I am very glad for the chance to express my gratitude to the many people who helped me in this work, without whom its completion would have remained an insurmountable problem (to use Maurice Blanchot’s apt phrase). First and foremost, I would like to thank Ian Balfour, Howard Adelman, and Stephen Levine for their unwavering support, critical acuity, and seemingly endless patience. In addition to their support of this project in its earliest stages, they have offered me enduring models of intellectual generosity and rigor. A great many other colleagues and friends supported me in various ways, whether by reading portions of the work, suggesting resources, offering critiques, editing, catching mistakes, minding me, giving me a quiet room and uninterrupted time to work, nudging my thinking further, putting up with my intellectual obsessions, or offering much needed diversions. They include Mark Webber, Cathy Caruth, Michelle Cohen, Cory Stockwell, Rebecca Comay, Deborah Britzman, Scott Marratto, David Levine, Karen Valihora, Kir Kuiken, Ian Stewart, Dorota Glowacka, Alexandra Morrison, Doug Freake, Jonathan Bordo, Susan Dodd, Thomas Trezise, Rebecca Wittmann, Jean-Luc Nancy, John Zilkosky, Daniel Brandes, Aleida Assmann, Paul Antze, Gerald Butts, and Zsuzsa Baross. I would also like to extend my warmest thanks to the fantastic students in my upper-year seminar class on “The Concept of Memory in Late Modernity” at the University of King’s College in Halifax. Their engagement with all things memorial over the past few years has been a huge inspiration for me and, above all, a powerful reminder of the point of it all.
Thanks are also due to the organizations and funding bodies that made possible my research and its dissemination: the Joseph Webber Memorial Scholarship, the Ontario–Baden-Württemberg exchange scholarship, the Freie Universität (Berlin) scholarship fund, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship fund, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The University of King’s College in Halifax provided a stimulating atmosphere within which I could bring this project to completion.
Finally, this book owes most of all to those who lived with it and saw the project through to the end with kindness, joy, and love—to Sherrill and Gerald Clift, Alison Clift, Uli vom Hagen, and above all to Tovah, who came along and changed everything.