Andreas Huyssen
Chapter 1 - Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia

The Holocaust as a universal trope is a prerequisite for its decentering and its use as a powerful prism through which we may look at other instances of genocide.

While the comparison with the Holocaust may rhetorically energize some discourses of traumatic memory, it may also serve as a screen memory or simply block insight into specific local histories.

No doubt, the world is being musealized, and we all play our parts in it.

The real can be mythologized, just as the mythic may engender strong reality effects.

Both [the Holocaust and desaparecidos] share the absence of a proper burial site, so key to the nurturing of human memory.

The shelf life of consumer objects has been radically shortened, and with it the extension of the present [...]

But the past cannot give us what the future has failed to deliver.

Therefore we now need productive remembering more than productive forgetting.

Memory, after all, can be no substitute for justice, and justice itself will inevitably be entangled in the unreliability of memory.

Lived memory is active, alive, embodied in the social [...]

[...] anything remembered - whether by lived or by imagined memory - is itself virtual.

Memory is always transitory, notoriously unreliable, and haunted by forgetting [...] It cannot be stored forever, nor can it be secured by monuments.

[...] time is not only the past, its preservation and transmission.

[...] we do need to make the effort to distinguish usable pasts from disposable pasts.

[...]we must not allow the fear of forgetting to overwhelm us. Perhaps it is time to remember the future, rather than simply to worry about the future of memory.