At Memorys Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture

While many critics and commentators point to attempts by the ""new Germany"" to reconcile itself with its genocidal past, most accounts that make it to these shores come from an outsider's perspective. Young, author of The Texture of Memory and a University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor of English and Judaic studies, was the only foreign and only Jewish member of the commission charged with raising a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Here, he gives an insider's look at the process that got Daniel Liebeskind's celebrated museum built, and also takes stock of the echoes of the Holocaust he finds in the work of other artists and architects. A chapter on Art Spiegelman's Maus comics, which intersperse autobiography with his parents' Holocaust experiences, finds an ingenious transmission of ""the living memory of survivors."" Shimon Attie's ""hypermediated relationship to the past"" translates movingly into his site-specific installations in Europe. Young British artist Rachel Whiteread is interestingly placed among fellow applicants for a German national ""memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe."" Chapters like ""Germany's Holocaust Memorial Problem--and Mine"" (discussing the recent quest for a national monument) are full of wryly sensitive and firm observations. While the book leans more toward academic criticism than general interest nonfiction, those interested in the subject will find Young's treatment accessible and engaging. (June)