Beyond Irrepresentability

Despite the doubts about the representability of the Holocaust, thousands of works of art and visual artifacts were created by prisoners in Nazi camps and ghettos during and immediately after the Holocaust. Yet, both art historians and historians rarely dealt with them for decades. Because of their mostly figurative language, researchers and memory institutions often reduced such images to the status of spiritual and political resistance, praised their artistic quality, or consulted them as illustrations of "how it was". But these images do not speak for themselves, they require analysis. In this volume, 19 international scholars, curators, and educators explore the potential of analytical approaches to drawings, albums, paintings, and prints created by victims and witnesses of the Nazi regime. They consolidate current approaches to these multifaceted objects and take the images seriously as images.