{"id":63,"date":"2017-10-10T08:10:37","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T08:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/?p=63"},"modified":"2017-11-24T12:57:01","modified_gmt":"2017-11-24T12:57:01","slug":"the-memorials-vernacular-arc-between-berlins-denkmal-and-new-york-citys-911-memorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/the-memorials-vernacular-arc-between-berlins-denkmal-and-new-york-citys-911-memorial\/","title":{"rendered":"The Memorial\u2019s Vernacular Arc Between Berlin\u2019s Denkmal and New York City\u2019s 9\/11 Memorial. By James E. Young"},"content":{"rendered":"

James E. Young <\/a><\/p>\n

Ph.D., Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English and Judaic and Near Eastern Studies
\nFounding Director, Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies<\/a><\/span>\u00a0(UMass Amherst)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adapted from The Stages of Memory:\u00a0 Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between<\/em><\/a> (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016)<\/h6>\n

 <\/p>\n

In April 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation called a press conference at the just-repaired Winter Garden of the World Financial Center in lower-Manhattan, located across the street from the gaping pit of Ground Zero. Here the LMDC announced an open international design competition for a World Trade Center Site Memorial, and I was one of 13 members of the design-jury introduced that day.\u00a0 Together with jurors Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Veterans\u2019 Memorial in Washington, D.C.) and Paula Grant Berry (whose husband David died in the South Tower on 9\/11), among others, we implored potential entrants to this blind competition to \u201cbreak the conventional rules of the monument,\u201d to explore every possible memorial medium in their expressions of grief, mourning, and remembrance for what would become the National September 11th<\/sup> Memorial (Wyatt, B-1).<\/p>\n

Within two months, we received some 13,800 registrations from around the world, and by the August 2003 deadline, we had received 5,201 official submissions from 62 nations, and from 49 American states (only Alaska was missing from the list).\u00a0 In January 2004, after six months of exhausting, occasionally tortured debate and discussion, we announced our winning selection at Federal Hall on Wall Street, where George Washington took his oath as America\u2019s first president.<\/p>\n

The winning design, \u201cReflecting Absence<\/a>,\u201d by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, proposed two deeply recessed voids in the footprints of the former World Trade Center towers, each 200 square feet, with thin veils of water cascading into reflecting pools some 35 feet below, each with a further deep void in its middle.\u00a0 The pools were to be surrounded by an abacus grid of\u00a0 trees (even rows replicating the city-grid when viewed west to east, seemingly natural, random groves when viewed north to south), which would deepen the volumes of the voids as they grew, even as they softened the hard, square edges of the pools.\u00a0 This memorial would indeed \u201creflect absence,\u201d even as it commemorated the lives lost with living, regenerating flora.<\/p>\n

Until that day in January 2004, the 9\/11 Memorial jurors were not allowed to speak to the press.\u00a0 Now for the first time since our appointment nine months earlier, we could take questions.\u00a0 The first question I took from a reporter caught me off-balance.\u00a0 \u201cKnowing that you have written much about Holocaust negative-form monuments in Germany and that you were also on the jury that chose Peter Eisenman\u2019s design for the Berlin Denkmal<\/a> (for Europe\u2019s Murdered Jews), it seems that you\u2019ve basically chosen just another Holocaust memorial.\u00a0 Is this true?\u201d\u00a0 Surprised and somewhat offended, I replied that obviously this design had nothing to do with Holocaust memorials.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"4.Vietnam_veterans_wall_satellite_image\"
A park within a park: Maya Lin conceived her project as a quiet protected place unto itself<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here the same reporter pressed me further: \u201cBut is it possible that Jewish architects are somehow predisposed toward articulating the memory of catastrophe in their work?\u00a0 Would this explain how Daniel Libeskind<\/a> (original site-designer of the new World Trade Center complex), Santiago Calatrava<\/a> (designer of the new Fulton Street Transit Center abutting \u201cGround Zero\u201d in lower-Manhattan), and now Michael Arad<\/a> (designer of the memorial at \u201cGround Zero\u201d) have become the architects of record in post-9\/11 downtown Manhattan?\u201d\u00a0 I had to concede that while I saw no direct references to Jewish catastrophe in these designs for the reconstruction of lower-Manhattan, it could also be true that the forms of post-war architecture have been inflected by an entire generation\u2019s knowledge of the Holocaust.\u00a0\u00a0 Michael Arad and Peter Walker\u2019s \u201cReflecting Absence\u201d is not a Holocaust memorial, I said, but its formal preoccupation with loss, absence, and regeneration may well be informed by Holocaust memorial vernaculars. This was also a preoccupation they shared with poets and philosophers, artists and composers:\u00a0 how to articulate a void without filling it in?\u00a0 How to formalize irreparable loss without seeming to repair it?<\/p>\n

