"How should Germany commemorate the mass murder of Jews once committed in its name? In 1997, James E. Young was invited to join a German commission appointed to find an appropriate design for a national memorial in Berlin to the European Jews killed in World War II. As the only foreigner and only Jew on the panel, Young gained a unique perspective on Germany's fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust.

In this book, he tells for the first time the inside story of Germany's national Holocaust memorial and his own role in it." "In exploring Germany's memorial crisis, Young also asks the more general question of how a generation of contemporary artists can remember an event like the Holocaust, which it never knew directly."--BOOK JACKET.