Visual representations are an essential but highly contested means of understanding and remembering the Holocaust. Photographs taken in the camps in early 1945 provided proof of and visceral access to the atrocities. Later visual representations such as films, paintings, and art installations attempted to represent this extreme trauma. While photographs from the camps and later aesthetic reconstructions differ in origin, they share goals and have raised similar concerns: the former are questioned not as to veracity but due to their potential inadequacy in portraying the magnitude of events; the latter are criticized on the grounds that the mediation they entail is unacceptable. Some have even questioned any attempt to represent the Holocaust as inappropriate and dangerous to historical understanding. This book explores the taboos that structure the production and reception of Holocaust images and the possibilities that result from the transgression of those taboos. Essays consider the uses of various visual media, aesthetic styles, and genres in representations of the Holocaust; the uses of perpetrator photography; the role of trauma in memory; aesthetic problems of mimesis and memory in the work of Lanzmann, Celan, and others; and questions about mass-cultural representations of the Holocaust. David Bathrick is professor of German at Cornell University, Brad Prager is associate professor of German at the University of Missouri, and Michael D. Richardson is associate professor of German at Ithaca College.
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In Visualizing the Holocaust, a new generation of critics takes on the iconic images, the previously taboo topics, and the painful legacies of the Nazi genocide. From photography to film, from victims and perpetrators to the postmemory generation, from Hollywood blockbusters to avant-garde aesthetics, the critical texts, figures, and debates that define the visual culture of the Holocaust are all addressed in this wide-ranging, but remarkably coherent collection. -- Michael Rothberg, author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation and co-editor of The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings From the initial photos and motion pictures of the death camps to the most current artistic and cinematic representations, this book subtly explores the philosophical, historical, and aesthetic meaning of the images, familiar and unfamiliar, through which we see or refuse to see the Holocaust. This wide-ranging volume displays the state of the art of scholarly criticism on the place of the visual image, as icon, as symbol, and as taboo, in our contemporary imagination and memory of mass extermination. --Anson Rabinbach, author of In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment
About the Author
Cornell University Brad Prager is associate professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
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