- = (, ( & , ( ) ! - $ 7> - " 9 ) )' + & ? ! , -* ( B - 0 # + ( ; , % #) A " #> , 2 0 This book wades into a complex critical and metacritical discourse that has expanded seemingly exponentially in recent years, namely the examination of the ways in which the Holocaust serves as subject matter for artistic works in literature, the visual arts, film, and architecture. Not only does this topic inherently engage a range of intense personal and cultural debates (many of which the authors directly address in their introduction), but the particular subtopic on which Gross and Rohr have chosen to focus - the roles of comedy, irony, and formal innovation in Holocaust-themed art - is fraught with the peril of having one’s interpretive argument obscured within a maelstrom of emotion and political controversy. It is this very fact, though, that contributes to the overall quality of this study. Gross and Rohr neither simply condemn nor extol such works as Melvin James Bukiet’s novel After, Radu Mihaileanu’s film Train of Life, or Alan Schechner’s digitally manipulated photograph “It’s the Real Thing - Self-Portrait at Buchenwald” that have “courted controversy” (9) in using the Holocaust to make art. They instead contextualize their close readings of representative texts within a broad spectrum of cultural, historical, and psychological discourses in order to move beyond the moral and ethical quandaries of representation and toward a critical perspective that attempts to explain why the end of the Cold War touched off “the most recent episode of a recurring aesthetic preoccupation with the so-called limits of representation [of the Holocaust]” (12). Their answer is that “[m]emory has, in a sense, taken the place of Cold War historical narratives as a stabilizing force in international relations” (21), and that memory as a mode of understanding the world “inevitably leads to issues of origin and provenance, but also to issues involving the social construction of the past” (23) that become part of the metaphorical foundation for artistic works. Building on a broad range of critical voices including Francis Fukuya- $$$ - $ ' & $ + & $) ! " # $% # & ma, Walter Benn Michaels, Susan Gubar, Shoshana Felman, Dominick La- Capra, and Terrence Des Pres, the authors make a compelling case that “[t]he commemorative art of the long 1990s is less concerned with verisimilitude or historical accuracy than with feeling or sentiment, often activated through the deliberately scandalous disregard of tradition, and assumed to link nonwitnesses with survivors and the events they experienced” (27). There are few areas of complaint to be found with this volume, but the one that stands out is the relative brevity of the discussions of the various primary texts the authors have chosen as examples in each of the categories of artistic expression that they examine. Gross and Rohr handle the intricacies of the critical and cultural debates surrounding Holocaust art in the past couple of decades with great skill, but at times also belabor their points somewhat in articulating their critical lens prior to directing it at actual examples of Holocaust-themed art. The chapter on film is especially noteworthy for this imbalance, with a rather cursory eight-page discussion of Mihaileanu’s film taking place only after twenty-four pages of expository context. Although this exposition is usually quite relevant - especially, but by no means exclusively, for readers unfamiliar with the complexities and controversies of trauma criticism - it dominates in the film and visual art chapters to an extent that the authors’ tone verges on becoming ethically persuasive rather than analytical. With their chosen subject matter, this distinction is inherently problematic (a point the authors themselves raise several times in the book), but it seems unnecessarily magnified in the chapters that so heavily emphasize the critical debates over the artistic creations that are the presumed subject of those debates. Furthermore, there is a repetitiveness that enters these lengthy contextual discussions by the fourth chapter of the book as the authors rehash many of the critical positions developed earlier in the book in preparation for applying them to a new category of artistic expression. Again, brief reminders of this sort are not only appropriate but also welcome in such intricate critical discourses, but these “refreshers” often occupy as much space as the interpretations of primary texts. Given the comparatively small audiences with first-hand experience of Bukiet’s After or Mihaileanu’s Train of Life or even the Jewish Museum’s Mirroring Evil exhibition of 2002 (in contrast to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, and other more canonical Holocaust art), it seems essential to treat the texts that Gross and Rohr have chosen as representative in greater depth in order to explicate how and why they perform the empathetic memorial function that the authors attribute to them. What critical effort they do expend in analyzing their primary texts is almost without exception insightful, but in only a few instances does it delve as deeply as in their discussions of important secondary texts. With that mild grievance now lodged, let me turn to the strengths of the individual sections of the book, because this is a study whose successes far outweigh its shortcomings. A succinct introductory chapter presents Gross and Rohr’s aforementioned thesis within a historical framework for the larger debate about Holocaust-related art from what the authors call the “long 1990s - that 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). Negotiating a & space within psychoanalytical, cultural, and aesthetic critical discourses, they develop their claim that the provocative Holocaust art of the “long 1990s” is “part of a widespread strategy of approximating, through emotional intensity, an event whose enormity seems to place it beyond our representational means,” and that this strategy “depend[s] on the dissonance between representational conventions and material […] to encourage sympathy between the suffering of the victim and the discomfort of the viewer” (12). This is followed by another