Description
Book Synopsis Despite Adorno's famous dictum, the memory of the Shoah features prominently in the cultural legacy of the 20th century and beyond. It has led to a proliferation of works of representation and re-memorialization which have brought in their wake concerns about a 'holocaust industry' and banalization. This volume sheds fresh light on some of the issues, such as the question of silence and denial, of the formation of contemporary identities — German, East European, Jewish or Israeli, the consequences of the legacy of the Shoah for survivors and for the 'second generation,' and the political, ideological, and professional implications of Shoah historiography. One of the conclusions to be drawn from this volume is that the 'Auschwitz code,' invoked in relation to all 'unspeakable' catastrophes, has impoverished our vocabulary; it does not help us remember the Shoah and its victims, but rather erases that memory.
Table of Contents Acknowledgements
Introduction: Postmemory, Unsayability and the Return of the Auschwitz Code
Ronit Lentin
Chapter 1. Categorial Murder, or: How to Remember the Holocaust
Zygmunt Bauman
Chapter 2. ‘The word passed away, as that world awakened’: On the (Im)possibility of Representation
Heidrun Friese
Chapter 3. Memory, Forgetting and Mourning Work: Deviant Narratives of Silence in the Gendered Relations between Israeli Zionism and the Shoah
Ronit Lentin
Chapter 4. Entering the World of a Holocaust Victim: Schoolchildren Discuss a Ghetto Memoir – a Case Study
Janina Bauman
Chapter 5. A Dual Perspective: Yaakov Shabtai and the Historian’s Account of the Deportation to Mauritius
Dalia Ofer
Chapter 6. Memory, Authenticity and Replication of the Shoah in Museums: Defensive Tools of the Nation
Andrea Tyndall
Chapter 7. Forbidden Laughter? The Politics and Ethics of the Holocaust Film Comedy
Yosefa Loshitzky
Chapter 8. Voice, Silence and Memory: The Escape from Auschwitz and the Israeli Historiography
Ruth Linn
Chapter 9. The Shoah and Marxism: Behind and Beyond Silence
Philip Spencer
Chapter 10. Re-presenting the Shoah in Poland and Poland in the Shoah
Annamaria Orla-Bukowska
Chapter 11. Denying the Holocaust where it Happened: Post-Communist East Central Europe and the Shoah
Michael Shafir
Chapter 12. Evoking and Revoking Auschwitz: Kosovo, Remembrance and German National Identity
Christine Achinger
Chapter 13. Exile, Daughterhood and Writing: Representing the Shoah as a Personal Memory
Esther Fuchs
Notes on Contributors
Index
