Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of MemoryMemory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York--three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization. |
Contents
Media Politics Amnesia II | 11 |
Christo in Berlin | 30 |
The Voids of Berlin | 49 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory Andreas Huyssen No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
Adorno aesthetic Alexander Kluge architecture Art Spiegelman Art Spiegelman's articulated Artie artistic Auschwitz become beginnings bombing Brandenburg Gate building capital century comic commemoration contemporary critical critique Daniel Libeskind debate decades destruction dimension Disney Doris Salcedo East Berlin East German emerged essay experience forgetting future German literature Gesamtkunstwerk global haunted historical trauma Holocaust Holocaust memory imaginary imagination issue Jewish Museum Jews Kluge Leipziger Platz literary Luftkrieg und Literatur mass culture Maus memory culture memory discourses mimesis mimetic approximation modernist modernity monu monumental museal narrative Nazi Nossack obsession Orphan's Tunic palimpsest park past political postmodern Potsdamer Platz present public memory Reich Reichstag remember repetition represent representation Richard Wagner ruins sculpture Sebald seems sense spatial Spiegelman Square story strategies structure Taliban temporal terror tion traditional trope twin towers Unland urban space Vladek void W. G. Sebald Wagner Wall York