Present Pasts

by Huyssen, Andreas

• ISBN13: 9780804745611
• ISBN10: 0804745617
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-02-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New Yorkthree late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city's reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization.

Author Biography

Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent book is Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	xi
Introduction	1	(10)
Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia	11	(19)
Monumental Seduction: Christo in Berlin	30	(19)
The Voids of Berlin	49	(23)
After the War: Berlin as Palimpsest	72	(13)
Fear of Mice: The Times Square Redevelopment	85	(9)
Memory Sites in an Expanded Field: The Memory Park in Buenos Aires	94	(16)
Doris Salcedo's Memory Sculpture: Unland: The Orphan's Tunic	110	(12)
Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno	122	(16)
Rewritings and New Beginnings: W. G. Sebald and the Literature on the Air War	138	(20)
Twin Memories: Afterimages of Nine/Eleven	158	(7)
Notes	165