The claims of memory

by Caroline Alice Wiedmer

More than half a century after World War II, Germany and France still struggle to understand the Holocaust and to confront their roles in the tragedy. Through an interpretation of a wide array of contemporary cultural texts - including memorials and memorial sites, museums and exhibits, national commemorations, books, and films - Caroline Wiedmer traces the evolution of an often conflicted postwar politics of memory in these two nations. Her provocative analyses of sites of memory and of policies and national debates reveal the deep-seated ambivalence of both France and Germany in the face of a desire to forget the horrors of the Holocaust and the need to remember them.