ABSTRACT
Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs emphasize locations of remembrance. Modern memory focuses on various sites of remembering worldwide: the death camps, Auschwitz and Belsen; nuclear sites such as Hiroshima and other bombed cities globally; and memorials to war, such as the Shoah and the Anne Frank House. Motivations for visiting such places (memory tourism), research and museums are analysed. The memory workers who engage in the archaeology of sites of trauma (Topography of Terror and the Chemins des Dames), such as Yves Gibeau, at Craonne, are linked to new museums in Belgium (In Flanders Fields), Verdun and Peronne. Certain contested memorials, especially Lutyens’ Thiepval on the Somme, Hill 60, and in Berlin (Neue Wache and and the memorial near Potsdamer Platz) are discussed, as is Kollwitz’s universalist Grieving Parents memorial in Flanders. As a memorializing city, Berlin and its monumnets are given special focus, as is the White Rose memorial in Munich and new Holocaust museums and memorials in Berlin, Washington DC and Mauthausen. The emergence of Peace museums is considered. The film Hiroshima mon Amour is related to such transnational spaces (Japan and France) and the search for memory sites finds interpretive literature including Duras’s script. Searching literary landscapes provide internationally links to memory; Hemingway’s ‘Old Man at the Bridge’ is one example of such a site on the Ebro in Spain.
