Description

Kathrin Kazmaier examines aesthetic procedures of the current culture of remembering the Holocaust. The underlying assumption is that any work of art dealing with National Socialism and the Holocaust must question itself in order to fulfil its task of appropriate remembrance. The examined works from literature, film, art and comics of pop culture and postmodernism all use poetic procedures of reservation and idiosyncrasy, which can be bundled in the concept of parody. Their procedures show a productive similarity with aesthetic-theoretical debates on the Holocaust, especially Jean-Francois Lyotard's reflections on a discourse that "connects to" the para-experience of Auschwitz, which can suspend the apparent incompatibility of pop culture/postmodernism and memory culture in the form of aesthetic constellations.