After-words: Lessons in Memory and Politics

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