ABSTRACT
The ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ campaign by the American animal rights organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) (see Chapter 6) gives insights into the mechanisms of using the Holocaust as a master trope. Holocaust uses are everywhere in politics, cultural industries, and the media. The legacy of the Holocaust continues to be worked out through a variety of cultural forms, such as Holocaust memoirs, films, art, museums, or memorials. The Holocaust has become a cultural commodity. Not only does it provide material for political debate and cultural production, but it is also functionalised in the development of an aesthetic of catastrophe – the ideas and underpinnings of how to think about, react to and represent catastrophic events – and thus influences and structures the representations of catastrophe as well as the critical discourses about catastrophic events. This chapter summarises the significance of the Holocaust transferals described in this book, and the implications of the Holocaust as an aesthetic possibility within the aesthetics of catastrophe.
