Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin / Irit Dekel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dekel, Irit.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Berlin, Germany).

Mediation--Germany.

Mediation.

Psychological aspects.

Germany.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Germany--Psychological aspects.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945).

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Germany--Influence.

Physical Description:

xii, 196 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hamshire, England : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Summary:

Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin offers a novel approach to the memorial and its study through the focus on performances. Based on extensive ethnographic research, and drawing on dramaturgic theory, memory studies and theories of the public sphere, the book offers a fresh theorization of memorial experience by analyzing interaction between guides, memorial workers and visitors. Moving away from models of postmemory and post trauma approaches, the book recognizes the precariousness and variation of memory work done at the memorial through the ways visitors engages with the act of remembrance rather than with its object, namely the history of Jewish persecution and the Holocaust. This engagement explores how visitors present and perform their 'moral career' at the site, whose codes have been shaped by knowledge about and visits in this and other sites of Holocaust remembrance.

Contents:

1 Navigating Experience 25

§1 Studying the Holocaust Memorial 25

1.1 Defining experience: entering the memorial 25

1.2 The transformation of experience: pedagogy in the Information Center 31

1.3 Making the feelings concrete: the rule of experience 32

§2 The memorial space 37

2.1 Invented space 39

2.2 Empty space 42

2.3 Accidental space 43

§3 Landscape and history 46

3.1 From abundance to absence of meaning 47

3.2 Creating the palimpsest of meaning 52

3.3 Attempts toward comprehension 53

§4 Transferring trauma? 54

4.1 From architecture of trauma to architecture of feelings 55

2 Spheres of Speakability: Old and New Discursive Modes 65

§1 From cultural to communicative memory and back 69

1.1 What is speakability? 74

§2 Witnessing 76

2.1 Witnessing ourselves: Jews as ordinary people 80

2.2 Guilt/shame 82

2.3 Performing silence 93

2.4 Provoking knowledge 98

2.5 Projecting other groups and ourselves 103

Conclusion: moving from the abstract to the concrete through the Jews 115

3 Memory in Action: New Ethics of Engagement with Holocaust Memory 118

§1 Two narratives of moral experience in the memorial 120

1.1 The narrative of showing and disclosing emotions 121

1.2 The narrative of change 135

§2 Three phases in visitors' moral career 137

2.1 'Getting in': moral career and judgment in the memorial 137

2.2 'Getting lost': memorial moves, limitation and liberation 141

2.3 'Getting it': duty to oneself and the realization of the public 146

Conclusion 147

4 Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial 149

§1 Dislocating narratives: victimhood, suffering and survival 151

§2 From knowledge toward experience 161

2.1 The work of archives in the Information Center 164

2.2 From documentation to transformation to mediation 168

2.3 Types of representation and the creation of others 169.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-190) and index.

ISBN:

023036330X

9780230363304

OCLC:

834978389