A topography of memory

the long version

This book is an analysis of the history of various sorts of representation, chiefly memorials, on the site of the concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald in comparison with Auschwitz, Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. By providing a reconstruction of the history and debates surrounding the question of memorializing and forgetting, it interrogates the question of how to represent the unrepresentable. It draws on Freudian analysis, the literature on sites of memory, and the debate about writing about the Holocaust, showing clearly how the camps have been and still remain highly contested places of memory and arguing that these debates and their physical embodiment on the sites have to be incorporated in our understanding of what these places represent. --from publisher description