AustLit

'What is the place of Jewish Holocaust memory in the context of a decolonising Australia? Can Holocaust memory model a possibility of responsiveness to the broader memory cultures in which it occurs? This article begins with the call for a 'radical democratic politics' of memory offered by Michael Rothberg, which 'does not entail a removal of Holocaust memory from the public sphere, but rather a decentering of its abstract, reified form' (2011: 540). In a discussion of the Australian contemporary performance work 'a room with no air', which premiered at Sydney's Performance Space in 2001, this article contemplates the archive of recent Australian theatre history to explore how questions of collective responsibility might be modelled by a re-staging of German- Jewish intergenerational legacies.' (Publication abstract)