ABSTRACT
The revelations of the camps, especially in Poland, and the aerial destruction of cities dominated memory production after 1945. The difficulties of analysing holocaust memory in the global context of total war is related to a concept of totalism, and the work of Hannah Arendt and her political sociology of ‘totalitarian’ regimes. Emphasis is placed on witness, place and time, and visits to the camps lead to a detailed analysis of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah as a key memory text and also the views of Shoshana Felman’s The Voice on testimony, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, Anselm Kiefer’s art, as well as Terence Des Pres on survivor literature. Inevitably holocaust memory cannot be separated from the history of Israel as a state since 1948. The problematics of the Shoah business, Anne Frank’s diary, the Eichmann trial (1961) and other Holocaust texts and monuments (Yad Vashem) are seen in the context of Auschwitz: acts of witness and the controversies over memories of the camps. In terms of experiencing sites of memory, and stewarding of atrocity and avoiding the danger of commodification, overall the chapter stresses the voice of the civilian victim and the role of the witness in memorializing, and that the European Holocaust is a template for a global concept of modern genocide, and a postnational cipher for barbarism.
