Toys and Affect: Identifying with the Perpetrator in Contemporary Holocaust Art

NOTES

• A slightly different version of this essay appeared in: Mirroring Evil, 2001, New York: Jewish Museum/Rutgers University Press (exhibition catalogue).
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• The series Comic Sketches consists of the following short stories: le mariage des parents, La maladie du grand-pere, les souvenirs du grand-pere, la toilette du matin,. La mort du grand-pere, la grosesse de la mere, le baiser cach, le grand-pere a la peche, les bonnes notes, l'horrible decouverte, la toilette de la mere, le recit du pere, lanniversaire, la naissance de Christian, le baiser honteux, la tache dencre, la durete du pere, la premiere communion, la visite du docteur, le pere a la chasse, la grimace punie.
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• “An Interview with Christian Boltanski”, P Bradley, C Esche & N White, in Christian Boltanski: Lost, 1994, Glasgow: CCA, pp 3–4.
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• The French expression interpretation means interpretation in the sense of explanation but also performance. The quote comes from D Renard, “Entretien avec Christian Boltanski”, in Boltanski (exh. cat.), Paris: Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, p 85.
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• See for the documentation of this controversy Katzir's catalogue Your Coloring Book: A Wandering Installation, 1998, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum.
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• A transcript of this very emotional discussion can be found in Bulletin Trimestriel de la Fondation Auschwitz. No Special–60, juillet-septembre 1998, pp 225–240.
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• See for an elaboration of this argument, my book, Caught by History: Holocaust effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory, Stanford University Press 1997.
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• Sander Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films”, Critical Inquiry, 26, Winter 2000, p 304.
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• S Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable”, in Yale French Studies, 63, 1982, p 28.
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• Z Libera, “Discussion”, Bulletin Trimestriel de la Fondation Auschwitz No Special–60, Juillet—Septembre 1998, p 225.
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• Van Alphen, “Caught by History: How this Book Came About”, in Caught By History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory, Stanford University Press, 1997, pp 1–15.
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• Felman, p 41.
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• ibid., p 27.
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• ibid., p 27.
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• ibid., p 31.
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• The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the general editorship of J Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, vol XXII, p 149; quoted by Felman, p 23.
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• SL Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films”, Critical Inquiry 26, Winter 2000, p 282.
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• T Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter”, in Writing and The Holocaust, Berel Lang (ed), New York: Holmes & Meijer, 1988, p 217.
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• See for second-person narrative: M Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, chapter “Second-Person Narrative”, pp 165–208.
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• See on the issues of second-person narrative M Bal, Chapter 6.
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• R Rothman, Mourning and Mania: Roee Rosen's Live and Die as Eva Braun, in R Rosen, Live and Die as Eva Braun: Hitler's Mistress in the Berlin Bunker and Beyond. An illustrated Proposal for a Virtual-Reality Scenario. Not to Be Realised, 1997, Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, unpaginated.
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• K Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, New York: Routledge, 1996.
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• Although formalist art has been in retreat since the 1960s, aesthetics has not quite followed suit. In general, aesthetics appears to have great difficulty in leaving Kantian disinterestedness behind.
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• Andrew Boardman, Zbigniew Libera, Warsaw 1998.
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• J Young, “David Levinthal's Mein Kampf: Memory, Toys, and the Play of History”, in David Levinthal, Mein Kampf, New Mexico: Twin Palms Publishers, 1996, p 72.
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• Janet who was working at the beginning of this century, was of influence on the theories of Sigmund Freud. See for a discussion of Janets ideas: BA van der Kolk and O van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma”, in C Caruth (ed), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp 158–182.
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• Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 1995, ibid, p 160.
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• ibid.
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• M Bal, “Introduction”, in M Bal, J Crewe, and L Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, Hanover: University of New England Press, 1999, p ix.
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• J Bennett, “The Aesthetics of Sense-Memory: Theorising Trauma through the Visual Arts”, in F Kallenbeck & P Weibel (eds), Trauma und Erinnerung/Trauma and Memory: Cross Cultural Perspectives, Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2000, p 87.
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• Bennett, ibid., p 83.
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• E Santner, “History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma”, in S Friedlander (ed), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, p 144.
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• ibid., p 146.
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• M Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
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