As I continued to mull my answer, I began to imagine an arc of memorial forms over the last eighty years or so and how, in fact, post-World War I and World War II memorials had evolved along a very discernible path, all with visual and conceptual echoes of their predecessors.\u00a0 Here I recalled that counter-memorial artists and architects such as Horst Hoheisel, Jochen Gerz, Esther Shalev, and Daniel Libeskind (among many others) all told me that Maya Lin\u2019s design for the Vietnam Veterans\u2019 Memorial<\/a> (1982) broke the mold that made their own counter-memorial work possible. And here I remembered that Maya Lin had also openly acknowledged her own debt to both Sir Edwin Lutyens\u2019s \u201cMemorial to the Missing of the Somme\u201d (1924) in Thiepval, France; and later to George-Henri Pingusson\u2019s \u201cMemorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation\u201d (1962) on the Ile de la Cite in Paris.\u00a0 Both are precursors to the \u201cnegative-form\u201d realized so brilliantly by Maya Lin, both preoccupied with and articulations of uncompensated loss and absence, represented by carved-out pieces of landscape, as well as by the visitor\u2019s descent downward (and inward) into memory (Lin, 4:09).<\/p>\n

\"3.Memorial<\/a>
Sir Edwin Lutyens\u2019s \u201cMemorial to the Missing of the Somme<\/a>\u201d (1924) in Thiepval, France<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"5.M\u00e9morial_des_Martyrs_de_la_D\u00e9portation_@_Ile_de_la_Cit\u00e9_@_Paris_(26558253140)\"<\/a>
George-Henri Pingusson\u2019s \u201cMemorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation<\/a>\u201d (1962), Paris.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Unlike the utopian, revolutionary forms with which modernists hoped to redeem art and literature after World War I, the post-Holocaust memory artist, in particular, would say, \u201cNot only is art not the answer, but\u00a0 after the Holocaust, there can be no more final solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carved into the ground, a black wound in the landscape and an explicit counter-point to Washington\u2019s prevailing white, neo-classical obelisks and statuary, Maya Lin\u2019s 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 now abhorred.\u00a0 In Maya Lin\u2019s words, she \u201cimagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal\u201d (Lin, 4:10).\u00a0 That is, she opened a space in the landscape that would open a space within us for memory.\u00a0 \u201cI never looked at the memorial as a wall, an object,\u201d Maya Lin has said, \u201cbut as an edge to the earth, an opened side.\u201d\u00a0 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\u2019s obverse space, a negative-space to be filled by those who come to remember within its embrace.\u00a0 Moreover, as Maya Lin described it in her original proposal, \u201cThe memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition, to be understood as we move into and out of it\u201d (Lin, 4:05).\u00a0 That is, as a \u201cmonument\u201d is fixed and static, her memorial would be defined by our movement through its space, memory by means of perambulation and walking through.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The New England Holocaust Memorial<\/a>, by Stanley Saitowitz<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After the dedication of Maya Lin\u2019s Vietnam Veterans\u2019 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s lost Jews without filling it in.<\/p>\n

With Maya Lin\u2019s design for the Vietnam Veterans\u2019 Memorial in mind, these German artists would set out on their own quest to express their nation\u2019s paralyzing Holocaust memorial conundrum:\u00a0 How to commemorate the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in the national name without redeeming this destruction in any way?\u00a0 How to formally articulate this terrible loss without filling it with consoling meaning?\u00a0 The resulting counter-monuments and negative-form designs of the 1980\u2019s and 1990\u2019s in Germany commemorating the Holocaust may have taken their initial cue from the Vietnam Veterans\u2019 Monument, but they also extended Maya Lin\u2019s implicit critique of the conventional monument\u2019s static fixedness, bombast, self-certainty, and authoritarian didacticism.<\/p>\n

