Escape from amnesia: the museum as mass medium --
After the wall: the failure of German intellectuals --
Nation, race, and immigration: German identities after unification --
Memories of utopia --
Paris/childhood: the fragmented body in Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge --
Fortifying the heart--totally: Ernst Jünger's armored texts --
Alexander Kluge: an analytic storyteller in the course of time --
Postenlightened cynicism: Diogenes as postmodern intellectual --
In the shadow of McLuhan: Baudrillard's theory of simulation --
Back to the future: Fluxus in context --
Anselm Kiefer: the terror of history, the temptation of myth --
Monuments and Holocaust memory in a media age.

As we are approaching our fin de sielce, issues of time and memory haunt contemporary culture. Musuems and memorials are being constructed rapidly, as if there were no tomorrow. Contemporary art and literature focuses on memory and the past, rather than claiming radical breakthroughs into some unknown future. With the recent resurgence of nationalism and issues of national identity, the political future, too, seems to fold itself back into the past rather than offering a bold vision of the 21st century. The great paradox of our fin de siecle culture is that novelity is even more associated with memory and the past rather than future expectation. But if the obsession with memory is one salient symptom in this age of a modernity grown old, then cultural and political amnesia is undoubtedly its counterpoint. Rather than blaming amnesia on television or the school, Twilight Memories argues that the danger of amnesia is inherent in the information revolution. Our obsessions withcultural memory can be read as re-representing a powerful reaction against the electronic archive and they mark a shift in the way we live structures of temporality. In this book, the media are the hidden veil through which the author looks at the problem of cultural memory and an emerging new sensibility of temporality in literature, art, politics, media theory and the museum.