ABSTRACT
This paper explores the ways in which contemporary Germans engage in diverse artistic and social forms of Holocaust memory work today that repudiate the ethos of silence and forgetting that dominated the post-war decades. The examples considered include W.G. Sebald's hybrid novel Austerlitz, Gunter Demnig's ‘stumbling stones’ action art project, and the installation ‘We Were Neighbors’ in the Berlin-Schöneberg town hall. These examples employ narrative as a way of opening up channels for the belated process of mourning; they engage their work through ‘Spurensuche’, that is, the process of searching for the traces of evidence of National Socialist crimes that were covered up and forgotten; and they confront critically the repression of memory of the National Socialist crimes in the post-war years.