Of all the dilemmas facing post-Holocaust memorial artists and designers, perhaps none is more difficult, or more paralyzing, than the potential for redemption in any representation of the Holocaust. Some, like Adorno, have warned against the ways poetry and art after Auschwitz risk redeeming events with aesthetic beauty or mimetic pleasure (Adorno, 125-27).\u00a0 Others like Saul Friedlander, have asked whether the very act of history-writing potentially redeems the Holocaust with the kinds of meaning and significance reflexively generated in all narrative (Friedlander, 61).\u00a0 Unlike the utopian, revolutionary forms with which modernists hoped to redeem art and literature after World War I, the post-Holocaust memory artist, in particular, would say, \u201cNot only is art not the answer, but\u00a0 after the Holocaust, there can be no more final solutions.\u201d\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Some of this skepticism has been a direct response to the enormity of the Holocaust\u2014which seemed to exhaust not only the forms of modernist experimentation and innovation, but also the traditional meanings still reified in such innovations. Mostly, however, this skepticism has stemmed from post-Holocaust artists\u2019 contempt for the religious, political or aesthetic linking of redemption and destruction that seemed to justify such terror in the first place. In Germany, in particular, once the land of what Saul Friedlander has called \u201credemptory anti-Semitism,\u201d the possibility that public art might now compensate mass murder with beauty (or with ugliness), or that memorials might somehow redeem this past with the instrumentalization of its memory, continues to haunt a postwar generation of memory artists (Friedlander, 3).\u00a0 For this generation, the shattered vessel of European Jewry cannot be put back together again; the rupture in human civilization represented by the Shoah cannot be mended. The traditional religious dialectic of \u201cfrom destruction to redemption\u201d would come to be regarded not as an answer to the history of the 20th<\/sup> century, but as an extension of the redemptory cast of mind that made such destruction possible in the first place.<\/p>\n

Here I recall being asked in several cases to help revive memorial processes in Boston, Berlin, and Buenos Aires that had gotten bogged down in what their organizers perceived as a morass of dispute, bickering, competing agendas, and politics.\u00a0 With the impertinence that only an academic bystander can afford, I always replied, Yes, it\u2019s true.\u00a0 You thought you were bringing a community together around common memory, and you found instead that the process is fraught with argument, division, and competing agendas. In Boston in 1988, I gently suggested that the New England Holocaust Memorial Committee stop hiding the issues that divided them and instead make them the centerpiece of a public forum on their proposed memorial. \u00a0Let debate drive the memorial process forward, I advised.\u00a0 Let the memorial\u2019s \u201cmemory-work\u201d begin with the committee\u2019s own heated discussions, public symposia and community education, even in public challenges to the very idea of such a memorial in Boston.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Aktion T4 memorial at 4 Tiedrgartenstra\u00dfe, Berlin, to victims of Nazi \u2018euthanasia\u2019 | EUROM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Berlin, when asked by the Bundestag in 1997 to explain why I thought Germany\u2019s 1995 international design competition for a national \u201cmemorial for the murdered Jews of Europe\u201d had failed, I answered that even if they had failed to produce a monument, the debate itself had produced a profound search for such memory and that it had actually begun to constitute the memorial they so desired.\u00a0 Instead of a fixed sculptural or architectural icon for Holocaust memory in Germany, the debate itself\u2014perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions\u2014might now be enshrined.\u00a0 And then just to make sure they grasped my own polemic, I offered the reassuring words, \u201cBetter a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany than a final solution to your Holocaust memorial question.\u201d A day later, I was invited by the Speaker of the Berlin Senate, Peter Radunski, to join a five-member Findungskommission <\/em>whose mandate would be to run yet another competition for a suitable design for the Denkmal.\u00a0 When I asked, \u201cWhy me?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think it can be done,\u201d Herr Sprecher Radunski answered with an Hegelian glint in his eye, \u201cBecause you don\u2019t think it can be done, we think you can do it.\u201d\u00a0 Thus hoisted on the petard of my own polemic, I agreed to serve\u2013but only on two conditions: First, that we could make the process itself publicly transparent, so that it might be regarded as part of the memorial design for which we searched; and second, that we invite artists and architects not to solve Germany\u2019s paralyzing memorial conundrum in their submissions, but rather to articulate the problem formally in their designs.<\/p>\n

