Preface

As is abundantly clear from this collection of clear-eyed essays on ‘new trends in Holocaust museums and memorials,’ both the idea of Holocaust memorials and our approach to them have evolved significantly, even radically, over the last three decades or so. No longer content to reduce the mass murder of nearly six million Jews during World War II to iconic platitudes of heroism or victimization, or to consoling spaces for never-ending grief, or to a fixed and unyielding national narrative, a new generation of artists and architects has sought to question the very capacity in their memorial art to remember anything at all. Rather than ‘solving’ memorial questions in their work, or offering fixed answers to how and why we remember the Holocaust, this new generation proposes living, animated spaces to reflect ongoing, living memory of this time and its victims. This approach, in turn, has prompted historians and cultural critics to turn from their roles as arbiters of high and low culture, or good and bad memorial art, to see memorials and the memory they would embody as perpetual and unending processes, demanding and then being animated by their own histories and how they came to be.

For many memorial artists and historians, the idea of the memorial and our relationship to it changed with Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1982 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Carved into the ground, a black wound in the landscape and an explicit counterpoint to Washington’s prevailing white, neo-classical obelisks and statuary, Lin’s design articulated loss without redemption and formalized a national ambivalence surrounding the memory of American soldiers sent to fight and die in a war the country abhorred. In Lin’s words, she ‘imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal.’¹ That is, she opened a space in the landscape that would open a space within us for memory. ‘I never looked at the memorial as a wall, an object,’ Lin has said, ‘but as an edge to the earth, an opened side.’² Instead of a positive V-form (like a jutting elbow, or a spear-tip, or a flying-wedge military formation), she opened up the V’s obverse space, a negative-space to be filled by those who come to remember within its embrace. Moreover, as she described it in her original proposal, ‘The memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition, to be understood as we move into and out of it.’³ That is, as a ‘monument’ is fixed and static, her memorial would be defined by our movement through its space – memory by means of perambulation and walking through.⁴

After the dedication of Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in 1982, it was as if German artists had also found their own uniquely contrarian memorial vernacular for the expression of their own national shame, for their revulsion against traditionally authoritarian, complacent, and self-certain national shrines. Preoccupied with absence and irredeemable loss, and with an irreparably broken world, German artists and architects would now arrive at their own, counter-memorial architectural vernacular that could express the breach in their faith in civilization without mending it, that might articulate the void of Europe’s lost Jews without filling it in.

With Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in mind, these German artists would set out on their own quest to express their nation’s paralyzing Holocaust memorial conundrum: how could they commemorate the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in the national name without redeeming this destruction in any way? How could they formally articulate this terrible loss without filling it with consoling meaning? The resulting ‘counter-monuments’ and negative-form designs of the 1980s and 1990s in Germany commemorating the Holocaust may have taken their initial cue from the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, but they also extended Lin’s implicit critique of the conventional monument’s static fixedness, bombast, self-certainty, and authoritarian didacticism.⁵ Indeed, at just about the same time, Israeli artists like Esther Shalev and Micha Ullman were offering their own memorial challenges to Israel’s national memorial landscape, first in an exhibition of contemporary art, entitled Hear and Now, at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1982, then again at the site of Israel’s ‘national monument’ at Tel Hai in 1983.⁶

Rather than continuing to insist that the monument do what modern societies, by dint of their vastly heterogeneous populations and competing memorial agendas, will not permit them to do, I have long believed that the best way to save the monument, if it is worth saving at all, is to enlarge its life and texture to include its genesis in historical time, the activity that brings a monument into being, the debates surrounding its origins, its production, its reception, its life in the mind. That is to say, rather than seeing polemics as a by-product of the monument, I would make the polemics surrounding a monument’s existence one of its central, animating features. For I believe that in our age of heteroglossia (Bakhtin’s term), the monument succeeds only insofar as it allows itself full expression of the debates, arguments, and tensions generated in the noisy give and take among competing constituencies driving its very creation. In this view, memory as represented in the monument might also be regarded as a never-to-be-completed process, animated – not disabled – by the forces of history bringing it into being.

Contemporary memorial artists and architects now insist on designs that have the capacity for both remembrance and reconstruction, space for both memory of past destruction and for present life and its regeneration. They must be integrative designs, sites that mesh memory with life, embed memory in life, and balance our need for memory with the present needs of the living. Such memorial sites are no longer allowed to disable life or take its place, but rather inspire life, regenerate it, and provide for it. Similarly, the essays in this special issue of Dapim do not arrive at fixed and unyielding interpretations of Holocaust memorials and museums, but rather they reinvigorate these sites of memory with histories and analyses of how and why they came to be – and how they will, or will not, accommodate the reasons future generations of mourners will have for their visits.

In his concluding chapter of Oblivion, entitled ‘A Duty to Forget,’ ethnographer and social theorist Marc Augé echoes Nietzsche’s case against the kinds of fixed memory that disable life. But here he extends this critique by reminding us that because memory and oblivion ‘stand together, both … necessary for the full use of time,’ only together can they enable life.⁷ Even survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, who do not need to be reminded of their duty to remember, may have the additional duty to survive memory itself. And to do this may mean to begin forgetting, according to Augé, ‘in order to find faith in the everyday again and mastery over their time.’⁸ In this view, the value of life in its quotidian unfolding and the meaning we find in such life are animated by a constant, fragile calculus of remembering and forgetting, a constant tug and pull between memory and oblivion, each an inverted trace of the other. ‘We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful,’ Augé concludes. ‘Faithful to what?’ we ask. Faithful to life in its present, quotidian moment, I say.

Notes

1 Maya Lin, Boundaries (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 4:10.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 4:05.

4 For a fuller elaboration of these thoughts, see James E. Young, The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), from which this introduction has been adapted.

5 For a full discussion on the origins and execution of Germany’s counter-monuments, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) and James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).

6 For further discussion of Israel’s early counter-monuments, see Young, The Stages of Memory, pp. 155–158.

7 Marc Augé, Oblivion (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 89.

8 Ibid., p. 88.