Language:
English
Year of publication:
2019
Titel der Quelle:
Holocaust Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
25,1-2 (2019) 101-117
Keywords:
Sebald, W. G.
;
Demnig, Gunter,
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in art
;
German literature History and criticism 21st century
;
Art, German 21st century
;
Public art spaces
;
Collective memory
Abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which contemporary Germans engage in diverse artistic and social forms of Holocaust memory work today that repudiate the ethos of silence and forgetting that dominated the post-war decades. The examples considered include W.G. Sebald's hybrid novel Austerlitz, Gunter Demnig's "stumbling stones" action art project, and the installation "We Were Neighbors" in the Berlin-Schöneberg town hall. These examples employ narrative as a way of opening up channels for the belated process of mourning; they engage their work through "Spurensuche", that is, the process of searching for the traces of evidence of National Socialist crimes that were covered up and forgotten; and they confront critically the repression of memory of the National Socialist crimes in the post-war years.
DOI:
10.1080/17504902.2018.1472877
URL:
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