With this precis in hand, we invited 25 artists and architects, of whom 19 submitted designs. From these 19, we culled a short-list of two, proposals by Gesine Weinmiller and Peter Eisenman, and recommended them to then Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who favored Eisenman\u2019s design for a waving field of stelae.\u00a0 A lively public debate ensued, with the two finalists making public presentations to packed audiences, who eventually formed a consensus around Peter Eisenman\u2019s \u201cField of Stelae<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 With this public mandate in hand, our Findungskommission made an explicit, three-part recommendation to the Bundestag: 1) select Peter Eisenman\u2019s revised design for a field of waving stelae;\u00a0 2) build underneath it a \u201cplace of information\u201d (or historical documentation); and 3) establish a permanent \u201cmemorial foundation\u201d to support the memorial\u2019s building and maintenance. Where the “monumental” had traditionally used its size to humiliate or cow viewers into submission, we believed this memorial\u2014in its humanly-proportioned forms\u2014would put people on an even-footing with memory.\u00a0 Visitors and the role they play as they wade knee-, or chest-, or shoulder-deep into this waving field of stones would not be diminished by the monumental but would be made integral parts of the memorial itself. Visitors, we hoped, would not be defeated by their memorial obligation here, nor dwarfed by the memory-forms themselves, but rather enjoined by them to come face to face with memory, able to remember together and alone.<\/p>\n

Able to see over and around these pillars, visitors would have to find their way through this field of stelae, on the one hand, even as they would never actually get lost in or overcome by the memorial act.\u00a0 In effect, they will make and choose their own individual spaces for memory, even as they do so collectively.\u00a0 The implied sense of motion in the gently undulating field also formalizes a kind of memory that is neither frozen in time, nor static in space.\u00a0 In their multiple and variegated sizes, the pillars would be both individuated and collected:\u00a0 the very idea of “collective memory” would be broken down here and replaced with the collected memories of individuals murdered, the terrible meanings of their deaths now multiplied and not merely unified.\u00a0 The land sways and moves beneath these pillars so that each one is some 3 degrees off vertical:\u00a0 we would not be reassured by such memory, but now disoriented by it.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, new national elections were called, a new government coalition was formed between the SPD and Green Party, and the Denkmal itself had become a political flashpoint. Eventually, Joshka Fischer (head of the Green Party and eventual Foreign Minister for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder\u2019s new government) agreed to join the coalition on condition that the Denkmal be built, after all. Beginning at 9:00 in the morning and running until after 2:00 in the afternoon on June 25th<\/sup>, 1999, a full session of the German Bundestag met in public view to debate and finally vote on Berlin’s “Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe.”\u00a0 Both opponents and proponents were given time to make their cases, each presentation followed by noisy but civil debate.\u00a0 Finally, by a vote of 314 to 209, with 14 abstentions, the Bundestag approved the memorial in four separate parts:\u00a0 1) the Federal Republic of Germany will erect in Berlin a memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe on the site of the former Ministerial Gardens in the middle of Berlin;\u00a0 2) the design of Peter Eisenman’s field of pillars (Eisenman-II) will be realized;\u00a0 3) an information center will be added to the memorial site;\u00a0 and 4) a public foundation composed of representatives from the Bundestag, the city of Berlin, and the citizens\u2019 initiative for the establishment of the memorial, as well as the directors of other memorial museums, members of the Central Committee for the Jews of Germany, and other victim groups will be established by the Bundestag to oversee both the building of the memorial and its information center in the year 2000.\u00a0 Five years later, in May 2005, Germany\u2019s national \u201cMemorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe\u201d was dedicated.<\/p>\n

Was this the end of Germany’s Holocaust memory-work, as I had initially feared?\u00a0 No, debate and controversy continued unabated.\u00a0 Memorials to other victims of the Nazi Reich were proposed and built nearby, with the Denkmal becoming one node in a memorial matrix that would now include memorials to the Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and the handicapped and disabled murdered by Hitler\u2019s regime.\u00a0 Moreover, once the parliament decided to give Holocaust memory a central place in Berlin, an even more difficult job awaited the organizers:\u00a0 Defining exactly what it is to be remembered here in Peter Eisenman’s waving field of pillars.\u00a0 What will Germany’s national Holocaust narrative be?\u00a0 The question of the memorial\u2019s historical content began at precisely the moment the question of memorial design ended.\u00a0 Memory, which had followed history, would now be followed by still further historical debate.<\/p>\n

\"1280px-Holocaust_Memorial_Museum_Berlin_Interioro_03\"<\/a>
Information Center of the Memorial of the Muredered Jews of Europe, designed by Dagmar von Wilcken<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today, on entering into the waving field of stelae, one is accompanied by light and sky, but the city\u2019s other sights and sounds are gradually occluded, blocked out. From deep in the midst of the pillars, the thrum of traffic is muffled and all but disappears.\u00a0 Looking up and down the pitching rows of stelae, one catches glimpses of other mourners and beyond them, one can even see to edges of the memorial itself.\u00a0 At the same time, however, one feels very much alone, almost desolate, even in the company of hundreds of other visitors nearby. Depending on where one stands, along the edges or deep inside the field, the experience of the memorial varies\u2014from the reassurance one feels on the sidewalk by remembering in the company of others, invigorated by life of the city hurtling by; to the feelings of existential aloneness from deep inside this dark forest, oppressed and depleted by the memory of mass murder, not reconciled to it.<\/p>\n

