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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Gert Hofmann
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland in Cork (UCC)
Rachel Magshamhráin
Affiliation:
University College Cork
Marko Pajević
Affiliation:
Queen's University
Michael Shields
Affiliation:
National University
Gert Hofmann
Affiliation:
University College Cork
Rachel MagShamhráin
Affiliation:
University College Cork
Marko Pajevic
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
Michael Shields
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland, Galway
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Summary

In this sixty-fifth anniversary year of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of Auschwitz, we are fast approaching the eightdecade death-knell for all “lebendige Erinnerung” (living, or communicative, memory) of the Nazi genocide. It would seem, then, that we have reached another critical milestone on our path backward into the future. As the last witnesses, survivors, and perpetrators pass out of real time, the imperative of Holocaust remembrance and attendant conundrum of how to express that re-presented past, seems to be entering a new and particularly perilous phase, one that will soon be exclusively characterized by “post-memory,” to borrow Marianne Hirsch's term. The idea of a dawning age of post-remembrance is associated for many with a terrible sense of urgency, fueled by the idea that such a transition may take us a step nearer to a coming time of complete erasure. The act of remembrance is now engaged in a “race against time,” requiring such massive interventions as, for example, the Survivors of the Holocaust Visual History Foundation, which aims to record and archive on film and in aeternum the memories of all remaining Holocaust survivors. So, nearly seven decades after the “break” of 1945, another major sense of caesura has come upon us, arguably even more radical than that first Zero Hour. With this sense of an impending end comes the sense that returns, recall, and representations are needed now more than ever.

Type
Chapter
Information
German and European Poetics after the Holocaust
Crisis and Creativity
, pp. 1 - 16
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2011

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