100 books like Palimpsestic Memory

This is one of the best critical surveys of the relationship between memory and history I have encountered. Geoffrey Cubitt is concerned with memory as both personal and social, along with the various dynamics between them. The book is interdisciplinary in conception and operation, exploring how history and memory inform one another in complementary and contradictory ways, and how both cross and re-cross varying scales of past/present relations. Regardless of whether readers approach this book from the perspective of memory or history, they will find it a comprehensive assessment of their complex interaction.

Focusing in the main on the psychology of memory, in this excellent book Kurt Danziger argues that conceptually memory has changed considerably over time, not least because of the shifting historical contexts in which it has been applied. The book covers such critical issues as different kinds of memory, memory and metaphor, the cultivation of memory, and memory and truth. Danziger’s contention throughout the book is that memory and remembering are ineluctably social, and any sound understanding of them needs to account for how various historical factors and cultural practices have shaped and helped constitute them. 

A predominant amount of work in memory studies has focused on national memory cultures. The shift in this anthology is towards small, local or regional memories and towards vernacular sites of remembering. Its contributors attend in the main to personal and familial forms of memory, and thus on the narrative modes and media associated with them. The chapters cover a fascinating range of topics, making for a diverse volume united by a key preoccupation with the locatedness of memory, rather than referring broadly across a whole national context or to a huge sweeping range of memory and remembering. This is a very welcome shift, bringing to the fore everyday objects of memory that have tended to be less predominant—hence ‘peripheral’, in the sense of being swept aside or overshadowed. Redressing this allows for a more complex understanding of relations between public and private memory and remembering practices, across varying temporal… show more.

All the books being recommended on this topic see memory and remembering as being structured and directed by the views and perspectives of the social groups to which people belong. Ever since Bartlett and Halbwachs, we have come to see memory as in many ways moulded by particular mental schemata and configurations associated with the various groups that exist within a social whole, yet the notion of collective memory is beset with problems: problems of exaggeration, reification, functionalism, and more. It is therefore fitting that in this edited collection the work of Halbwach in particular is regarded critically, and extended historically, while also being recognised as providing the necessary starting point: "social groups construct their own images of the world by constantly shaping and reshaping versions of the past" (p. 3).

As we saw with Danziger, the social frameworks of memory as well as the kinds of memory being actively… show more.

This classic is about the need to speak up when someone sees something wrong. The story mirrors what many seemingly good people did not do during the WWII Holocaust. This story is told about different groups of animals, which is easier for young readers to understand. When the Terrible Things come to take away one group, the others feel relief. But one by one the Terrible Things take away another group. During this time no one speaks against what’s happening. They are just happy their time hasn’t come. By the time the Terrible Things come for the last group, there is no group left to protest and save them. The author wrote this book to “encourage young children to stand up for what they think is right, without waiting for others to join them.” That’s exactly what children in my books do and what I want to encourage in readers.

Andreas Huyssen is the author of many distinguished books, but this one is especially important because it expanded the study of public memory to South America, which has had its own share of traumatic pasts to memorialize. Huyssen argues that World War II and the Holocaust have provided  “templates” for memorialization that have been adapted by the Memory Park in Buenos Aires, among other examples. 

This novel tells the story of a typically sheltered American Jewish girl on a personal mission to Israel just as the country (and the world) is grappling with the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

It reveals the impact of the Holocaust not just on the protagonist’s father, who lived through it, but on the young girl herself as she struggles with the burdens of history, class, and immigration. Set in the past, it casts a bright light on our today.

No one can truly know what life was like for Jews under the Nazis. We cannot feel the constant terror and inhumanity imposed upon their Jewish victims. We cannot hear their constant pleas, moans, and screams. We cannot smell the stench of filth, sickness, and death. Nevertheless, Joseph Gershowitz manages to take us as close as we can to his suffering in his absolutely riveting first-hand account of life in the Nazi’s concentration camps. On the Borderline of Extermination is a must-read for understanding the cruelty, barbarism, and inhumanity of the Germans and their all too willing helpers.

I enjoyed how the author, a musician herself, masterfully depicts the entire spectrum of human experience: joy, passion, cruelty, love, longing, endless guilt, and a sense of peace, all accompanied by thoughtful insights. Her passion for music is only matched by her longing for homemade Hungarian cuisine… a painful story told in a sensitive and aesthetic manner. 

The late Jacob Presser (1899-1970) was a historian, scholar, and a Holocaust survivor himself. His wife was deported and died, and he survived by going into hiding He spent fifteen years researching the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the plight of the Dutch Jews.

He speaks movingly of finding small scraps of paper, messages thrown from trains leaving Westerbork (an internment camp and later a transit camp in the Netherlands), noting that “Before me, hardly anyone has read them and, after me, they are locked into the archives and it’s possible nobody else will see them.” They awoke in him, he said, an awareness that one of the tasks of the historian is to “give the dead a voice.”