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The David Buchan Memorial Lecture, Presented to the Elphinstone Institute, the University of Aberdeen, 29 November 2018

Memorial Interventions: Negotiating Paths through Complicated Pasts

Pages 221-236 | Published online: 12 Aug 2019
 

Abstract

The David Buchan Lecture 2018 examines a range of small memorial interventions from occupational culture to Holocaust markers. Rather than working with large figures on pedestals, they are designed to subtly disrupt everyday perception. What are the motives behind such initiatives? Who pays for them? What kinds of materials are they made of and how do they seek to imprint their message onto present and future generations? Drawing from American and German cases, similar questions present themselves: who is entitled to decide what should be publicly remembered and in what form? How effective are small memorial interventions in stirring public discussion of the past? How does intentional memorial activity compare to actual evidence of historical events in everyday life?

Notes

Notes

1 Thanks go to Tom McKean and his diverse and broadly engaged team at the Elphinstone Institute for the invitation and the honour of delivering this lecture. Having an opportunity to hear about the different kinds of projects underway among Aberdeen’s postgraduate students was energizing, reminding one of what all folklore can be about. This article built on earlier presentations at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in October 2017 and at the American Folklore Society Meetings in October 2018 in Buffalo, New York. Thanks are due to the colleagues who offered commentaries and assisted in sharpening the ideas presented.

2 See Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, ‘The “Silent Sam” Confederate Monument at U.N.C. Was Toppled. What Happens Next?’, New York Times, 22 August 2018, A21. A video entitled ‘Silence Sam’ was produced by University of North Carolina students in 2018 and can be viewed on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/300532032 (accessed 23 December 2018).

3 Touristic consumption can render the most thought-through site banal—an issue that German remembrance site planners and custodians reflect on. Yet, as several reports on Germany’s news and culture channel, Deutschlandfunk, illustrate, the economic benefit is relevant for many cities and may undermine the more educationally minded planners (see Schnee Citation2016).

4 Holocaust remembrance proves to be one of the most difficult in ever more heterogeneous societies. Esra Özyürek’s recent rethinking of how exactly empathy can be understood in Germany is worthy of consideration and expansion for other locations. Participating in nationally conceived memorials of guilt and sorrow proves difficult for minority members and immigrants (Ozyürek Citation2018).

5 The International Journal of Heritage Studies, initiated in 1995, has quickly risen to be the premier journal of critical heritage research.

6 For a brief, recent summary considering affect within heritage endeavours, see Crouch (Citation2015).

7 Message from Paul Merion via Facebook, 5 October 2017.

8 On industrial heritage’s high phases and the opposing views it engendered, see Oevermann and Mieg (Citation2015); also see Rautenberg (Citation2012) for a comparative policy study on industrial heritage.

9 ‘Walk of Fame’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Walk_of_Fame#Controversial_additions. Terrazzo is, according to the links in this Wikipedia entry, a material made with bits of marble, quartz, granite, and glass used for floor treatments.

11 Since the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency, his star of fame has been repeatedly attacked: The Associated Press reported on 24 September 2018 that a street artist calling himself ‘Plastic Jesus’ placed jail bars on top of the star and posted a video of the imprisoned star on Twitter with the caption ‘Trump behind bars. Finally’.

12 The information regarding the genesis of the Stolpersteine project seems to get revised continuously. The Wikipedia entry traces the first emplacement of a Stolperstein to 1992. See ‘Stolpersteine’, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolpersteine#Der_Weg_zu_den_Stolpersteinen (accessed 26 December 2018). On the official Stumbling Stone website, the artist’s design for the first stones is dated to 1993 (http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/biography/, accessed 15 September 2018) and the first installation is dated to 1996 in Berlin, legalized later.

13 Koordinierungsstelle Stolpersteine Berlin, https://www.stolpersteine-berlin.de/.

15 ‘Munich Bans Disrespectful Holocaust Memorials on the Ground’, BBC News, 27 July 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-44979359?SThisFB.

16 Muslim communities in Göttingen took shape around the same time; at the time of this writing, there are four officially registered groups. A DITIB mosque was built in 2006.

17 Translated from the German by the author. Source: https://jkg-goettingen.org/texte/ (accessed 10 October 2018).

19 See also Susan Slyomovics’s astute research and discussion of claiming German reparations for the suffering experienced, in prison and extermination camps, loss of property, and so forth. While her study traces the ‘how’ of making a claim, the prologue also cites the reasons voiced for refusing to submit to such ‘blood money’ or money paid to assuage German guilt—and in the process possibly relive the trauma suffered during internment (Slyomovics Citation2014, 3).

20 ‘New Statue of Chairmain Mao Surprises China’, Telegraph, 3 November 2009, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/6492767/New-statue-of-Chairman-Mao-surprises-China.html.

21 The German noun Vergangenheitsbewältigung, ‘coming to terms with the past’, is a term that is practically of constitutional importance in Germany: it is this never-ending task that renders the Holocaust a part of the curriculum and ensures the funding of memorial sites and educational efforts in a thoroughness that is probably without comparison elsewhere in the world.

22 Alternatively, as was mentioned to me after the presentation in Aberdeen, some residents may get habituated to this ever-present danger, because evacuations and traffic blockades occasioned by bomb-diffusion efforts happen too often. A news item in the Göttinger Tageblatt of 29 December 2018 reported that the number of bomb deactivations had sharply increased over the past years. This was attributed to a building boom through the winter season. ‘We have mild winters and no ground frost, climate change thus also influences our work’, one aging expert deactivator was quoted as saying.

24 JTA, ‘Rome Holocaust Memorial Vandalized’, Jerusalem Post, 1 March 2010, http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Rome-Holocaust-memorial-vandalized.

26 ‘Thete Böttger wird 75’, Göttinger Tageblatt, 14 December 2015, http://www.goettinger-tageblatt.de/Goettingen/Themen/Thema-des-Tages/Tete-Boettger-wird-75.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Regina F. Bendix

Regina F. Bendix, originally from Switzerland, studied and taught for more than twenty years in the USA. Since 2001, she has been based at Göttingen University in Germany. She has worked on the history of folklore studies, on narrative, and on questions of tourism, cultural property, and heritage.

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