Memory and Postwar Memorials Confronting the Violence of the Past

by Silberman, Marc; Vatan, Florence

• ISBN13: 9781137343512
• ISBN10: 1137343516
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-12-05
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The twentieth century witnessed genocides, ethnic cleansing, forced population expulsions, shifting borders, and other disruptions on an unprecedented scale. This book examines the work of memory and the ethics of healing in post authoritarian societies that have experienced state-perpetrated violence. Focusing on global memorialization practices and local specificities, the contributors explore trans-generational encounters, performances, rituals, and diverse forms of remembrance and reconciliation in the aftermath of violent historical events: WWII, the Holocaust and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stalinism in post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, collaboration in Vichy France, the Civil War in Spain, and apartheid in South Africa.

Author Biography

Marc Silberman is a Professor of German and Affiliate Professor of Film Studies and Theater and Drama at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. He is the author of books on the German cinema, the dramatist Heiner Müller, and the East German novel; he also edited and translated Brecht on Film and Radio and recently co-edited the volume Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe.

Florence Vatan is an Associate Professor of French and affiliate member of the German faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. She is the author of Robert Musil. Le 'virtuose de la distance' and Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, as well as numerous articles on nineteenth-century French literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction – After the Violence: Memory; Florence Vatan and Marc Silberman
PART I: COMPETING MEMORIES
1. The Nuremberg Trials as Cold War Competition: The Politics of the Historical Record and the International Stage; Francine Hirsch
2. The Cube on Red Square: A Memorial for the Victims of Twentieth-Century Russia; Karl Schlögel
3. Reactive Memory: The Holocaust and Flight and Expulsion of Germans; Bill Niven
4. Beyond Auschwitz? Europe's Terrorscapes in the Age of Postmemory; Rob van der Laarse
PART II: STAGING MEMORY
5. Narrative Shock and Polish Memory Remaking in the Twenty-first Century; Geneviève Zubrzycki
6. Grievability and the Politics of Visibility: The Photography of Francesc Torres and the Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War; Ofelia Ferrán
7. Doing Memory in Public: Post-apartheid Memorial Space as an Activist Project; Robyn Autry
8. Mnemonic Objects: Forensic and Rhetorical Practices in Memorial Culture; Laurie Beth Clark
PART III: RE-MEMBERING MEMORY
9. Toward a Critical Reparative Practice in Post-1989 German Literature: Christa Wolf's City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010); Anke Pinkert
10. Paradoxes of Remembrance: Dissecting France's 'Duty to Memory'; Richard J. Golsan
11. After-Words: Lessons in Memory and Politics; Marc Silberman