Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual)

by David Bathrick

This book explores the limits and transgressions, the aesthetic quandaries and attempted solutions that have marked some of the discursive and artistic controversies about Holocaust images. It explores both the taboos - the perceived rules that structure the production and reception of Holocaust images - and the productive possibilities that inhere in the transgressions of these taboos. Its twelve essays inquire into the uses of different visual media (photography, film, painting, and architecture), aesthetic styles (realism, modernism, postmodernism), and genres (melodrama, comedy, documentary) in memorializations of the Holocaust. The essays analyze the uses of perpetrator photography in fiction and nonfiction, the role of trauma in the transmission of memory, the aesthetic problems surrounding mimesis and memory in the work of Lanzmann and Celan and others, and questions surrounding mass-cultural representations of the Holocaust, including the continued fascinations with Anne Frank, Hitler, and with Holocaust "comedies."

Paperback Bunko

First published June 1, 2008

About the author

David Bathrick is Professor of German at Cornell University. He is coeditor or New German Critique and author of numerous articles and two books: The Dialectic and the Early Brecht and Powers of Speech.