Vol. 19 · No. 2 · Issue 59 · Summer 2001 · pp. 106-115 (10)

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

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Abstract

James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)

Where does memory reside? In the individual mind? In the texts and videotaped interviews that make that consciousness public and enable it to outlive those whose experiences they record? In the art and architecture created by a generation that lack such first-hand experience? In the places in which the events occurred? In their recent books James E. Young and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld propose that the latter two are crucial. Young takes as his subject the art and architecture of those born after the events to which they refer; Rosenfeld views the buildings and monuments of postwar Munich in terms of the ways in which they do or do not acknowledge the city's former position as the Hauptstadt der Bewegung—that is, the capital of National Socialism.