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| by Michael Bernard-Donals |
Bibliographic information
| Title | Forgetful Memory: Representation and Remembrance in the Wake of the Holocaust |
| Author | Michael Bernard-Donals |
| Publication Date | 12/31/08 |
| Subject | Historiography,History,Holocaust Studies,Literary Theory |
| Pages | 215 |
Examines the role of forgetfulness in our understanding of the Holocaust.
Much of the discussion surrounding the Holocaust and how it can be depicted sixty years later has focused on memory. In Forgetful Memory, Michael Bernard-Donals focuses on the relation between memory and forgetfulness, arguing that memory and forgetfulness cannot be separated but must be examined as they complicate our understanding of the Shoah. Drawing on the work of Josef Yerushalmi, Maurice Blanchot, David Roskies, and especially Emmanuel Levinas, Bernard-Donals explores contemporary representations of the Holocaust in memoirs, novels, and poetry; films and photographs; in museums; and in our contemporary political discourse concerning the Middle East. Ultimately, Forgetful Memory makes the case that we should give up on the idea of memory as a kind of representation, and that we should see it instead as an intersection of remembrance and oblivion, as a kind of writing, where what remains at its margins-what is left unwritten-is at least as important as what is given voice.
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Michael Bernard-Donals ---
Michael Bernard-Donals is Nancy Hoefs Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has written and edited several books, including (with Richard Glejzer) Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation, also published by SUNY Press, and An Introduction to Holocaust Studies.
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"This is a lucid and eloquent and consistently perceptive book. Exploring the vexed relationship between memory and forgetting, Bernard-Donals makes a powerfully persuasive case that the memory texts of the Holocaust are not-and cannot ever be-entirely credible. For some in Holocaust Studies today, to claim that memory texts have something necessarily figurative or false about them is to open the worrisome floodgates to Holocaust denial. Forgetful Memory refuses to give in to such worries. Yes, testimony necessarily fails to forge a transparent or seamless relation to the events to which testimony bears witness. But if we embrace the forgetful void at the heart of memory, we thus enable spontaneous acts of remembering that testify not to the certainties of a traumatic past but to the complexities involved in our memorial encounters with traumatic events themselves. What Forgetful Memory makes plain is that the future of such events-their lessons-are bound up ineluctably with these complexities." - Paul Eisenstein, author of Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject
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