Countermonumental Memory

Abstract

The last chapter investigated the ways that Schlink’s fiction could be positioned at a certain moment in the evolution of German cultural memory — a cultural moment that threatened to disarticulate the relation between perpetrator and victim. Schlink’s fiction explores the ethics of strategically knowing and identifying with the perpetrator versus notions of the Holocaust’s unrepresentability, whereas, in what follows, I argue that much theorisation of German countermonumental architecture in effect reassumes Holocaust remembrance from the victim’s position regardless of the historical context of perpetration. Put differently, the work of memory done in and around the spaces of countermonumental architecture is often at the cost of the history of the monument and to what it refers.