The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History

Memorials are a means by which societies unceasingly shape their pasts. They provide a focus for public commemoration of individual memories, guiding them into channels that serve changing public purposes. The channels are determined and redetermined through time in often conflicting negotiations between the authority who authorized, designed, and constructed a memorial, the groups who use it for commemorative purposes, and the memorial itself, including changes made to it or to its site.

James E. Young, the curator of the exhibit and editor of the catalogue, has investigated all these aspects in The Texture of Memory (1993), and Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1990), pioneering analyses of political and social components of responses to the Holocaust. In The Art of Memory exhibit, however, the audience for memorials takes center stage, for the exhibit seeks to make viewers aware of how historical contingencies affect the memories that monuments evoke.

The negotiation between public and private memory of the Holocaust is a complex issue; repercussions of the event were widespread, encompassing places from which people were deported, where extermination took place, and where the victims found refuge. Meanings can fluctuate according to who created or who is visiting the monuments: natives, foreign dignitaries, or synagogue groups. The Jewish character of the Holocaust figures centrally in the most provocative essays in the catalogue, since the content of memorial visits often depends on whether this character is suppressed or evoked. Emphasis on the specifically Jewish character of the Holocaust can turn monuments into propaganda for Israel, as described in excellent essays by Saul Friedländer and Jack Kugelmass, or make them tools in the effort of Jews to prove their victimhood, as Peter Novick argues in relation to Holocaust memory in America.

Consequences of the suppression of Jewish memory are described by Claudia Koonz, Konstanty Gebert, Jochen Spielmann, and Zvi Gitelman in essays on East German, Polish, and Soviet memorials. The exhibition also dramatized the suppression of memory through an album of snapshots from the 1940s of homemade memorials from the former Soviet Union. They range from expressionistic amateur art to touchingly simple plaques, tombstones, or a mere photograph of a man pointing into the woods; all were removed by Soviet authorities. To page through the album is to sense the private nature of the memorials as well as the forces that kept them from becoming public. An answer to the dilemma of whether to suppress or overemphasize the Jewish nature of the catastrophe seems to be proposed in Young’s sympathetic treatment in his essay on the universalist aspirations of the Anne Frank House, as well as the memorials built near it in Amsterdam to homosexuals and Gypsies exterminated by the Nazis.

The most impressive moment in the exhibit negotiates not spatially, however, but temporally between the private and the public. It is a video of the two minutes of silence, or rather stillness, “mandated by the Knesset” on the morning of Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust. The video leafs through pages of a Jewish calendar beginning with Passover, which precedes the memorial by a week. When it reaches the date of Yom HaShoah, the video cuts from the calendar to a busy intersection in Jerusalem, bustling with traffic, pedestrians, newspaper readers. A siren sounds and life stops. Bus passengers stay in line. A man stands frozen in the middle of the street in the act of handing money to a cabdriver. Cars stop. People stand at attention or with heads bowed, mourning or trying to show respect for those who do. An eerie silence seems to justify calling the memorial “two minutes of silence” despite the siren’s overwhelming wail. Yet one person continues walking. Does he violate the ban on movement deliberately, or has he somehow failed to notice it? The siren stops, followed by laughter and applause. As people begin to move, someone wipes away tears. Girls smile and point to the camera as though they...