contextualizing chapter focused specifically on the issue of the “Americanization” of the Holocaust and whether or not popular representations of the Holocaust such as The Diary of Anne Frank, Stanley Kramer’s 1965 film Judgment at Nuremberg, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have (mis)appropriated the Holocaust as a memory. Without explicitly taking a side in this ongoing debate, Gross and Rohr posit that what has been called ‘Americanization’ by such scholars as Peter Novick, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Tim Cole is not necessarily a “self-serving and thus disrespectful” (29) attempt to co-opt the rhetorical power of the Holocaust for political expedience. Instead, they argue that it sometimes marks a universalizing expansion of the Holocaust’s significance beyond the limited historical framework imposed upon it by the Cold War: “[B]y the mid-1960s [memory] has become a symbol (and symptom) of personal disruption that cannot be resolved through justice or sympathy but for that very reason is taken to have universal significance” (41). By the “long 1990s” this has become the “preferred metaphor of the traumatic past” in which the “authenticating principle” of memorial art is its “difference from more traditional representational forms” (63). Though intellectually dense and morally complicated, their argument in this regard holds together well and sets the stage effectively for their examination of particular artistic forms. The first of these subsequent chapters is perhaps also the strongest, in part because it contains the most substantive engagement with primary sources in support of the authors’ claims about the relationships between provocative form and memorializing function. In their discussion of Bukiet’s After and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Gross and Rohr suggest that both novels transcend the heavily prescribed role to which comic representations were limited in the 1980s: “[C]omedy functioned as a structural analogy to history - either its mirror image or its inversion - and was therefore taken as evincing a respect for the victims or dismissed as inadequate to evoking their trauma” (97). Both works express a “new symbolic etiquette” that is “marked by the continuity of emotion, measured as intensity, rather than by the degree of similarity between symbol and historical event,” which results in a situation in which “the real […] is what we feel” and “irony is an attempt […] to reinvoke the emotional intensity of an event that has receded into history” (80). The difference in the two books arises out of the intentions Gross and Rohr ascribe to them in using such a comic and ironic mode of representation: “Bukiet demonstrates the limits of understanding and representation and evokes laughter as an embodied but ultimately insufficient form of memory; Foer forges memorial communities or collective memories through laughter” (86). & The next two chapters apply a similar formulation of this “new symbolic etiquette” to, respectively, the visual arts and to film, using the controversial exhibition Mirroring Evil and the film Train of Life as their exemplars. As noted before, both of these chapters (especially the latter) are hampered rhetorically by a relative paucity of detail regarding primary sources. Nevertheless, Gross and Rohr still produce a convincing argument that provocative Holocaust-themed visual art performs a similar function to that found in the novels by Bukiet and Foer: “[C]ontemporary art commemorates the Holocaust by first claiming representation to be impossible. This impossibility is materialized in our own discomfort and in the rituals of scandal and protest that inevitably accompany exhibitions like Mirroring Evil” (130). Likewise, the chapter on film discusses Train of Life not just as an artistic statement in its own right but as part of a group of “[c]ontemporary representations of the Holocaust [that] are interested in calling into question even […] the seemingly objective documentary productions responsible for establishing ‘objective’ forms and standards in the first place” (139). Their contention that the film thus functions as a postmodern historiographic metanarrative parody (although Linda Hutcheon is not among the plenitude of critics mentioned in this chapter) stands up reasonably well on its own, but could certainly stand to be bolstered with further evidence. The final chapter feels at first like something of a red herring, given that it focuses primarily on a memorial devoted to the victims of the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks and not the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Gross and Rohr skillfully weave their discussion of architect Daniel Libeskind’s design for a skyscraper at the former World Trade Center site into a wider analysis of Libeskind’s commemorative architecture and its use of “void” spaces, a technique they associate with his earlier design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They claim that Libeskind’s “Memory Foundations” design for lower Manhattan “adapts an international idiom of trauma, witnessing, and victimization developed largely in the 1990s to denote the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, to what are arguably national-commemorative ends” (163). Through extended discussion of the architectural design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Gross and Rohr articulate the means by which “the memorial architecture developed by Libeskind in Berlin, and by other architects around the world has emerged as a spatial strategy for managing national political problems in terms of international moral consensus” (180). Importantly, this style of architecture “posits feeling as a point of moral consensus preceding political consensus” (180), thereby linking it to the other emotive memorial processes they outline in the previous chapters. On the whole, this is a cogent and coherent work that treats emotionally and intellectually complex material in a manner that is simultaneously respectful and intellectually honest. As such, it is a valuable contribution to a burgeoning field of scholarly inquiry. 2 0 ( . ' ! = C D *> ! C> .(-