The art of memory : Holocaust memorials in history

It is not often, in my experience, that exhibitions are as thoughtful, engaged, and anthropologically revealing for viewers as this one. Announced as first American exhibition to examine how and why public memory of the Holocaust is being shaped by museums and monuments ... in the United States, Israel, and Europe, The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History aims to examine the process of memorialization itself. Such memorials, the show argues, the past differently depending on where they were constructed and by whom. The exhibition attempts to demonstrate the differences in thematic elements selected-whether it is the war dead who are recalled, resistance, or mass murder-and how these are shaped by national cultures, ideals, and changes in politics. James E. Young, the historian who curated this exhibition, has also edited the catalogue and written his own quite eloquent book on the same topic (The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, Yale University Press, 1994), emphasizing the differences in the relation of such memorials to national self-definition. As with much anthropological analysis, awareness of difference provides evidence for social construction and a powerful basis for analytical, critical insight To undertake such a critical examination through material culture and its principally visual representation is a great challenge: memorials are typically architectural forms, and of course none can be brought in themselves to be displayed. The show employed over 200 images and objects, including photographs, video and other multimedia presentations, sculptural maquettes and sketches, architectural models, and designs for existing and planned Holocaust memorials. The installations were grouped into six principal sections, which I discuss in order of their presentation. Jewish Memorial Tradition and the Holocaust explores the continuities between Holocaust memorialization and Jewish traditions of remembrane--represented by objects like the covered mirror for mourning, Jahrzeit memorial candles, a mourner's bench, memorial tablets, and memorial books produced by Holocaust survivors after they returned to their devastated villages. The section suggests explicit cultural injunctions to remember the dead, and the formative role of memory in Jewish identity. Memorials at the Sites of Destruction includes those at former concentration camps, sites of massacre and resistance (such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), and sites of hiding (such as the Anne Frank house). The emphasis of this grouping is on representations indexically linked to the events of the Holocaust, whose power lies in this link: such memorials tend to collapse the distinction between themselves and the history they evoke. With the passage of years, time has subtly placed itself between the mute ruins of former concentration camps and their terrible past. Only a deliberate act of memory by the state, by visitors, or by a monument maker can reconnect the site of destruction to its past. As a result, each site of destruction has its own story to tell, remembering its victims in its own way. Here, in the absence of any natural link, is the space of memorialization. If this is the arena of contestation that any theory of socially constructed meanings must recognize, it is also ground much covered in very substantial contemporary debates about representation. This section introduces viewers to the fact of interpretations as multiple and conflicting, as well as to the representational (formal) strategies of evoking signifieds as real. Wall text argues that the ruins of the crematorium camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, shown in photographs, are organized to force visitors to accept such reality, by attempting to maintain them as they were found by the Russian army: with decaying uprooted concrete structures, railroad sidings and barbed wire, displays of suitcases (with name tags) and shoes in massive piles, eating utensils scattered in the dirt. The memorial not only provides evidence for the crimes committed there, it also asks us to recall the victims as the Germans have remembered them to us. A millennium of Jewish life in Europe is reduced to the Exhibit Review Essays