Andrew S. Gross & Susanne Rohr. Comedy – Avant-Garde – Scandal: Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo: Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation

Abstract

Andrew S. Gross’s and Susanne Rohr’s Comedy – Avant-Garde – Scandal: Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History and the conference volume The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo: Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation, which was edited, together with Sophia Komor, also by Susanne Rohr – are expressions of “the change from studying (or recalling, or representing) the Holocaust [in the fifties and sixties] to ‘Holocaust Studies’, i.e. to the study of these representations, some thirty years later” that Heinz Ickstadt pinpoints in his perceptive and personal conclusion to the conference volume as “a new and different – perhaps: a generational – turn” (The Holocaust 252) in the process of coming to terms with the challenge of representing the Holocaust. “Why I Don’t Like Holocaust Studies Yet See No Escape From It”, the challenging title of Ickstadt’s contribution, perfectly captures the uneasiness and contradictions that circumscribe Holocaust art and Holocaust studies, which tread the fine line between creating a barrier against “the very fear of ‘forgetting’ by remembering again and again” (253) and the “routinization” and “ritualization” of public memory and memorial culture by artistically aestheticizing and scholarly dissecting – and thereby running the risk of minimizing or even trivializing (254) – the horrors of the gas chambers. An unjustifiable and disrespectful aestheticization of a terrible and unique moment in Jewish history: that is the verdict against much of the shocking Holocaust art of “the long 1990s – the period extending from the fall of the Berlin Wall on 11-9-1989 to the attack on the World Trade Center on 9-11-2001” (12). Gross and Rohr refrain from such condemnation and discuss and conceptualize 1990s Holocaust art as expression and symptom of a major shift not only in the artistic rendering of the Holocaust but also in the cultures of the (newly unified) West after 1989 in their impressive study of the phenomenon. The two critics argue that the 1990s saw a radical aesthetic change from efforts of a historical to a commemorative approximation of the Holocaust, which lead to a “new commemorative art” that “forges a connection to the past by transversing the terrain of viewer discomfort, adopting avant-garde (or ... comic) strategies for the purpose of traditional, even sentimental acts of remembrance” (11). The study is grounded in history by linking the spectacular change in artistic Holocaust renderings to the end of the Cold War controversy between the socialist/communist and the capitalist