Description
Book SynopsisThis book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas—Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.
Trade Review"Fascinating reading, this is a profound, original, and timely book about the world's current obsession with the past, as well as the form which this obsession has taken: memory. Huyssen considers what our obsession with memory means, and examines a number of material forms that it has taken, as well as the social, cultural, and aesthetic functions they have served." -Kaja Silverman, University of California, Berkeley
Table of ContentsPresent pasts - media, politics, amnesia; monumental seduction - Christo in Berlin; the voids of Berlin; after the war - Berlin as palimpsest; fear of mice - the Times Square redevelopment; memory sites in an expanded field - the Memory Park in Buenos Aires; Doris Salcedo's memory sculpture unland - the Orphan's Tunic; of mice and mimesis - reading Spiegelman's Maus with Adorno; rewritings and new beginnings - W.G. Sebald and the literature on the air war; twin memories - after-images of 9/11.
