ABSTRACT
In times of revolution and cultural upheaval, memorials often become victims of political iconoclasm or cultural revisionism. In nineteenth-century Paris, the fall of the Soviet Union, and with the end of Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq, memorials were pulled down as conspicuous symbols of despised regimes. Recently a more subtle irritation with memorials has entered public discourse that curiously has nothing to do with these more dramatic turns in history. “Too Many Memorials?” a journalist asked in 2007, bemoaning the banality of the recent spate of memorials across Europe [11–1, 11–2]. 1 Also in the United States, a kind of memorial exhaustion has set in, with parallels in academia, where references to memory have become ubiquitous in the humanities and social sciences. During the last generation, memory has become one of the keywords of our times, but its sources and its rather contentious journey, even over the past two decades, remain underexamined. Too often memory—the keyword—and its material manifestation—the memorial—have been combed from their cultural braid and treated separately. This chapter explores memory’s emergence as a keyword in the context of important memorials and conventions in memorialization. Rachel Whiteread, Holocaust Memorial, Vienna, Austria, 2005.
[Marc Treib]
https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315881157/9d2e583d-d92a-4a08-a15d-2619fc8f6113/content/fig11_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Peter Eisenman, Holocaust Memorial, Berlin, Germany, 2005.[Marc Treib]
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