Abstract

The collapse of the Berlin wall and subsequent influx of large numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers led to one of the greatest challenges Germany faces today: how to reconcile the different ethical and historically inflected dispositions of its increasingly diverse migrant populations. Because mass-mediated modes of representations of the past offer new venues to produce historical knowledge, as well as assert empathic engagements with the past that inform present debates around multiculturalism, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a necessary movement towards a contemporary understanding of Deutschsein . In this article, I examine two cultural artifacts: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe in Berlin, Germany, and a recent documentary about the site entitled, Steles in the Heart of Berlin: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I argue that both of these representations of the Holocaust exemplify what Žižek calls the “passion for the Real”—culminating not in a remembrance of the actual bodies and lives that perished in the Holocaust, but rather offering, instead, a “spectacular [a]ffect” through contemporary representations of history that, while functioning on one level to assuage a lingering guilt about the Holocaust, also produce an affective engagement with the past through a Lacanian gap or absence