The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this header included, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribed institution . No copies of this work may be distributed electronically outside of the subscribed institution, in whole or in part, without express written permission from the JHU Press . Edited by James E. Young.
Memorials are a means by which societies unceasingly shape their pasts.
They provide a focus for public commemoration of individual memories, guiding them into channels that serve changing public purposes. The channels are determined and redetermined through time in often conflicting negotiations between the authority who authorized, designed, and constructed a memorial, the groups who use it for commemorative purposes, and the memorial itself, including changes made to it or to its site. In The Art of Memory exhibit, however, the audience for memorials takes center stage, for the exhibit seeks to make viewers aware of how historical contingencies affect the memories that monuments evoke. The Jewish character of the Holocaust figures centrally in the most provocative essays in the catalogue, since the content of memorial visits often depends on whether this character is suppressed or evoked. Consequences of the suppression of Jewish memory are described by Claudia Koonz, Konstanty Gebert, Jochen Spielmann, and Zvi Gitelman in essays on East German, Polish, and Soviet memorials.