Making Holocaust mementos: early postwar graphic albums as "awkward" objects of the Holocaust archive
Immediately after the Holocaust, survivors created scores of graphic albums as testimonial and commemorative objects recounting their individual and collective histories under Nazi oppression. Despite their large number, these works are dispersed in public and private collections and are rarely repr...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2025
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| In: |
Holocaust and genocide studies
Year: 2025, Volume: 39, Issue: 2, Pages: 137-159 |
| Further subjects: | B
Aufsatz in Zeitschrift
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Rights Information: | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 |
| Summary: | Immediately after the Holocaust, survivors created scores of graphic albums as testimonial and commemorative objects recounting their individual and collective histories under Nazi oppression. Despite their large number, these works are dispersed in public and private collections and are rarely reproduced or exhibited in their entirety. Largely neglected by Holocaust studies (which privileges word-based testimonies), they are also overlooked by art history (which privileges unique paintings). Unsettling disciplinary, exhibitionary, and archival categories, these hyphenated "imagetexts" (art-books, pictorial-albums, image-stories, visual-testimonies) fall between the cracks of the Holocaust archive and its well-entrenched taxonomies of format, medium, subject, and periodization. In so doing, they prompt questions about how the archive was assembled in the past and how archival practices today assign and maintain hierarchies of value that determine which things count as historical evidence or testimony. This article examines one graphic album discovered by chance in the open stacks of the circulating library at the Ghetto Fighters' House in Israel: Dezső (David) Izraeli's Memento 1942-45 created in Cluj, Romania in 1947. Using Memento as a touchstone, I argue that these graphic albums constitute one of the most important and overlooked mediums of early Holocaust memory. They open a window onto a vibrant but still buried history of early Jewish survivor activities and the central role that art played in efforts to document the past and commemorate the dead. |
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| Item Description: | Literaturangaben |
| Physical Description: | Illustrationen |
| ISSN: | 1476-7937 |
| Access: | Open Access |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Holocaust and genocide studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/hgs/dcaf015 |