Where does memory end and history begin here?\u00a0 As so brilliantly conceived by Dagmar von Wilcken, the exhibition-designer for the \u201cOrte der Information<\/em><\/a>\u201d, this site\u2019s commemorative and historical dimensions interpenetrate to suggest an interdependent whole, in which neither history nor memory can stand without the other.\u00a0 As one descends the stairs from the midst of the field into the \u201cPlace of Information,\u201d it becomes clear just how crucial a complement the underground \u201cinformation center\u201d is to the field of pillars above.\u00a0 It neither duplicates the field\u2019s commemorative function, nor is it arbitrarily tacked onto the memorial site as an historical after-thought. But rather, in tandem with the field of stelae above it, the place of information reminds us of the memorial\u2019s dual-mandate as both commemorative and informational, a site of both memory and of history, each as shaped by the other. While remaining distinct in their respective functions, however, these two sides of the memorial are also formally linked and interpenetrating.<\/p>\n

By seeming to allow the above-ground stelae to sink into and thereby impose themselves physically into the underground space of information, the underground Information Center audaciously illustrates both that commemoration is \u201crooted\u201d in historical information and that the historical presentation is necessarily \u201cshaped\u201d formally by the commemorative space above it.\u00a0 Here we have a \u201cplace of memory\u201d literally undergirded by a \u201cplace of history,\u201d which is in turn inversely shaped by commemoration, and we are asked to navigate the spaces in between memory and history for our knowledge of events.\u00a0 Such a design makes palpable the Yin and Yang of history and memory, their mutual interdependence and their distinct virtues.<\/p>\n

Like the mass murder of European Jewry it commemorates, Eisenman\u2019s memorial design provides no single vantage-point from which to view it. From above, its five-acre expanse stretches like an Escherian grid in all directions and even echoes the rolling, horizontal plane of crypts covering Jerusalem\u2019s Mount of Olives. From its edges, the memorial is a somewhat forbidding forest of stelae, most of them between one and three meters in height, high enough to close us in, but not so high as to block out sunlight or the surrounding skyline, which includes the Brandenburger Tor and Reichstag building to the north, the renovated and bustling Potsdamer Platz to the south, and the Tiergarten across Ebertstrasse to the west.\u00a0 The color and texture of the stelae change with the cast of the sky, from steely-gray on dark, cloudy days; to\u00a0 sharp-edged black and white squares on sunny days;\u00a0 to a softly rolling field of wheat-colored stelae, glowing almost pink in the sunset.<\/p>\n

Only when moving back out toward the edges, toward the streets, buildings, sidewalks, and life, does hope itself come back into view. Neither memory nor one\u2019s experience of the memorial is static here, each depending on one\u2019s own movement into, through and out of this site.\u00a0 One does not need to be up-lifted by such an experience in order to remember and even be deeply affected by it.\u00a0 The result is that the memory of what Germany once did to Europe\u2019s Jews is now forever inflected by the memory of having mourned Europe\u2019s murdered Jews here, of having mourned the Holocaust together with others and alone, by oneself.<\/p>\n

In post-9\/11 New York, our memorial questions were very different: how to commemorate and articulate the loss of nearly 3,000 lives at the hands of terrorists and at the same time, how to create a memorial site for ongoing life and regeneration? By necessity, the National 9\/11 Memorial and Museum would have to do both. This is why we chose a design that had the capacity for both remembrance and reconstruction, space for both memory of past destruction and for present life and its regeneration.\u00a0 It had to be an integrative design, a complex that would mesh memory with life, embed memory in life, and balance our need for memory with the present needs of the living. \u00a0It could not be allowed to disable life or take its place, but rather inspire life, regenerate it, and provide for it. \u00a0It would have to be a design that animates and reinvigorates this site, but does not paralyze it, with memory.<\/p>\n

