Mass Media and Holocaust Memory
Examples of the “Holocaust Metaphor”
El Periódico, 2000
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).
Source: Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995), p. 132
Jan and Aleida Assmann
“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
POST-MEMORY Marianne Hirsch
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 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
