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  • Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory
  • Dora Apel
Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory, edited by David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. 336 pp. $75.00.

Visualizing the Holocaust is the first volume in the series Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual, edited by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke, and consists of a series of twelve essays, all but one of which began as projects for a DAAD Summer Seminar for College Teachers at Cornell University. In [End Page 199] his introduction, David Bathrick distinguishes the nature of this volume from anthologies such as Visual Culture and the Holocaust (2001), edited by Barbie Zelizer, by noting that the latter explores the myriad and diverse settings in which the Holocaust has come to be visually represented, while Visualizing the Holocaust focuses on "core philosophical and methodological issues underlying the field as a whole" (p. 16). It is also different from anthologies that are sustained explorations of artistic representation such as Absence/Presence: Critical Essays on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust (2005) edited by Stephen Feinstein, Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (2003), edited by Shelley Hornstein, Laura Levitt, Laurence J. Silberstein, and Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (2003) edited by Shelly Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz. Visualizing the Holocaust focuses primarily on Holocaust film and photography, with some attention to architecture and art, and should be read in the context of works such as Terri Ginsburg's Holocaust Film: The Politics and Aesthetics of Ideology (2007).

Visualizing the Holocaust maintains an overlapping set of references, particularly the work of Marianne Hirsch and her notion of postmemory, and is framed by controversies surrounding films such as Shoah and Shindler's List. But it goes beyond an analysis of narrative to examine more complex relationships between image, affect, and ideology. Like many contemporary visual artists today who grapple with the continuing legacy of the Holocaust, the new generation of authors dealing with Holocaust representation theoretically attempts to challenge or complicate taboos surrounding Holocaust representation and claims of unknowability and unrepresentability. Visualizing the Holocaust thus represents an important contribution to the literature on Holocaust representation.

The essays often address similar subjects from different perspectives. Brad Prager writes on perpetrator photographs in Holocaust narratives, particularly W. G. Sebald's books Austerlitz (2001) and The Emigrants (1992), while Daniel Magilow examines perpetrator photographs through Heinrich Jöst's Warsaw ghetto pictures; Sven-Erik Rose examines the theoretical use of Auschwitz in the work of Frederic Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, and Georges Didi-Huberman through the debates on Claude Lanzmann's work, while Michael D'Arcy deconstructs Lanzmann's own approach to Shoah (1985); David Brenner examines the tragicomic in Holocaust cinema, focusing on Radu Mihaileanu's film Train of Life (1998), while Michael Richardson looks at the function of parody and satire in selected comic representations of Hitler in film and television, beginning with Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1941). In other essays, Elke Heckner writes on the transmission of memory through trauma and Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin [End Page 200] (2001) as an "architecture of trauma"; L. J. Nicoletti examines the iconic representation of Anne Frank in American culture, including visual art projects by Ellen Rothenberg and Rachel Schreiber; and Karyn Ball writes on Adorno's Bilderverbot and the German reception of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). Turning to documentaries, Eric Kligerman rereads Alain Resnais' 1955 documentary Night and Fog through Paul Celan's translation of Claude Cayrol's commentary, while Darcy Buerkle analyzes Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman's film The Specialist (1999), based on Eichmann's 1961 trial, in terms of the affective results of both what is onscreen and what is off-screen; Jaimey Fisher writes on Hungarian filmmaker and video artist Péter Forgács and his experimental reworking of home movies in Free Fall (1996). Whether exploring melodrama, comedy, or documentary in film, or the effects of other visual media, these essays transcend the anxieties surrounding Holocaust representation that began with Adorno's aesthetic interdiction and are attuned to the fruitful possibilities of analyzing the production and reception...

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