Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past

Marking Absence: Remembrance and Hamburg's Holocaust Memorials / Natasha Goldman

Marking Absence Remembrance and Hamburg’s Holocaust Memorials Natasha Goldman Recent Holocaust memorialization in Germany has embraced the visual trope of the countermonument, or memorials conceived to “challenge the conventional premises of the monument.”1 While traditional memorials often displace memory with ‹gural representations aiming to either console or redeem viewers, countermonuments request the viewer’s direct conceptual involvement in interpreting voids and/or a minimalist rhetoric. A case study is the constellation of memorials in Grindel, a neighborhood once central to Jewish life in Hamburg. Alfred Hrdlicka’s un‹nished Countermonument (1985–86) stands on Dammtordam directly across from and in deliberate opposition to Richard Kuöhl’s 1936 Monument to the Seventy-sixth Infantry Regiment, known as the 76er Monument or Kriegsklotz (war monstrosity). Ulrich Rückriem’s minimalist Memorial to the Deported Jews, erected in 1983, stands in a small triangular park near the University of Hamburg, and Margrit Kahl’s Joseph-Carlebach-Platz Synagogue Monument, built in 1988, traces the outlines of a destroyed synagogue’s vaulting in Grindelhof.2 Until 2005, the only public monument dedicated to all Jewish citizens of Hamburg who were murdered during the Holocaust was installed by the Jewish community in 1951 in Ohlsdorf Cemetery, far from the monuments around the university or Dammtor. Re›ecting the needs of the Jewish community in the seclusion of a Jewish cemetery, the monument does not attempt to address Holocaust memory for the city as a whole.3 While Hamburg is often seen as a city that turned a cold shoulder to Hitler and National Socialism, recent historical scholarship resists the myth of a liberal Hamburg and instead lays bare the Nazi activities of Hamburg citizens and of‹cials. Memorialization dedicated to the Hamburg victims of Allied bombing (known as the Hamburg Feuersturm) was 251 common. Some individuals in Hamburg, however, have accepted the dif‹cult challenge of remembering Nazi atrocities. Cultural Senator Wolfgang Tarnowski was especially active in realizing several memorials, sometimes under tight budgetary constraints. Most recently, the Grindelhof Citizen’s Initiative has been active in the upkeep of the Joseph-CarlebachPlatz Synagogue Memorial. The countermonuments at Dammtor are stylistically either postmodern or minimalist. While traditional interpretations of high modernist works of art (minimalism in particular) stress the materiality of the object or its aggressive positioning in relation to the viewer, revisions to this thinking posit that modernism can also seek to address memory and the Holocaust.4 In the United States, some postwar modernist works of art, although alluding to the Holocaust via their titles, were rarely analyzed, at least in the early years, in terms of this seemingly blatant meaning.5 Cases in point include Frank Stella’s series of black paintings, including Arbeit Macht Frei (1958), and Morris Louis’s Charred Journal: Firewritten (1951). Comparably, Louis Kahn’s proposed Holocaust memorial (1966–72) for Battery Park in New York City consisted of nine glass cubes that made an outright association between modernism and the Holocaust (the memorial was never built). More recent reinterpretations of high modernist works turn to the possibility of their attempt to locate a post-Holocaust position that requires a certain activation of memory on the viewer’s part. Mark Godfrey , for example, provokingly suggests that Barnet Newman’s Stations of the Cross (1958) activates a space of memory for the viewer. In contrast, Jill Bennett contributes a transformative analysis to trauma studies in elucidating the relationship between the work of art and the viewer as one that produces “affect.” She claims: “Trauma related art is transactive, not communicative. It often touches us, but it does not communicate the ‘secret’ of personal experience.”6 More broadly, James Young’s vital historical analyses of Holocaust memorials concern the ways in which collective memory is activated in the planning, commissioning, and reception of memorials. Young ‹rst analyzed the memorials at Dammtor in his 1993 study The Texture of Memory. To his analysis, I add re›ections on German postwar attitudes to the Holocaust, particularly in relation to the representations of victims of Allied bombing. Other scholars, such as Lisa Saltzman and Paul Jaskot, place national identity, postmodernism, and politics in the foreground of their research. While Saltzman locates Gerhard Richter’s works in the social context of 252 Beyond Berlin German religious cycles of commemoration, Jaskot resists the myth that there was “silence” in art criticism regarding the analysis of artwork and its relationship to the...