In this new collection of essays on memory and amnesia in the postmodern world, cultural critic Andreas Huyssen considers how nationalism, literature, art, politics, and the media are obsessed with the past. The great paradox of our fin-de-siecle culture is that novelty is even more associated with memory than with future expectation. Drawing heavily on the dilemmas of contemporary Germany, Huyssen's discussion of cultural memory illustrates the nature of contemporary nationalism, the work of such artists and thinkers as Anselm Kiefer, Alexander Kluge, and Jean Baudrillard, and many others. The book includes illustrations from contemporary Germany.

Andreas Huyssen is a Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Introduction: Time and Cultural Memory at Our Fin de Siecle I Time and Memory 1. Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium 2. After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals 3. Nation, Race, and Immigration: German Identities after Unification 4. Memories of Utopia 1/ Media and Culture 5. Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge 6. Fortifying the Heart-Totally: Ernst Junger's Armored Texts 7. Alexander Kluge: An Analytic Storyteller in the Course of Time 8. Post-enlightened Cynicism: Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual 9. In the Shadow of McLuhan: Baudrillard's Theory of Simulation 10. Back to the Future: Fluxus in Context 1 11. Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth 12. Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age