Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation

6. Refiguring the Sacred: Strategies of Disfiguration in String, the Memorial to the Deportees, and Menora

149 6 • REFIGURING THE SACRED Strategies of Disfiguration in String, the Memorial to the Deportees, and Menora We have seen that Holocaust museums and exhibits draw on a number of unique framing and display strategies to evoke particular kinds of vision and remembrance. One technique not yet discussed—and one of the more unusual strategies for encouraging a critical encounter with symbols of Holocaust remembrance—is the disfiguration of memorial objects or images. Drawing on aesthetic techniques indicative of a postmodern sensibility, disfiguration also helps to prevent the monumentalization of Holocaust memory. In contrast to chapters 4 and 5, which broadly examine objects, images, and display techniques, this chapter focuses exclusively on disfiguration as it appears in three exhibits: String, a video installation at Yad Vashem; the Memorial to the Deportees, an outdoor memorial at Yad Vashem; and Menora, a video sculpture in the Jewish Museum Berlin.1 Any contemporary discussion of alternative memorials—that is, memorials that deviate in their form and aesthetics from traditional memorial strategies—draws on the work of James E. Young, whose studies of Holocaust memorials in Germany describe a new kind of Holocaust monument—the countermonument.2 Countermonuments call into question the memorializing work that monuments normally undertake. While Young’s work on countermonuments lays the groundwork for the current discussion, above all by providing a basic conceptual framework with which to view and analyze how certain monuments deviate from more conventional memorial spaces, the concept of disfiguration used here ventures into 150 Holocaust Memory Reframed new territory, with a focus on how sacred meaning emerges from particular aesthetic strategies. Holocaust Representation, Postmodern Aesthetics, and Sacred Meaning Both Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum Berlin turn to methods of disfiguration to dismantle traditional, modernist visual habits and to evoke new and even sacred ways of seeing and remembering. A problem for all Holocaust museums and exhibits is how to relate narratives of the Holocaust without relying too heavily on either abstraction or figuration. Ethical and aesthetic questions haunt both of these strategies. Those who have been critical of abstraction typically object to the elevation of formal and aesthetic concerns above the duties of remembrance and communication. They criticize aesthetic priorities that discourage direct emotional or empathetic involvement with the horrific subject matter. Critics of figuration, on the other hand, object to the overexposure of certain images and symbols, the risk of violating the Bilderverbot (prohibition of images) that concerns particular kinds of suffering, the trivialization and exploitation of the Holocaust , and the creation of harrowing depictions that alienate viewers. In light of these concerns, particularly inventive Holocaust displays rely on an aesthetic strategy that exists between these two poles of representation, thereby avoiding the Scylla of evasion and aesthetization on the one hand and the Charybdis of reductive representation on the other. A number of Holocaust exhibits in Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum Berlin practice such an alternative strategy, engaging in a process of disfiguration through postmodern techniques and thereby imbuing Holocaust memorial symbols and forms with sacred significance. A second, related issue in Holocaust representation is the question of the appropriateness of postmodern aesthetics for the subject matter. Holocaust artists have often relied on postmodern aesthetics; this may be due to the fact that the postmodern sensibility is uniquely suited to the representation of trauma, loss, fragmentation, and irresolution. Edith Wyschogrod has aptly described this: “The holocaust is itself intrinsic to postmodern sensibility in that it forces thought to an impasse, into thinking a negation that cannot be thought and upon which thinking founders.” Within the realm of Refiguring the Sacred 151 architecture, for example, Holocaust museums of the past few decades have begun drawing on the more daring, at times controversial, strategy of developing their own “ritualized iconography and symbolism”—that at times refers directly to the spaces and experiences of the concentration camps. In architecture, as Gavriel Rosenfeld argues, the rise of postmodernism gave architects the “tools to grapple with Auschwitz’s architectural legacy.”3 More generally, postmodern aesthetic techniques draw attention to the process of memory itself and self-consciously recognize the roles of mediation and transmission in Holocaust memory. In this sense, postmodern art practice tends toward the nonnarrative, the polyvalent, the enigmatic, and the ambiguous ;itcultivatesgaps,silences,andabsencesappropriatefortheevocationof traumatic memories—themselves subject to repression and forgetting.4 It is difficult to clearly differentiate between modern and postmodern aesthetics, particularly since many postmodern aesthetic techniques such...