In Michael Arad and Peter Walker\u2019s design for \u201cReflecting Absence,\u201d we found both the stark expressions of irreparable loss in the voids, and the consoling, regenerative forms of life in the surrounding trees and pools of water.\u00a0 The cascading waterfalls simultaneously recall the source of life and the fall of the towers, even as they flow into a further unreplenishable abyss at their centers to suggest loss and absence. \u00a0The fuller and taller the trees grow, the deeper the volumes of the voids become. \u00a0The taller the surrounding skyscrapers of the World Trade Center grow, the deeper the open commemorative space at their center becomes. \u00a0In the National September 11th<\/sup> Memorial at Ground Zero in New York City, the memorial expressions of loss and regeneration are now built into each other, each helping to define the other.\u00a0 The memorial plaza and names of the victims have been brought to grade, stitched back into the grid and fiber of the city streets of lower-Manhattan.\u00a0 And finally, like the Denkmal<\/em> in Berlin, the 9\/11 Memorial at ground-level is anchored by the underground 9\/11 Memorial Museum built beneath it, which tells the hard history of that day, as well as the life stories of those who were lost in the terrorist attacks on September 11th<\/sup>, 2001.<\/p>\n

Underlying all of these national memorial projects, the question remains:\u00a0 What do monuments and memory have to do with each other? “Every period has the impulse to create symbols in the form of monuments,” Sigmund Giedion has written, “which according to the Latin meaning are ‘things that remind,’ things to be transmitted to later generations.\u00a0 This demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed.\u00a0 It will find an outlet at all costs\u201d (Giiedion, 28).\u00a0 This may still be true, I believe, which leads me to ask just what these outlets and their costs are today.\u00a0 Indeed, the forms this demand for the monumental now takes, and to what self-abnegating ends, throw the presumptive link between monuments and memory into fascinating relief.<\/p>\n

By creating common spaces for memory, monuments propagate the illusion of common memory. Public monuments, national days of commemoration, and shared calendars thus all work to create common loci around which seemingly common national identity is forged.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here I would like to explore the ways both the monument and our approach to it have evolved over the last 80 years or so, the ways the monument itself has been reformulated in its function as memorial, forced to confront its own limitations as a contemporary aesthetic response to recent past events such as the September 11th<\/sup> attacks and more distant past events such as the Holocaust.\u00a0 In this somewhat contrary approach to the monument, I try to show what monuments do by what they cannot do.\u00a0 Here I examine how the need for a unified vision of the past as found in the traditional monument necessarily collides with the modern conviction that neither the past nor its meanings are ever just one thing.<\/p>\n

The real problem with monumentality, Lewis Mumford once suggested, may not be intrinsic to the monument itself so much as it is to our new age, “which has not merely abandoned a great many historic symbols, but has likewise made an effort to deflate the symbol itself by denying the values which it represents . . .” (Mumford, 179).\u00a0 In an age that denies universal values, he found, there can also be no universal symbols, the kind that monuments once represented. Or as put even more succinctly by Sert, Leger, and Giedion in their revelatory 1943 essay, “Nine Points on Monumentality,” “Monuments are, therefore, only possible in periods in which a unifying consciousness and unifying culture exist” (Sert, Giedion, 48).<\/p>\n

Where the ancients used monumentality to express the absolute faith they had in the common ideals and values that bound them together, however, the moderns (from the early 19th century onward) have replicated only the rhetoric of monumentality, in the words of Giedion, “to compensate for their own lack of expressive force.” “In this way,” according to Giedion, “the great monumental heritages of mankind became poisonous to everybody who touched them” (Giedion, 25).\u00a0 For those in the modern age who insist on such forms, the result can only be a “psuedomonumentality,” what Giedion called the use of “routine shapes from bygone periods . . .\u00a0 [But] because they had lost their inner significance they had become devaluated;\u00a0 mere cliches without emotional justification” (25).\u00a0 To some extent, we might even see such psuedomonumentality as a sign of modern longing for common values and ideals.<\/p>\n

Ironically, in fact, these same good reasons for the modern skepticism of the monument may also begin to explain the monument’s surprising revival in late modern, or so-called postmodern societies.\u00a0 Because these societies often perceive themselves as no longer bound together by universally shared myths or ideals, monuments extolling such universal values are derided as anachronistic at best, reductive mythifications of history, at worst.\u00a0 How to explain, then, the monument and museums boom of the late 20th<\/sup> and early 21st<\/sup> centuries?\u00a0 The more fragmented and heterogeneous societies become, it seems, the stronger their need to unify wholly disparate experiences and memories with the common meaning seemingly created in common spaces.\u00a0 But rather than presuming that a common set of ideals underpins its form, the contemporary monument attempts to assign a singular architectonic form to unify disparate and competing memories.\u00a0 In the absence of shared beliefs or common interests, memorial-art in public spaces asks an otherwise fragmented populace to frame diverse pasts and experiences in common spaces.\u00a0 By creating common spaces for memory, monuments propagate the illusion of common memory. Public monuments, national days of commemoration, and shared calendars thus all work to create common loci around which seemingly common national identity is forged.<\/p>\n

