The last ten years have seen a marked increase in the frequency and kind of debates about the memory of the Holocaust. The planning of Holocaust monuments, the filing of class-action lawsuits by survivors, the flood of written and videotaped oral testimonies, and the establishment of Holocaust studies chairs and institutes have kept the Holocaust in the public eye and have all occasioned intense discussions about how it should be remembered and represented. Dora Apel’s intelligent and insightful book draws our attention to the role that art can play in understanding this phenomenon and the questions it poses about the problematic relationship of history and memory. By the 1990s, the issue for critics was less whether there could be art after Auschwitz than how to interpret the growing body of art about Auschwitz and other aspects of the Holocaust that was being produced by men and women too young to have directly experienced the war.

Apel calls these artists “secondary witnesses” and argues that their creative work represents not the Holocaust but rather its “memory effects.” Departing from this premise, Apel avoids the limitations of debates about “mirroring evil” that followed the 2002 exhibition about Nazi imagery in recent art at the Jewish Museum in New York. Instead, she sheds light on how contemporary artists situate themselves in relationship to the memory of the events, highlighting their explorations of intergenerational trauma and their renegotiations of Jewish identity in works that also comment trenchantly on contemporary racism and anti-Semitism.

Apel grounds her analyses of contemporary artworks in a wide-ranging examination of debates about the limits and possibilities of Holocaust representation. She provides a valuable survey of older polemics regarding the capacity to apprehend and communicate the genocide (can the Holocaust be translated into a familiar mimetic universe, or is it unrepresentable?) before discussing more recent commentators who are more concerned with elaborating strategies of remembrance that recognize the workings of trauma and the unreliability of narrative. It is in these ideas by Michael Rothberg, Roger Simon, and others that the author finds an interpretative key for a body of artistic work that makes problematic notions of testimonial, document, and archive, and “retells the story while telling the contemporary conditions of the telling of the story” (7).

Indeed, an imaginative recreation of the historical archive underlies the projects of Shimon Attie, whose 1992–93 Berlin installation projected old photographs of unassimilated Eastern European Jews onto the buildings in which they worked and lived before the war. In this and other installations, such as his projections of faces of German Jews onto the train tracks of Dresden station, Attie operates a double disturbance. His images not only remind Germans of the lively Jewish life and culture that existed in those urban spaces, but they also gain their effect from what is not depicted: the terror and violence of the forcible removal of that Jewish life and culture during the war. Attie’s ghostly photos, which raise the specter of the ill-tolerated Other, draw a parallel with contemporary German treatment of Turks, Eastern Europeans, and other foreigners. Yet this is no simple history lesson: Attie’s images are obviously edited, blacked-out in parts, with jagged edges that allude to the ruptured existences of and ravaged memories about Germany’s Jewish population.

This same approach to the historical artifact can be seen in artists whose work interrogates the format of the testimonial. The art of Pier Marton and Jeffrey Wolin subverts the notion of the testimonial as the delivery of truth, which has in countless videos and documentary films been reinforced by the mechanism of the invisible listener. Marton videotapes only secondary witnesses, highlighting their uncertain memories, and includes himself among the participants. Wolin implicates himself in the narratives of Holocaust survivors, combining and often surrounding photographic portraits of survivors who display their tattooed camp identification numbers with his own handwritten transcriptions of their oral testimonies. 

Perhaps the best known of the artists covered by Apel is Jeffrey Friedman, whose photographs of Auschwitz and other concentration camps document their life as memory sites while consistently revealing the constructed nature of this documentation. Even as he captures the quotidian and ordinary aspects of these extraordinary places through pictures of concession stands and tour buses, his use of foreshortened lenses (creating a halo effect), his inclusion of shadows of the photographic apparatus, and his insertion of himself as a subject alongside tourists and local residents all challenge the objective ethos of documentary photography.

Apel also explores the psychological and historical imperatives behind the reenactment of Holocaust events, mainly through the work of Susan Silas and Mikael Levin. Reenactments, the author states, express both “affinity and distance, embrace and resistance” (3), and both are present in Silas’s 1998 redoing of the Hembrechts camp death march, in which 580 women, mainly Hungarian Jews, were forced to march almost two hundred miles in twenty-two days with very little food or water. Silas, who is of Hungarian Jewish origins, has commented that the core of the work was the reenactment of the walk, and the still and video images that documented it simply byproducts of the experience. Yet those images perfectly demonstrate the relationship to Holocaust history that is the domain of the secondary witness: self-portraits in the convex traffic mirrors that now dot the roadside reproduce the removed and distorted memory and the impossibility of reclaiming experience that marks the Holocaust interrogations of those born after 1945.

The book’s final chapters explore the work of young artists who use their own bodies as memory sites. In different ways, both Rachel Schreiber and Marina Vainshtein explore the question of what Jewish identity means today, especially in relation to past histories of victimhood, but also given traditional Judaism’s difficulty in accepting female emancipation and sexual diversity. Schreiber, a video artist, has treated her body a stage to reenact Holocaust experience, most notably in her 1996 Please Kill Me; I’m a Faggot Nigger Jew in which she cuts and shaves her pubic hair and then writes “Jude” on her naked pubis, reenacting the violent and dehumanizing bodily interventions and markings that Jews and others in the camps had to endure. The tattoos are permanent and visible in the case of Vainshtein. Her inked body, which is covered with graphic images of every stage of Jewish extermination in the camps, protests the loss of the memory of Jewish persecution at a time of renewed racism. Yet her new-generation punk styling—multiple piercings, Mohawk-haircut, and her open lesbianism—as well as her decision to tattoo her body in opposition to Jewish law performs a new identity for the Jew that resists the status of German victim and the strictures of Jewish tradition.  

As Apel notes, Memory Effects is also a very personal book. It begins and ends with the author’s reflections on her own identity as a child of Holocaust survivors and on the lapses, contradictions, and enigmas that marked the transmissions of her own family’s Holocaust memories. It is this intimate experience with intergenerational testimony (and trauma), as much as her skills as an art historian, that inform the sensitive and insightful readings of artworks that call attention to the ways that both memory and history are lived through time.