strategies.

This event is free and open to the public. It will be held in a hybrid format, with Dr. Brackney presenting via Zoom and an audience viewing and engaging in in-person discussion in Humanities Center Conference Room D, and also via Zoom (registration link below).