Holocaust monuments

Living memorials encourage reflection about the space of traumatic events, about the remains held (or forgotten, obfuscated), and they also encourage reflection about the return of traumatic events. How are the patterns of antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia return- ing now? How, if at all, do reminders of the fascist past change the approach to the present? This essay reads two living memorials, James Friedman’s photographic series “12 Nazi Concentration Camps” and Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine, as lenses through which to analyze how we interact with spaces of trauma and how the aesthetics of these photographs or stones create vibrant memorial spaces. Examining the affective nature of interacting with traumatic landscapes, this essay argues that each space calls up distinct aspects of the Nazi genocide, and each memory tourist finds a new meaning in the process of being in these spaces. The very process of interacting with traumatic land- scapes alters the living memory or postmemory generated through the interchange between people and powerful things.

Since the late 1980s the study of “memory,” of individual and group ideas about past events, has been a rapidly growing subfield of history. While the literature on memory is large and studies of specific events abound, there is still no common ter-minology or methods.1 This essay ...