\n

In an increasingly democratic age, in which the stories of nations are being told in the multiple voices of its everyday historians\u2013i.e., its individual citizens\u2013monolithic meaning and national narratives are as difficult to pin down as they may be nostalgically longed for.\u00a0 The result has been a shift away from the notion of a national \u201ccollective memory\u201d to what I would call a nation\u2019s \u201ccollected memory.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Part of our contemporary culture\u2019s hunger for the monumental, I believe, is its nostalgia for the universal values and ethos by which it once knew itself as a unified culture.\u00a0 But this reminds us of that quality of monuments that strikes the modern sensibility as so archaic, even somewhat quaint: the imposition of a single cultural icon or symbol onto a host of disparate and competing experiences, as a way to impose common meaning and value on disparate memories\u2013all for the good of a commonwealth.\u00a0 When it was done high-handedly by government regimes, and gigantic monuments were commissioned to represent gigantic self-idealizations, there was often little protest.\u00a0 The masses had, in fact, grown accustomed to being subjugated by governmental monumentality, dwarfed and defeated by a regime\u2019s over-weaning sense of itself and its importance, made to feel insignificant by an entire nation\u2019s reason for being. But in an increasingly democratic age, in which the stories of nations are being told in the multiple voices of its everyday historians\u2013i.e., its individual citizens\u2013monolithic meaning and national narratives are as difficult to pin down as they may be nostalgically longed for.\u00a0 The result has been a shift away from the notion of a national \u201ccollective memory\u201d to what I would call a nation\u2019s \u201ccollected memory.\u201d\u00a0 Here we recognize that we never really shared each other\u2019s actual memory of past or even recent events, but that in sharing common spaces in which we collect our disparate and competing memories, we find common (perhaps even a national) understanding of widely disparate experiences and our very reasons for recalling them.<\/p>\n

This relatively newfound sense of public ownership of national memory, that this memory may actually be ours somehow and not on vicarious loan to us for the sake of common identity, has been embraced by a new generation of memorial-makers who also harbor a deep distrust for traditionally static forms of the monument, which in their eyes have been wholly discredited by their consort with the last century\u2019s most egregiously dictatorial regimes.\u00a0 Seventy years after the defeat of the Nazi regime, contemporary artists in Germany still have difficulty separating the monument there from its fascist past.\u00a0 In their eyes, the didactic logic of monuments\u2014their demagogical rigidity and certainty of history\u2014continues to recall too closely traits associated with fascism itself.\u00a0 How else would totalitarian regimes commemorate themselves except through totalitarian art like the monument?\u00a0 Conversely, how better to celebrate the fall of totalitarian regimes than by celebrating the fall of their monuments?\u00a0 Monuments against fascism, or against the totalitarian regime of the former Soviet Union, therefore, would have to be monuments against themselves:\u00a0 against the traditionally didactic function of monuments, against their tendency to displace the past they would have us contemplate\u2014and finally, against the authoritarian propensity in monumental spaces that reduces viewers to passive spectators.<\/p>\n

\n

Monuments against fascism, or against the totalitarian regime of the former Soviet Union, therefore, would have to be monuments against themselves:\u00a0 against the traditionally didactic function of monuments, against their tendency to displace the past they would have us contemplate\u2014and finally, against the authoritarian propensity in monumental spaces that reduces viewers to passive spectators.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019ve long believed that the best way to save the monument, if it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 That is to say, rather than seeing polemics as a by-product of the monument, I would make the polemics surrounding a monument\u2019s existence one of its central, animating features. For I believe that in our age of heteroglossia (Bakhtin\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In his concluding chapter of Oblivion<\/em> (entitled \u201cA Duty to Forget),\u201d ethnographer and social theorist Marc Aug\u00e9 echoes Nietzsche\u2019s case against the kinds of fixed memory that disable life.\u00a0 But here he extends this critique by reminding us that because memory and oblivion \u201cstand together, both [ ] necessary for the full use of time,\u201d only together can they enable life (Auge, 89).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And to do this may mean to begin forgetting, according to Aug\u00e9, \u201cin order to find faith in the everyday again and mastery over their time\u201d (88).\u00a0 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. \u201cWe must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful,\u201d Aug\u00e9 concludes.\u00a0 \u201cFaithful to what?\u201d we ask.\u00a0 Faithful to life in its present, quotidian moment, I say.<\/p>\n

