Storm in a Sea of Graves: Aesthetics, Memory and Storytelling at the Memorial tothe Murdered Jews of Europe

Abstract

This paper aims to meditate on ethical-aesthetical aspects of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, in Berlin, based on a multidisciplinary approach, in which particular discussions of the fields of arts, literature and history interact. Formal specificities of the memorial are therefore put in relation: from its concrete presence as a monument, to the long debate on the very possibility of a memory of Auschwitz in which the ethical commitments to remember a past of death and the call to transform life in the present meet. The paper goes on investigating forms of storytelling that take place precisely where “presence” and “image” meet – beetween image and memory –instead of opposing the monument’s materiality to its graveyard metaphor. Finally, as acritical key, the text explores the particular figure of a storyteller who, in the face of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, is able to collect the traces of a past which contains within itself its future in the evanescent instant of a bump between life and history.