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Reviewed by:
  • Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust
  • Paul Eisenstein
Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust, by Oren Baruch Stier. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. 277 pp. $34.95.

Oren Baruch Stier's Committed to Memory is an innovative and consistently perceptive examination of the "processes of memorial mediation" (p. 1) that guide and inform our encounter with the Holocaust. Like many books in Holocaust Studies today, Stier takes as axiomatic the postmodern notion that all memory is socially constructed—the notion that we can have no objective or immediate memorial experience of the past. Indeed, for Stier, insofar as memory is shared, it comes to us always in the form of a representation and never as an absolute or immanent historical referent. Far from something to lament, however, Stier sees how the traumatic absence at the heart of the Holocaust creates and fuels the very desire to remember. As Stier points out, this desire takes many forms, and it is, to be sure, prone to all sorts of mishaps and missteps as it underwrites various representations and embodiments of the Holocaust. But his book's larger, provocative theoretical point of departure is that memory's very condition of possibility has its coordinates in the inability of history to present itself objectively, that memory thrives in the gaps of a collective or communal memorial sensibility.

As Stier's theoretical inquiry into the very concept of collective memory (in his opening chapter) makes plain, the way to cope with the explosion of memory today—in increasingly popular and technologically mediated forms—lies not in the nostalgic call to return to collective memory, but rather in a full avowal of the cultural dimension of memory, and in a sharper critical self-consciousness regarding the strategies employed by institutions devoted to Holocaust memory in their production of it. Stier models precisely this critical consciousness in his reading of four distinct memorial modes: the iconic, the videotestimonial, the museological, and the ritual-ceremonial. [End Page 148]

In his look at some of the most recognizable metonymic images of the Holocaust in Chapter 2, Stier shows us how such images function as icons by calling attention to their own representational strategies in their attempt to remind us of the past. Stier's use of the word icon here gets nicely at the religious aura of such images, at the sanctity of their embodiment of the past, but he sees how their self-reflexivity (and/or the critical, interpretive posture that sees them as self-reflexive) helps to check what we might call their oversanctification. Reading the museum display of railway cars and hair shorn from female Auschwitz prisoners, as well as literary texts such as Art Spiegelman's Maus and Emily Prager's Eve's Tattoo, Stier is consistently on the lookout, indeed, for the way icons are displayed or received as overly sacred—in short, for the way icons are presented or regarded as idols. Such idols become objects of worship, calcifying memory and exchanging complexity and multivocity for redemption and eschatology.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Stier turns more explicitly to the way technology and media affect and transform memorial activity. Chapter 3 examines videotaped testimonies, with an eye to the "various strategies of framing" engaged in by those who are producing and participating in the giving of testimony. Such strategies are both technical and narrative, and they make clear that no testimony—even those of survivors—is pure or unmediated. Stier's analysis of the testimonies collected by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (the project sponsored by Steven Spielberg in the aftermath of Schindler's List), including CD-ROMs produced by the Foundation, is especially good at tracing the implications of framing strategies on the production of memory. Chapter 4 turns to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance (MOT), and the fundamental contrast between them. In a close reading of the sort of experience both museums set out to provide, Stier tracks the contributions and faults of both. The artifacts in the USHMM's traditional, object-driven collection foster a powerful relationship...

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