Present PastsMemory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New Yorkthree late twentieth century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the citys reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and