Mass Media and Holocaust Memory
Examples of the “Holocaust Metaphor”
El Periódico, 2000
Jan and Aleida Assmann
Communicative Memory – everyday communication, temporal
horizon of eighty to hundred years, strongly influenced by
contemporaries of the remembered events. SHORT TERM MEMORY.
Cultural Memory – “body of reusable texts, images, and rituals
specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to
stabilize and convey that society’s self-image.” LONG TERM
MEMORY. - (Equivalent to Tradition).
“It is not the literal past that rules us. It
is images of the past”
George Steiner
How did commercial mass media
influence Holocaust memory?
1959
1979
1991
HOLOCAUST is an insult
to those who perished,
and those who survived.
The Holocaust has to be
remembered but not as
a TV Show.
Elie Wiesel (Survivor)
1979
SCHINDLER’S LIST is one
of the most powerful
films of all time,
capturing the true horror
of the Holocaust.
Anna Bergman (Survivor)
2013
ARE ALL GENRES APPROPRIATE?
Class debate:
HOLOCAUST MADE IN HOLLYWOOD?
POSITIVE (Optimists) vs. NEGATIVE (Apocalyptics)
Further questions for discussion:
-
Is there a “memory industry”? (Critical Theory)
Is there a serious memory vs. a trivial memory?
Is there true vs. false memory?
What are the effects of these representations?
Relation between comunicative memory and
cultural memory.
- Do these products energize discourses of
traumatic memories or block insight into specific
and other histories (Huyssen).
UNITED STATES
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
“Even if the Holocaust has been endlessly commercialized, that does not
mean that all commercialization inevitably trivializes it as a historical event.
There is no pure space, existing outside the culture of commodities, no
matter how much we would like for it to exist. Thus, a great deal depends
on the specific
strategies of representation and commercialization and the context in
which both are staged”
Andreas Huyesen
Memory can be transmitted to those who
were not actually there to live an event.
Post-memories are memories in their own right.
Post-memory marks a particular turn-of-century moment,
marked by looking backward rather than ahead and
defining the present in relation to a troubled past rather
than initiating new paradigms.
POST-MEMORY
Marianne Hirsch
Post-memory is a consequence of traumatic recall but
(unlike post-traumatic stress disorder) at a generational
remove.
Relationship to the formative events of the XX century has
been defined by the powerful but mediated forms of
knowledge