The Politics of Memorialization: Postwar Cultural Responses to the Nazi Past and Comparative Sites

This course explores the surprisingly numerous ways in which artists, architects and art historians engaged with the Nazi past in postwar German culture. While the course will provide an overview of the extensive literature on architecture, sculpture , and paintings, we will focus especially on installations at sites of memory that memorialized victims related to the Nazi past. Taking off from this emphasis on memorialization, the last third of the course will focus on comparative examples from the memorialization of other sites of destruction and oppression, including sites in the United States, Japan, and other select examples drawn especially from the Cold War period.