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Oren Baruch Stier . Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory . New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press , 2015. 239 pp.
Book Reviews: Modern Era
Holocaust-era railway cars, the famously cynical Nazi slogan "Arbeit macht frei," Anne Frank, and "the six million" are the four Holocaust icons that form the subject of Oren Baruch Stier's insightful new book, Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory. Stier's choice of the word "icon" to describe these Holocaust symbols is careful: the four selected symbols emerge as dense yet consumable crystallizations of cultural signification and memory. They possess a unique power to express certain essential characteristics of the Holocaust. Stier demonstrates that these symbols resemble sacred relics and religious symbols both in structure and in the meanings and emotions they generate among their viewers. Furthermore, as representations rooted in actual historical contexts and events of the Shoah, these icons draw their power from an authentic past while contributing, through the strengthening of memory, to the authentication of that past as a real presence in contemporary culture. The icons thus possess the power to stand in for a complex range of events and experiences, and they enable the unfolding of greater constellations of meanings and narratives. There is a danger, though, that it is precisely through this vaster potential that the symbols could lose their specificity and the natural ties to their historical contexts, becoming too general and reductive to usefully inspire further remembrance.
Here the necessity and timeliness of Stier's undertaking becomes clear: his intent is to restore to each icon its history and context; to place each, once again, within the parameters...