Some faculty members may choose to assign individual chapters to their classes. While the book’s bibliography provides many sources that can be paired with Memory Passages, below are some ways that I have taught the content.
Anyone researching or thinking about Holocaust memorials must read the works of James E. Young, including: The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York: Prestel, 1994); At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); “Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today.” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 267–96; The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016); and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). These books can be paired with any chapter below.
Chapter One: East and West Germany in the Postwar Years: Will Lammert and Gerson Fehrenbach. This chapter will be especially useful to anyone teaching the art and/or politics of East and West Germany in the immediate postwar period. I would recommend reading it in conjunction with Angela Lammert’s “Will Lammert’s Ravensbrück Memorial: The Image of Woman in German Post-War Public Sculpture,” Sculpture Journal 9 (2003): 94–103.
Chapter Two: A Forgotten Memorial and Philadelphia’s Survivors: Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs (1964). Classes that focus on the history of Holocaust memory in the United States, of Philadelphia, and/or of refugees/New Americans/Holocaust survivors in the US will find this chapter useful. For faculty teaching about Holocaust survivors, this chapter could be paired with Beth B. Cohen’s Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
Chapter Three: Monuments to Deported Jews in Hamburg (Hrdlicka, Rückriem, Kahl) and East Berlin (Lammert). This chapter would be a great addition to classes addressing Holocaust memory in East and West Germany in the 1980s. This essay was originally published in Gavriel Rosenfeld’s and Paul Jaskot’s Beyond Berlin: German Cities Confront the Past, and could be read in conjunction with any of the essays in that anthology. Also pertinent would be Jeffrey Herf’s Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Chapter Four: Memorial Functions: Shapiro, Kelly, LeWitt, and Serra at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993). Courses addressing contemporary art in the American context will find this chapter helpful. Vital to thinking through these works of art is Mark Godfrey’s Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), and of course, James E. Young’s chapter on the United States in Texture of Memory.
Chapter Five: Walking through Stelae: Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005). For those looking for new ways to theorize contemporary memorials, this chapter offers new approaches to thinking through memorial spaces and perambulation, and therefore would be appropriate for classes on contemporary art and contemporary Holocaust memory. I’m just now reading Erling Kagge’s Walking: One Step at a Time, which was published too late for me to include in the book, and is a thoughtful rumination on walking. In a classroom setting, it could make for an interesting pairing with this chapter. Dori Laub and Daniel Podell’s “Art and Trauma,” International Journal of Psycho- Analysis 76 (1995): 991–1005, has been influential for me to think through the connections between trauma and empty spaces in the visual arts.
Conclusion: Andy Goldsworthy; Nature and Memory at the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial. Anyone teaching courses on environmental art should consider using this chapter. To better understand this memorial, I developed an entire course entitled Art and the Environment. In addition to Goldsworthy’s terrific books, I would recommend pairing this chapter with Bryan Bannon’s “Re-Envisioning Nature: The Role of Aesthetics in Environmental Ethics,” Environmental Ethics 33, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 415–36.
Early iterations of some chapters have been published as follows.
‟From Ravensbrück to Berlin: Will Lammert’s Monument to the Deported Jews (1957/1985),” Images: A Journal of Jewish Arts and Culture (Nov. 2016): 1–24.
“‘Never bow your head, be helpful, and fight for justice and righteousness: ‘Nathan Rapoport and Philadelphia’s Holocaust Memorial (1964),” Journal of Jewish Identities vol. 9 no. 2 (July 2016): 159–192.
“Marking Absence: Remembrance and Hamburg’s Holocaust Memorials,” in Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Past, eds. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Paul B. Jaskot (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 251–272.
Not included in the book, but frequently cited:
“Israeli Holocaust Memorial Strategies at Yad Vashem: from Silence to Recognition”, Art Journal (Summer 2006) vol. 65 no. 2: 102–122.
Memory Passages: Holocaust Memorials in the United States and Germany 