At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture

by James Edward Young

How should Germany commemorate the mass murder of Jews once committed in its name? In 1997, James E. Young was invited to join a German commission appointed to find an appropriate design for a national memorial in Berlin to the European Jews killed in World War II. As the only foreigner and only Jew on the panel, Young gained a unique perspective on Germany’s fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust. In this book, he tells for the first time the inside story of Germany’s national Holocaust memorial and his own role in it.

In exploring Germany’s memorial crisis, Young also asks the more general question of how a generation of contemporary artists can remember an event like the Holocaust, which it never knew directly. Young examines the works of a number of vanguard artists in America and Europe―including Art Spiegelman, Shimon Attie, David Levinthal, and Rachel Whiteread―all born after the Holocaust but indelibly shaped by its memory as passed down through memoirs, film, photographs, and museums. In the context of the moral and aesthetic questions raised by these avant-garde projects, Young offers fascinating insights into the controversy surrounding Berlin’s newly opened Jewish museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, as well as Germany’s soon-to-be-built national Holocaust memorial, designed by Peter Eisenman.

Illustrated with striking images in color and black-and-white, At Memory’s Edge is the first book in any language to chronicle these projects and to show how we remember the Holocaust in the after-images of its history.

Genres: History, Holocaust, Art, World War II, Architecture, Nonfiction, Theory

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Regardless of whether or not this book is the best research project or scholarship around, for me, it is the first of it's kind about this subject. As we have all witnessed in the design of the World Trade Tower memorial and the building of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, trying to memorialize a global tragedy is an almost impossible task. This has been true for theHolocaust in every memorial, movie, play, museum and statue ever written or built. There are some who believe trying in any way is not only impossible but even an insult to the magnitude of the horror. Some people question whether fictional books about the Holocaust should be written or read at all. Others believe the remains of concentration camps are enough to tell the story. This is a fascinating book with many examples I had never seen and some arguments and explanations I had never read. A terrific and informative book.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really thought provoking look at how the Holocaust has been represented by artists working in various mediums. He contributes two particularly useful ideas. One is the sense among these artists that part (all, even) of their experience of the Holocaust is as a story or memory passed down, that it is not their actual memory. Useful for thinking about memorializing events (particularly traumatic events) in a generation far removed from the event itself. Young also identifies the phenomenon of the "counter memorial" which speaks directly against traditional memorials. Artists, memorialists working on the Holocaust have explored representations of absence and shame, not usually considered in traditional monuments.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually post about books I read for work here, but this one was just spectacular. I wanted to slow down and read it for pleasure! I'm really excited, since I get to meet the author this afternoon at a discussion group.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

How we remember the Holocaust...or, in some cases, how we don't remember it.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

He repeates himself too often in this book. His argument is unclear, and not well supported.