Bilder av Förintelsen. Mening, minne, kompromettering
Images of the Holocaust. Meaning, Memory, Incrimination
Author
Summary, in English
Part 2,"Memory" (chapter 4-5), first considers the visualisation of Holocaust memory in the forms of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, Holocaust monuments (Buchenwald and Berlin), and photographs of Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. These are analysed with regard to different understandings of Holocaust memory as either "traumatic" or "constructed", borrowed from historiography. The thesis then proceeds to examine Holocaust memory in digital media, such as the Internet and CD-rom, in which the technology seems to foster ideas about memory as programmable and re-programmable. The author detects a shift from "historical" to "virtual" Holocaust memory, when the interactive features of digital media are combined with a pedagogy that stresses empathetic insight and identification. Clashes between competing collective memories over official Holocaust monuments are contrasted to the simultaneous individualisation and universalisation of Holocaust memory in the new media.
Part 3, "Incrimination" (chapter 6-8), examines the visual representation of Nazism and forms an antipole to the focus on processes of meaning and identification in the previous parts of the book. "Incrimination" is here understood as a kind of cultural, negative signification of a secondary order, a "counter-meaning" always consisting of the destruction of a pre-existing positive meaning or identity. From this perspective, the author discusses various forms of the visualisation of Nazism, including some adopted by the Nazi regime itself as well as today’s post-modern appropriations of the aesthetics and iconography of Nazism. From the conflict within Nazism over German Expressionism to the censoring of contemporary artists like Melvin Charney, Zbigniew Libera and Ronald Jones from international exhibitions, this study points to the problems involved in visually defining Nazism and its ties to both European cultural traditions and to modernity.
Department/s
Publishing year
2002
Language
Swedish
Document type
Dissertation
Publisher
Palmkrons förlag
Topic
- Art History
Keywords
- Visual Studies
- Visual Culture
- Holocaust Representation
- Holocaust Art
- Holocaust Studies
- Documentary Photography
- Abject Art
- NO!art
- Monuments
- Psychoanalytic Theory
- Julia Kristeva
- Jacques Lacan
- Abjection
- Sublimation
- Sacrifice
- Katharsis
- Apocaly
- Art history
- Konsthistoria
- Contemporary history (since 1914)
- Nutidshistoria (från 1914)
Status
Published
Supervisor
- [unknown] [unknown]
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISBN: 91-89638-00X
Defence date
24 May 2002
Defence time
10:00
Defence place
Dept. of Art History, Biskopsgatan 5, room 314 (the gray building, 3:d floor)
Opponent
- Bent Fausing