Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory [Hardcover]

Geoffrey H. Hartman (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1994 | ISBN-10: 1557861250 | ISBN-13: 978-1557861252

The recording, explanation and the inescapable task of judging great wrongs in the past presents historians with their most difficult assignment. For those who have either lived through such injustice or have been in some way responsible for it the impositions of memory are both painful and unavoidable. Memory shapes the future, and the recollections of past suffering haunt and may overwhelm generations long after. In 1938 the National Socialist Party in Germany began the final preparations for the systematic genocide of the Jews throughout Europe. For the Jews, whose national loyalties had long exceeded any ties of ethnicity, the programme of extermination was an act not merely of monstrous cruelty but of humiliation and treachery. In Holocaust Remembrance scholars, artists and writers consider the ways in which the events of 1938-1945 have been, might be, and will be remembered. The records of the Holocaust are vast and various, ranging from the museum at Auschwitz to the cartoons of Art Spiegelman, from the dark paintings of R.B. Kitaj to the elegaic stories of Primo Levi, from the filmed testimonies of the death camp survivors to revisionist historians who usurp the name of scholar in the pursuit of denial and evasion. The perspectives brought to bear here are rich and various - impassioned, objective, personal, poetical, historical and philosophical. They are united by an awareness of the dangers both of respectful silence and overwhelming information, and that only in remembering can an understanding of the past be sought and human kind redeemed from the forces of humiliation and guilt.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Remembering the Holocaust may evoke trauma, moral outrage, denial, guilt or a quest for redemptive recovery of the past, as these 21 varied essays demonstrate. Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld probes the "violent self-repression" of memory among his generation of survivors. The Eichmann trial forced Israelis to confront long-buried memories, as Israeli novelist/journalist Haim Gouri, who reported on the trial, explains. David Roskies of the Jewish Theological Seminary charts a modern Jewish literature of destruction, beginning with the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Other essays explore contemporary Germany's "near-obsession" with the Third Reich, the remnants of Poland's Jewish community, Christian theologians' reluctance to confront the Holocaust, the anti-Semitic motives of self-styled "revisionist" historians who deny that Hitler's genocide of Jews took place, and Bolivia's community of refugees from Nazi-dominated Central Europe. Among the 25 halftones are plans of Auschwitz and haunting, expressionist, cartoon-like paintings by German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who sought refuge in southern France and died in Auschwitz. Yale English professor Hartman has assembled penetrating essays that constitute a meaningful act of remembrance.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Hartman has assembled penetrating essays that constitute of ameningful act of remembrance." Publishers Weekly

"An outstanding interdisciplinary anthology. Hartman's Holocaust Remembrance is simultaneously representative of, and a major contribution to, the best literature on this subject." The Historian --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Blackwell Pub (January 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557861250
• ISBN-13: 978-1557861252
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,338,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)