The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning

The Texture of Memory by James Young is a powerful and moving examination of the complex nature of Holocaust memorials and of their difficult mandate: to convey meaning in a world subject to constant change. As the years pass and the number of survivors dwindles, memorials take on an added burden of signification under radically different circumstances—nations and generations situated spatially and temporally far from past events, under diverse political systems and cultural conditions.

Young begins his book with a careful consideration of the ambivalence of memory, and hence of the memorials themselves. Memory, the author reminds us, is never neutral or value-free. We do not have instant recall—direct access to the facts as they were. Thus it is not just the future that brings change: the past, too, is always being altered, caught between an originating event and the impossibility of ever recapturing it. Young also dismisses the notion of collective memory as an abstraction, a metaphysical ghost that is bandied about uncritically. Different ethnic groups, nations, religions, generations, tend to remember the same past in complex and conflicting ways. And if memory is such a labile, fleeting construct, fraught with so many difficulties, then erecting monuments to memorialize past events poses almost insurmountable problems.

Younger artists who came of age during the postwar years have preferred to rely on minimalist, conceptual, or even performance art not only to avoid commodification but also to bypass other pitfalls inherent in memorials as such: monumentalization—one of the mainstays of fascist aesthetics—and the danger of aestheticizing the unspeakable horrors of the Final Solution: hence the invention of the gegen-Denkmal, or counter-monument. The author analyzes some of the most challenging recent examples of this invention, such as Harburg’s Monument against Fascism by Jochen and Esther Gerz, and Horst Hoheisel’s Aschott-Brunnen in Kassel.

Challenging as they are, these monuments have not pleased everyone. The very strategies employed to prevent commodification, such as the ephemeral nature of the construction and dialogical demands placed upon the spectators, have brought memorials into conflict with a generation of survivors who ask that the connection between monument and referent be as clear and unequivocal as possible, even at the cost of being retardataire. At the heart of the controversy lies the old, intractable question of the relationship between memory and representation. Is there not an excess of the signified that precludes or exceeds the possibility of representation altogether? It is not just mimesis that is in question here: the very scale of the massacre seems to resist the symbolic as well.

The question becomes particularly acute in the case of the memorials built on the site of the death camps. Young relates the moving story of several of these: Birkenau, Dachau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Auschwitz. One of the many merits of this book is its judicious choice from among the thousands of memorials built to honor the victims. Young evokes the agonizing decisions of artists like Nathan Rapoport who could not bring themselves to design more up-to-date monuments because in their eyes a more literal approach was needed. Unlike other, more hermetic forms of avant-garde art, memorials are public, and must convey meaning beyond themselves: they must be referential, not self-referential, and, particularly in the eyes of survivors, they must offer if not the promise of transcendence in the future, at least the consolatio of reference gesturing towards the past. For younger generations on the other hand, the non-representational quality of truth demands an abstract or conceptual approach: the consolatory power of figurative art introduces a redemptive telos into a terrain that must remain forever barren, a reminder of the irrevocable and irreversible nature of genocide.

Young is surely correct in pointing out that in gauging the quality of these painful markers, we need more than traditional methods of analysis: “Holocaust memorials demand additional criteria if the meanings of such works are...