Visualising the Holocaust

Abstract

In this text, I wish to explore the relationship between trauma and representation, which would serve as a theoretical framework for my research on the Roma Holocaust and its visual representation. First, I attempt to understand the concept of trauma starting from a rather psychoanalytic perspective and then shifting towards historiography. Then, I aim to conceptualise the Holocaust as a traumatic event within the context of representation and think about the ways in which the experience of the Holocaust was understood, thought, reflected or visualised in art. I argue that art, or representation in general, is an the; a tool for the working-through of a trauma; a possibility for a new rhetoric that provides a better understanding of our past, present and our future.