At Memory′s Edge – After Images of the Halocaust in Contempory Art & Architecture: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture - Hardcover

Young, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300080328 ISBN 13: 9780300080322

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2000

Synopsis

James Young explores Germany's fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, and also asks how late 20th century artists can remember an event they never knew directly but which is shaped through images in films, photographs and museums.

About this title

Review:

At Memory's Edge is an ambitious and provocative collection of essays whose topics range from Art Spiegelman's Maus books to, most notably, the Berlin Holocaust memorial. Author James E. Young, an American professor of English and Judaic Studies, was the only foreigner and the only Jew on the German committee that selected the design for the memorial. His behind-the-scenes account of this project's development offers sophisticated answers to some very difficult questions. Young doggedly asks how Berlin can remember a group of people who are no longer at home there, and how Germany can, or should, remember the extermination of Jews that was once committed in that nation's name. The author's answers to such questions may appear excessively doctrinaire to some readers. Early in the book, for example, Young asserts that "memory-work about the Holocaust cannot, must not, be redemptive in any fashion". But his rationale for such sweeping pronouncements is very persuasive. The book is also lavishly illustrated with photographs and architectural drawings that will be of great value to all readers who accept the challenge that Young has assumed "the task of contemplating how to understand a formative historical tragedy of which first-hand memory is rapidly fading". --Michael Joseph Gross

Review:

"The brilliance of James Young's theoretical insights is matched by his outstanding knowledge of the vast array of representations of the Shoah and by his artistic and literary sensitivity. This will become an influential book." Saul Friedldnder

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0300080328
• ISBN 13: 9780300080322
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 252