Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia By Huyssen

Memories are important, they are a personal record of our past experiences, and could be called the history book for our life. In the poem "The Heroes You Had as a Girl", author Bronwen Wallace tells the story of a woman who meets her high school hero later in her life, reflects on her memories of him, and ultimately decides not to talk to him. The effect that this topic has on everyone is the knowledge that we can be captivated and let our memories control us, and by knowing that our memories hold that much power, it may make it more mentally efficient to make accurate, and personal decisions in a fraction of the time. The topic and overall meaning that this idea holds convey a message that resonates with the idea that memories are in fact the central hub of our decision making. People remembering memories can affect their perspective on their lives to such an extent, that they prefer to immerse their mind in their past memories rather than the current reality.

Events in the past are preserved through photographs, writings and libraries. Can memories conserve the historical occurrence to the present? The theory of memory transmission states that a “massive trauma experienced by a group in the historical past can be experienced by an individual living centuries later who shares a similar attribute of the historical group” (Balaev 151). In the story “Cattle Car Complex” by Thane Rosenbaum, Adam Posner is a second generation survivor of the Holocaust. He displays symptoms of post-trauma when stuck in an elevator. Mr. Posner’s parents were prisoners of concentration camps and their memories transmit to him “so deeply as to seem to constitute memories” of his own (Hirsch 1). The Holocaust is a “Nazi Judeocide”

The Holocaust was the result of the cumulation of years of racism and pure hatred. The Holocaust’s legacy has to be preserved if there is any chance to eliminate racial genocide. Learning about terrible events like the Holocaust helps to promote a sense of responsibility and a fight for human rights. Knowing that blind hatred can lead to genocide will help to eliminate genocide because knowing that something horrible is preventable forces a sense of responsibility for those who can to stop it. Remembering the Holocaust is a way to ensure that anything like it is never repeated because if something so terrible is preventable, everyone should help to prevent

“Holocaust remembrance depicting the horrors of Auschwitz, published in 1960, to forget would not only be dangerous but offensive to forget the dead would be akin to killing theme a second time.” It tell about The Danger of Forgetting And The Imperative of Remembrance. “Their race, religion or political views,

"This is a humbling and deeply disturbing subject for anyone who approaches it, yet we have to learn the history of the Holocaust, to know it as best we can. Remembering the Holocaust and understanding how it came about is part of making sure it never happens ag

Every act of remembering is also, intrinsically, an act of forgetting. Giving preference to particular details of an event lessens the immediacy of others. Thus, memory is its own, unique narrative culled from an almost endless sea of details present, and sometimes not present, in the original event. Memory is the past, reformulated and interpreted through the lens of the present (Huyssen 1995). When an event is commemorated through a physical act of memory, the narrowing of possible details becomes even more finely tuned, limited by the physical scope of possibilities for bodies in a three-dimensional space.

The Holocaust is remembered as one of the most vicious events in history. We have gotten the chance to try and comprehend the pain that such evil genocide left on many, through those who witnessed it. Who sorely revive it, in an attempt to make sure that the world never forgets the millions of Jews that were unjustly tortured and murdered.

In paragraph 2 of “Teaching the Holocaust” it reads, “...believes that parents are generally uncomfortable talking about difficult issues with their children,” and in the same paragraph it states, “Most parents would prefer that the schools take care of it.” So if parents do not teach it to their children, and schools decide not to teach it to their students, then how will the children know and learn from the past? In paragraph 5 of “The World Must Not Forget” it proclaims that, “It is well that the stories be told and retold, however unpleasant they are, and that the photographs be seen by all the world. The world must know and it must not forget. It must know and remember the character of the enemy we are overthrowing and make sure that the enemy never again can gain the strength to perpetuate more horrors,” this shows that although it might be brutal for some, the Holocaust matters and should not be

ways that collective memories develop, eventually concluding that the Holocaust was not a collective memory. In his argument, he gives three different definitions of a collective memory. He then explains how Americans do not meet these definitions based on geographical location, and not experiencing it first-hand. The author is trying to get across that even though the Holocaust is discussed a lot in various contexts, it is not defined as a collective memory for Americans. The Holocaust was as Novick suggests “cost-free” for Americans, meaning they did not lose anything. Germans were directly affected by this historical

Reading historical sources is an important and fundamental way of learning from history because it provides different perspectives of a particular event. If historians and scholars were to draw from one particular source, then they would have a limited perspective of an event that occurred. Therefore, this is why many different sources need to be integrated into learning about a particular subject. While learning about the Holocaust, my Professor, Gordon Dueck, has used Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, Laurent Binet’s novel, HHhH, and Norman Goda’s historical overview, The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews, 1918 – 1945, to teach us about the Holocaust. This paper will discuss the different forms of Holocaust representation that I have learned about and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of memoirs, novels, and historical overviews while learning about the Holocaust.

Memory is the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information. memories of adversity in the past will amplify the positive experiences in the present. In the excerpt from the novel, “Ru”, Kim Thuy describes her first experiences as an immigrant in Canada. She is dazzled, blinded and intoxicated by the landscape and surprised by all the unfamiliar sounds and the size of ice sculptures. She is a refugee from Vietnam and has faced many hardships in her life.

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

As a civil servant and author, Schlink attempts to alter his as well as later generations’ disposition towards not only the past, but also those who lived through the atrocities of that time. In “The Presence of the Past,” Schlink briefly describes that, while he was growing up, Germans lived under veil of the actions of the Third Reich, best seen when Schlink states, “The longer we live with the idea that the past is something we can and must come to terms with, the more paradoxical this proves to be” (35). As a part of a generation that involuntarily bears the weight of past events, Schlink believes that those who are oppressed by these burdens must not become fixated on remembering or forgetting the past, but alternatively must observe these events and learn from them. The process of learning from past events must include reflecting on history, which is best seen when Schlink asserts “It is righteous to prepare oneself for possible future situations by looking at past situations and pondering what one would have done in them” (31). Reflecting and learning from the past is integral to the healing of those who have felt its

In everyone’s life there is a moment that is so dreadful and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized by death for example it is very natural to shut off the memory in order to self-defense suppresses the awful emotional experience. Very often it is thoughtful that this neglecting and abandoning is the best way to forget. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, memory is depicted as a dangerous and deliberating faculty of human consciousness. In this novel Sethe endures the oppression of self imposed prison of memory by revising the past and death of her daughter Beloved, her mother and Baby Suggs. In Louise Erdrich’s

In a complicated and intertwining history, emotionally and politically charged, the Solovki Islands present an example where we question whether or not spaces of uncomfortable history should be preserved - and if so, to what extent? Jeffrey Olick in Collective Memory discusses the contrast between “history” and “collective memory,” where “both are publicly available social facts – the former “dead,” and the latter “living.” As history that is an “organic” relation where collective memory is the active past that forms our identities. In the Solovki Islands in Russia, this active past is present through the commemoration of daily prayer and mourning, however, this act is shadowed in dark history many are trying to forget.