Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia

303 Pages·1995·55.858 MB·English

by  Andreas Huyssen

Twilight Memories

Tw iI i g h t Me m 0 r i e s
Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
Andreas Hllyssen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publications Data
Huyssen, Andreas.
Twilight Memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia I Andreas Huyssen
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN HB 0 415 9093411 - ISBN PB 0 415 90935 X
1. Germany-Intellectual Life. 2. German-Civilization.
3. Germany-History-1993-1945-Historiography. 4. Memory in literature.
5. German literature-History and criticism.
I. Title.
DD260J.H89 1994
943.08-dc20 94-27439
CIP
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some
imperfections in the original may be apparent.
For Nina

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Time and Cultural Memory at Our Fin de Siecle
I Time and Memory
1. Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium 13
2. After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals 37
3. Nation, Race, and Immigration: German Identities after Unification 67
4. Memories of Utopia 85
1/ Media and Culture
5. Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke's 105
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
6. Fortifying the Heart-Totally: Ernst Junger's Armored Texts 127
7. Alexander Kluge: An Analytic Storyteller in the Course of Time 145
8. Postenlightened Cynicism: Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual 157
9. In the Shadow of McLuhan: Baudrillard's Theory of Simulation 175
10. Back to the Future: Fluxus in Context 1 91
11. Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth 209
12. Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age 249
Notes 261
Index 279

Acknowledgments
Most of the essays in this book were previously published and appear here essentially
unaltered. All of these essays were originally presented as papers, and their final form
has benefited immeasurably from comments, criticisms, and, especially in the case
of the political essays on recent German events, heated debate. I could not even begin
here to acknowledge all those friends and colleagues in the United States and in
Germany who have had a hidden hand in the writing and rewriting of this book. Nor
could I give appropriate thanks to all those who provided me with the institutional
spaces to test and to refine my ideas. A summary expression of gratitude will have to
suffice, but it is no less genuine for that.
Chapters 2 and 6 were previously published in New German Critique 52 (Winter
1991) and 59 (Summer 1993); chapters 7 and the two parts of chapter 11 in October
46 (Fall 1988), 48 (Spring 1989), and 62 (Fall 1992); chapter 3 in Discourse 16.3
(Spring 1994); chapter 9 in assemblage 10 (December 1989); chapter 5 in Modernity
and the Text, edited by David Bathrick and myself (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1989); chapter 8 as a Foreword to Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); chapter 10 in In the Spirit of
Fluxus, published by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in conjunction with the
exhibition In the Spirit ofF lux us (1993); and chapter 12 in James E. Young, ed., The