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Oren Baruch Stier. Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003. xvi + 277 pp. 15 figures. ISBN 1-558-49408-1, $37.50.
Do we live in an age that looks to memory now that history has, as Fukuyama claimed and Niethammer pondered in 1992, come to an end? The question arises less from the demise of the so-called "Evil Empire" than from the deconstruction of naive realist historiography, the development of Photoshop CS among other manufacturers of simulacra, and perhaps, the foreclosure of any complicity in the series of atrocities that both preceded and followed 1992. As a consequence, do we yearn for the hoped-for realia of recollected Erlebnis (lived-experience) or the monumental materiality of sites of memory (Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire)?. Or conversely, are we anxious about possibly acting out (yet-to-be) recovered memories? The list of publications in the human sciences over the last decade throughout Europe and North America would suggest a near obsession with the means, meanings, motivations, and aftermaths of memory. Books with titles reading "Memory", "Mémoire," "Gedächtnis/Erinnerung," compete for our attention with others snouting "Trauma," "Trauma," "Trauma."
Both series converge on-and perhaps emerge from-the Holocaust. A quick check of Amazon indicates that there are over eighty works in which "Holocaust" and "memory" are conjoined. Oren Baruch Stier's Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust is another such title that attempts to find some forgotten niche in this growing archive of memorabilia. With its suggestions of preservation and of duty, the title itself, Committed to Memory, embodies the duality of the many embodiments of Holocaust memory that the author addresses. Stier examines a broad spectrum of sites in which...