Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory by Oren Baruch Stier (review)

Oren Baruch Stier’s recent work is a masterful contribution to scholarship on Holocaust memory, theoretically sophisticated yet accessible to non-experts. The volume features chapters on four Holocaust icons: railroad cars, the “ Arbeit macht frei” phrase/sign, Anne Frank, and “the six million.” Each of these chapters is empirically rich and interpretatively innovative. Stier looks at the history of each icon and its past referents, as well as of contemporary appropriation in memory work and popular culture.

Stier starts with conceptual and theoretical considerations, noting that “the Holocaust bequeathed to contemporary society a cultural lexicon of powerful symbols” (p. 2). His three-fold point of departure is that everything we know about the Shoah is already mediated, that Holocaust memory matters today, and that memory is distinct and often disconnected from history (p. 4). This last point can be problematic because with the construction of memory, a distillation and mediation process can raise critical issues about authenticity and authentication if the memory moves too far away from history—“material ofthe Holocaust interacting with material onthe Holocaust” (p. 6). This is why the author concerns himself not with symbols per se, but with icons—simultaneously a representation and representative (p. 6), “facilitators … permitting identification … through a symbolic code” (p. 7). Icons are tropes, metonyms, or summarizing symbols, containing an element of the sacred, which “effectively sum up an adherent’s dedication to the system, often in a non- or pre-cognitive way” (p. 9). They are structurally similar to religious symbols, and indeed the conceptual roots in Eastern Orthodox Christianity are key. Unlike other types of symbols, Holocaust referentiality is crucial. There must remain a tangible connection to the historical facts and contexts for an icon to be an icon.

Stier shares other thoughts about the contemporary situation, emphasizing how current generations are spectators not witnesses, and, following Marianne Hirsch, that we are concerned with “affiliative postmemory” (p. 14) today. To reinforce his approach, Stier includes a brief glance at several other common symbols. The Star of David and the pink triangle have been appropriated so widely that they “cannot be icons because of their ubiquity and malleability” (p. 20). The author concludes that “they remain symbolic and powerful, but each has also left the Shoah behind” (p. 31).

The first empirical chapter looks at the rise of the rail car as icon during and after the Holocaust, and the appropriation of the object in museal and memorial projects today. Four case studies exemplify different modes of Holocaust iconization (p. 63): initiatory (with a car in Dallas being the literal entrance to a museum); integrative (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington displays an open car situated in the chronological presentation of Holocaust history); ambivalent (in a museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the car is accessible externally but with closed interior spaces); and monumental (at Yad Vashem, presented at a distance on a railroad bridge abruptly cut off over a peak). Stier ends with some thoughts on Robert Kusmirowski’s Wagoninstallation in Berlin, an exact replica of a rail car, which shows “that the artifact itself has become the object of imaginative replication and aesthetic interpretation” (p. 67).

Next, the author addresses the infamous “Arbeit macht frei” phrase/sign, noting the major disjunction between the pre-Nazi proverbial and the post-Nazi iconic usages. The vast majority of victims at Auschwitz/Birkenau would not have entered the camp through that gate, as is widely believed today (evidence of “the fraught relationship between history and memory”; p. 69). Stier notes that the seemingly proverbial statement expresses an older German belief in the “redemptive value and necessity of work” (p. 72); that it is a kind of “theological statement” (p. 76); and that it has become a kind of “multilevel lie” glossing over “the key differences between different types of camps and different types of Jewish incarceration...