Abstract
The number of memorial sites, historical museums, and public places of mourning are increasing worldwide, becoming what has been referred to in the American context as “memorial mania” and extending globally to “grassroots memorials,” shrines, and other forms of ritualized practices.1 While memorializing seems to fulfill an anthropological need among humankind, the contemporary process of historical remembering and the very vocabulary to articulate it date to the much more recent crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazi regime in Germany. Like no other event in recent memory, the Holocaust reveals both the possibilities and limitations of historical interpretation and artistic representation. As Adorno suggested early on, its extreme nature marks not only a political and social rupture but also a rupture of experience and morality.2 So the Holocaust has become the test case for the workings of modern collective memory as a cultural practice of remembering and self-reflection, raising conceptual, categorical, and interpretative problems. And yet, this discourse of remembering after the violence of the Second World War is fairly recent. In Germany, after two decades of institutionally controlled memory that served primarily the goal of forgetting, that is, of resisting shame and facing up to the responsibility for the past, social memory swelled in the 1970s through an interest in autobiographical writing, family genealogy, and plans for new museums and commemorative sites; and since then it has generated a veritable boom with a heterogeneous outpouring of interdisciplinary and international scholarship.3
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Notes
Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010);
and Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero (eds), Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death (New York: Berghahn, 2011).
Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft” [1951], in Prismen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 30; in English, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 34.
For recent collections with extensive bibliographies, see Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010);
and Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (eds), The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
On the concept of memory contests, see Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote (eds), German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990 (Rochester: Camden House, 2006).
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), Act I, Scene 3.
Jacob S. Eder, “Holocaust-Erinnerung als deutsch-amerikanische Konfliktgeschichte. Die bundesdeutschen Reaktionen auf das United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.,” in Universalisierung des Holocaust? Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik in internationaler Perspektive, ed. Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 109–34.
For the original exhibition catalogue, see Hannes Heer (ed.), Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995);
for the controversies and details around the revision, see Christian Hartmann, Johannes Hürter, and Ulrike Jureit (eds), Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Bilanz einer Debatte (Munich: Beck, 2005).
For the original exhibition catalogue, see Volker Knigge, Rikola-Gunner Lüttgenau, and Jens-Christian Wagner (eds), Zwangsarbeit: Die Deutschen, die Zwangsarbeiter und der Krieg (Weimar: Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora, 2010); see also the exhibition website: http://www.ausstellung_zwangsarbeit.org/index.php?id=251 (accessed July 23, 2012).
Swiss writer Binjamin Wilkorski’s Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 was first published by the Jüdischer Verlag, an imprint of the prestigious Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995);
Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years was first published by a small press (Gloucester, MA: Mount Ivy Press, 1997).
Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (second version), in Gesammelte Schriften I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 471–508 (note 8);
trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcort in Selected Writings 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 251–83 (third version; here note 11).
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [1927] (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967).
Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon der Uneigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1966), 62–63.
On memory and media, see Ursula von Keitz and Thomas Weber (eds), Mediale Transformationen des Holocausts (Berlin: Avinus, 2013), especially the introductory chapter by Thomas Weber.
See Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes (eds), Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004).
Jan Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Zehn Studien (Munich: Beck, 2000).
See Helmut Schmitz and Annette Seidel-Arpaci (eds), Narratives of Trauma: Discourses of German Wartime Suffering in National and International Perspective. German Monitor 73 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), especially the introduction (6).
Mark A. Wolfgram, “Getting History Right”: East and West German Collective Memories of the Holocaust and War (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 212. See also Francine Hirsch’s comments on the Soviet memory of the Nuremberg Trials in chapter 1.
See Jeffrey K. Olick, “Introduction,” in States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 5.
Jan-Werner Müller has cogently outlined some of the obstacles and imponderables of transnational memory within the European context; see Müller, “On ‘European Memory’: Some Conceptual and Normative Remarks,” in A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, ed. Malgorzata Pakier and Bo Sträth (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 25–37. Stephen Feuchtwang has similarly investigated the differences and commonalities in the transmission of social memory in Germany and Asia; see his “Introduction” in After the Event: The Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 3–19.
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© 2013 Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan
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Silberman, M. (2013). After-words: Lessons in Memory and Politics. In: Silberman, M., Vatan, F. (eds) Memory and Postwar Memorials. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343529_12
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