IN SEPTEMBER 2017, Gerhard Richter donated part of his Birkenau- Zyklus (discussed in chapter 1) to the Bundestag. A print of his four abstract paintings, along with reproductions of the four Sonderkommando photos, now hangs in the entrance hall of the German Parliament opposite Schwarz, Rot, Gold (discussed in the introduction). This juxtaposition seems to encapsulate a narrative about the archival turn in memory culture. In the early years of the Berlin Republic Richter planned to return to the archive of the Holocaust, to use images from the camps in his commission, but he rejected this idea, instead reproducing the abstract design of the German flag. Two decades later he returns to the Holocaust archive after all and makes a figurative depiction of the four images from Auschwitz the underlying formal feature of his abstract canvases in Birkenau-Zyklus. If the archive returns as the unfinished business of Richter's project and of German memory culture, the location of this new work in the Bundestag, and opposite this earlier work evoking an archive in absentia, now suggests resolution and a past that has been “worked through.” An answer to the fraught question about Holocaust representability and the role the archive has to play in this has been provided by a German artist and displayed in the symbolic center of the newly unified German nation. Indeed, housing Richter's archive work in the place that is both emblematically German and emblematic of the Berlin Republic's commitment to Erinnerungskultur suggests that the future of Holocaust memory has been secured—moreover, secured on the “German model.”

However, this book has shown the archival turn in German memory culture to be more complicated than such a narrative would allow. The readings offered indicate, across different media and cultural modes, how the archive is increasingly fundamental to post-witness remembering, but its status and significance for subsequent generations are compromised by the violence it traces. The artists, directors, and authors discussed here turn to the archive not simply as historical source but also, to expand on Stoler's definition, as the subject of their engagement with the culture and politics of memory.