Overview
- Develops our understanding of the notion of ‘memorial ethics’
- Explores Levinas’s ‘ethics as optics’ in Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum
- Creates a virtual ‘literary extension’ to Libeskind’s Museum
Part of the book series: The Holocaust and its Contexts (HOLC)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book is a detailed critical study of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum in its historical, architectural and philosophical context. Emphasizing how the Holocaust changed our perception of history, memory, witnessing and representation, it develops the notion of ‘memorial ethics’ to explore the Museum’s difference from more conventional post-World War Two commemorative sites. The main focus is on the Museum as an experience of the materiality of trauma which engages the visitor in a performative duty to remember. Arleen Ionescu builds on Levinas’s idea of ‘ethics as optics’ to show how Libeskind’s Museum becomes a testimony to the unpresentable Other. Ionescu also extends the Museum’s experiential dimension by proposing her own subjective walk through Libeskind’s space reimagined as a ‘literary museum’. Featuring reflections on texts by Beckett, Celan, Derrida, Kafka, Blanchot, Wiesel and Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (Celan’s cousin), this virtual tour concludes with a brief account ofLibeskind’s analogous ‘healing project’ for Ground Zero.
Reviews
“An illuminating and ethically responsive timely guide to the strands of notions, ideas, trends and controversies whose nexus is a master-work of conceptual art, the book culminates in a passage through the museum itself, reading its exhibits and listening to Libeskind’s architectural voids as to echo chambers.” (Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, author of “Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors and of Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction”)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Arleen Ionescu is Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory in the Philology Department at Universitatea ‘Petrol-Gaze’ din Ploieşti, Romania. She has published widely on modernist writers such as Joyce, Woolf and Beckett, as well as on Blanchot and Derrida. She is the author of Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality (2014).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind's Berlin Jewish Museum
Authors: Arleen Ionescu
Series Title: The Holocaust and its Contexts
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53831-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-53830-7Published: 28 February 2017
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-53831-4Published: 20 February 2017
Series ISSN: 2731-5711
Series E-ISSN: 2731-572X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 305
Number of Illustrations: 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Cultural History, Memory Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies, Architectural History and Theory, History of Modern Europe