In my new book, The Stages of Memory<\/em><\/a> (from which this lecture was adapted), I recount a handful of memorials, memory-themed exhibitions, and museum-debates that took place between 1991 and 2014, which when regarded together, might trace what I call \u201cthe arc of memorial vernacular\u201d connecting the dots between Maya Lin\u2019s design for the Vietnam Veterans\u2019 Monument, Berlin\u2019s \u201cMemorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,\u201d and the \u201cNational 9\/11 Memorial\u201d located on the site of the former Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.\u00a0 The “stages of memory\u201d here refer both to the public staging of these memorial projects and to the incremental sequence (or stages) of these memorial processes as they unfold.\u00a0 In every case, the emphasis here is on the process and work of memory over what we might call its end result.\u00a0 With this in mind, I would even suggest that as great and brilliant as Michael Arad and Peter Walker\u2019s realized design for the National 9\/11 Memorial at Ground Zero may be, its true foundation is the process that brought it into being, which includes the hundreds of thousands of hours spent by the other 5,200 teams in their offices and studios, at their families\u2019 kitchen tables.\u00a0 The \u201cstages of memory\u201d at Ground Zero necessarily include both the built memorial and the unbuilt proposals, which deserve and will surely have their own public showing one day.<\/p>\n

\n
Bibliography<\/h6>\n

Adorno, T.W. \u201cEngagement.\u201d In Noten zur Literatur<\/em> III. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Vorlag, 1965.<\/p>\n

Aug\u00e9, Marc. Oblivion<\/em>.\u00a0 Minneapolis and London:\u00a0 University of Minnesota Press, 2004.<\/p>\n

Friedlander, Saul. Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe<\/em>. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993.<\/p>\n

– – – – -.\u00a0 Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution<\/em>. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.<\/p>\n

Giedion, S. \u00a0Architecture You and Me:\u00a0 The Diary of a Development.<\/em>\u00a0 Cambridge:\u00a0 Harvard University Press, 1958.<\/p>\n

Lin, Maya Ling. Boundaries<\/em>.\u00a0 New York and London:\u00a0 Simon & Schuster, 2000.<\/p>\n

Mumford, Lewis. “Monumentalism, Symbolism and Style.” Architectural Review<\/em>, April 1949.<\/p>\n

Sert, J.L., F. Leger, and Giedion, S. “Nine Points on Monumentality.”\u00a0 In S. Giedion, ed. Architecture You and Me<\/em>, 1943, 1958.<\/p>\n

Wyatt, Edward, 2003.\u00a0 \u201cOfficials Invite 9\/11 Memorial Designers to Break the Rules.\u201d\u00a0 New York Times<\/em>, April 29:\u00a0 B-1.<\/p>\n

Young, James E. \u00a0The Texture of Memory:\u00a0 Holocaust Memorials and Meaning<\/em>.\u00a0 New Haven and London:\u00a0 Yale University Press, 1993.<\/p>\n

– – – – – .\u00a0 At Memory’s Edge:\u00a0 After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture.<\/em>\u00a0 New Haven and London:\u00a0 Yale University Press, 2000.<\/p>\n

– – – – -. The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between<\/em>. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016.<\/p>\n

– – – – – . \u201cThe Stages of Memory at Ground Zero,\u201d in Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres, Eds. Religion,Violence, Memory, and Place<\/em>. Bloomington and Indianapolis:\u00a0 Indiana University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n

– – – – – .\u00a0 \u201cDie Gedenkstatte des World Trade Center:\u00a0 Bericht Eines Jurymitglieds uber die Stadien der Erinnerung.\u201d In Gunter Schlusche, Ed. Architektur der Erinnerung:\u00a0 NS-Verbrechen in der europaischen Gedenkkultur<\/em>.\u00a0 Berlin:\u00a0 Nicolai\/Akademie der Kunste, 2006.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James E. Young Ph.D., Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English and Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Founding Director, Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies\u00a0(UMass Amherst)   Adapted from The Stages of Memory:\u00a0 Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016)   In April 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":64,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,13,14],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-large-article","tag-911memorial","tag-jamesyoung","tag-reflectingabsence"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310,"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}