Remembering the Past in Time of Globalization and Europeanization

As storage for knowledge and memories books and archives represent the human desire to preserve the past. In my study I will examine monuments that use books and libraries as symbols to commemorate the Second World War and the Holocaust. Focusing on three concrete monuments: “The Empty Library” by Micha Ullman in Berlin, The “Nameless Library” by Rachel Whiteread in Vienna and “The Hall of Names” by Moshe Safdie in the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, compared to other monuments across Europe. In this presentation I will be examining monuments that use books and libraries as symbols to commemorate the Second World War and the Holocaust.

This Examining will allow us to determine whether these monuments depict books and libraries to represent a shift toward a European or even a global memory culture transfer of artists and ideas, or whether they still represent a particular memory. As Jacques Derrida and Aleida Assmann observed, library appears as objective storage of history and memory, but in fact driven by the political views of those in power who decide what will be recorded and what will be forgotten. I argue that the monument has the ability to expose and criticize the mechanisms of archives as agents of memory. Depict books in monument holds a paradox, because the knowledge they contain is no longer accessible, as I intend to show, this expresses the universal difficult inherent in representations of the Holocaust.