This is a collection of essays, originally published in hardcover by Indiana in 1996. The essays focus on representation, memory, and the struggle for meaning in the wake of the Holocaust. In this series of interlinked essays, Geoffrey Hartman explores life and culture, meaning and memory in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Taking up the anguished question of many survivors, "has the world learned anything?", Hartman discusses issues of representation and ethics, the relations between first and second generation witnesses to the events, and how artists, scholars, and teachers have represented and transmitted these extreme experiences. How, he asks, do we convert our knowledge about the Holocaust into a thoughtful and potent understanding? Hartman takes the reader from Bitburg to Schindler's List, from Vichy to battles over public memory. He also writes in detail about his experience in the Kindertransport (in which tens of thousands of European Jewish children were sent by their families to safety in England shortly before the outbreak of the war), and his wife's experience in Auschwitz.

Author Biography

GEOFFREY HARTMAN is a noted literary critic, Sterling Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Director of the Holocaust video testimony project at Yale. He left Germany as a child as part of the kindertransport.