ABSTRACT
My central focus in this chapter is on the relation between memory and late modernity. Typically, an emergent anxiety regarding memory is dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is linked to accelerated processes of modernization, the impact of the industrial revolution, and the advent of technological warfare. These factors, as Walter Benjamin has pointed out, destroyed traditional communities and ways of life, and they also gave rise to the traumatic symptoms which became the focus of Sigmund Freud’s science of psychoanalysis. The late-nineteenth-century foregrounding of memory is often seen, in turn, as distinct from the late-twentieth-century ‘memory boom’. Between the two lie the totalitarian atrocities perpetrated under Nazism and Communism. The horrors of the Holocaust, in particular, are understandably accorded central importance in many accounts of contemporary memory studies. The Holocaust has thus commonly been seen to mark a radical break in memorial consciousness, giving rise to concerns about the very possibility of representation and remembrance, and producing a concentrated focus on the traumatic memories of those who survived its terrors.
