Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre

THE EVENT WE NOW KNOW as the Holocaust has been widely represented in a variety of media, from autobiographical and scholarly books; to literature, photography, and film; to art, music, and museums. 1 There has even been an extensive discussion about whether it can be represented at all: Saul Friedlander has described it as being "at the limits of representation." 2 Even before the event itself was defined, however, it was being commemorated in monuments and memorials. Today there are many thousands of memorials marking sites of Nazi persecution and mass murder, and dozens more in cities around the world, with additional monuments being erected each year. 3 In order to investigate how the Holocaust has been memorialized, we must first delimit what we mean by the term. Not until the 1970s did "Holocaust" become the most widely used word to denote the Nazi program to systematically exterminate all Jews; since the 1990s, it has expanded to include Nazi programs to decimate or eradicate other groups as well. 4 In fact, an awareness of Nazi genocide as a program 1 The works of Lawrence Langer on Holocaust literature and testimony are standard-setting: