Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting Memory in a Mediated Age

New collective memory A new critical discourse on memory has emerged in recent times in response to the renaissance of the heritage/museum industry, the techno-logical, political and cultural shifts affecting how we remember, and, latterly, the rise of what Finkelstein (2000) has termed the ‘Holocaust Industry’. ‘Collective memory ’ has emerged as a concern of a range of disciplines with different traditions and perspectives (literature, [social] psychology, sociology, cultural studies and history, for example). Across the social sciences most writers begin their accounts with passing reference to Halbwachs, who as Wood points out, was ‘the first modern theorist of collective memory ’ (1999:1). Halbwachs ’ conception of the collective was a temporally and spatially co-present one which draws on Durkheim (1915) in respect of the ‘collective consciousness’, that is the social bonding of the collective, of the group, of memory, can be measured quantitatively. Halbwachs argued that, ‘Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props. Just like God needs us, so memory needs others ’ (1952/1992: 34). In the contemporary highly mediated age, however, the ‘continuous feeding ’ of collective memory has more to do with the connectivity of the electronic media than with any sustained social consensus about the past. John Urry (1996: 63), for example, describes an ‘electronification ’ of memory. Television, is one of the principal vehicles of what I have called ‘new memory’.1 ‘New’, in as much as this idea has only been explicitly addressed in conjunction with the rapid recent growth in media and cultural studies (see