Books by Aleida Assmann

In Paris Calligrammes the filmmaker, photographer and collector of worlds Ulrike Ottinger links historical archival material with her own art and film works to create a sociogram of the era in which she came of age as an artist. In the grip of political upheavals, Paris of the 1960s attracted artists from all over the world and was a pulsating stream of energy hovering between trauma management and the utopia of Europe. From the Librairie Calligrammes, a meeting place of exiled German intellectuals, to the Cinémathèque française, which sparked her love of film, Ulrike Ottinger charts a city and its utopias. They live on in her collaged landscape of memories in a workshop exhibition complimenting her film Paris Calligrammes (2019).The films by ULRIKE OTTINGER (*1942 Konstanz, Germany) were shown at the most important international festivals and honored at various major museums, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. With her photographs she was represented at the documenta and the Biennale di Venezia.EXHIBITIONHKW, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, BerlinAugust 23-October 13, 2019

Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future-and their relationship to the present-been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has...

The book traces the process of creating of a new German memory of the Holocaust after the fall of the Wall. Combining theoretical analysis with historical case studies, the book revisits crucial debates and controversial issues out of which Germany's new 'memory culture' emerged as a collective project and work in progress.