Rationed Life: Science, Everyday Life, and Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands, 1914–1918

Abstract

up interesting new directions for future researchers in the field. The book’s conclusion builds on the ‘coda’ sections of each part, which take a more personal, almost ‘psychogeographic’ tone in their reflections of the author’s experience at each site. Here, Rapson draws on Sebald’s writing about place and memory to reinforce her earlier arguments around mediation and remediation of memory through landscape, the transnational, cosmopolitan, interconnected nature of memory exchange, and the importance of the ecocritical perspective. The three sites are united in the frequently evoked trope of the disrupted pastoral. While this trope elides the always problematic nature of humans’ relationship with nature, the power of the ‘mobilization of [. . .] affectivity in memorial landscapes’ (p. 196) is clear, and the mourning involved may be put to productive ends. The book ends on a discussion of Sebald’s work as a way of accessing an ‘ecocentric view of the Holocaust’ (p. 197), providing a compelling conclusion to the case studies that draws together the complex connections between ecology, genocide, modernity and cultural memory.