Present Pasts

Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York--three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city's reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center.
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Present pasts - media, politics, amnesia; Monumental seduction - Christo in Berlin; The voids of Berlin; After the war - Berlin as palimpsest; Fear of mice - the Times Square redevelopment; Memory sites in an expanded field - the Memory Park inBuenos Aires; Doris Salcedo's memory sculpture unland - the Orphan's Tunic; Of mice and mimesis - reading Spiegelman's Maus with Adorno; Rewritings and new beginnings - W.G. Sebald and the literature on the air war; Twin memories - after-images of nine/eleven.