Holocaust As the Visual Subject: The Problematics of Memory Making Through Visual Culture (Report‪)‬

Introduction This paper explores the role of visual culture particularly in enabling Holocaust memories where the need to remember and forget and the urge to integrate history without it becoming a debilitating device encapsulates three fundamental themes: the spiritual struggle for a positive German national identity (post-1945), the need for European Jewry to renounce the label of victimhood and above all to repudiate the charge of evil which had besieged modernity after Holocaust. In interrogating visual culture and trauma this paper explores how trauma is often reliant on material formats to translate both its occurrence and its burden on the human condition. The dialectical strands of universalisation versus particularization of the Holocaust makes it a difficult project to articulate both discursively and visually and often Holocaust memorials whether in Germany or other parts of the West have only materialized after long periods of deliberation as to their role, function and message to societies. A miscarriage of any commemoration objective through art or artefact is often perceived as transgressing the sacred realms associated with the Holocaust.