Holocaust Monuments and National Memory-Cultures in France and Germany since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Vél d'Hiv in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin (review)

This study of two sites of memory — the Vél d'Hiv in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin — is timely. The latter memorial, the Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe, was finally officially opened in 2005 after years of highly mediatized debate. Both monuments constitute controversipal memorials to the deportation and persecution of Jews in France and Germany during the Second World War and exemplify what Carrier sees as a different mode of memorial. He points out that where, historically, monuments evoked collective commemoration through appealing to belief in a shared past, the function of memorials has changed since 1945 in the context of debates around the forms that commemoration can take in the wake of genocide. Carrier does not analyse the monuments as expressions of cultural memory, but as the nexus of a series of political, artistic and public debates. The process of remembering is shown to be bound up less in the structures and origins of the memorial sites themselves (which hold no intrinsic significance) than in the thorny debates they have generated. This book gives a usefully broad account of the origins and functions of both monuments and of the public and political debates they have inspired. It is divided into three parts: the first traces the history of monuments in collective memory; the second uses the case studies of the Vél d'Hiv and the Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe; and the third maps out the national and postnational 'memorial paradigm'. The third part also explains the term 'national memory-culture': this definition would probably be more useful earlier in the study as a framing device. The strength of the study lies in the comparative approach, which productively shows that the origins, functions and reception of the Holocaust monument and the Vél d'Hiv are both nation-specific and transnational. In both countries, Carrier points out, the quest to commemorate the genocide of the Jews became bound up in a desire to create a memorial that could adequately represent the 'nation' and its conflictual relation to the past. The debates around what kind of monument could represent this difficult relation to the past were played out very differently in the two countries, reflecting their different positions in relation to the genocide. None the less, compelling analogies are drawn here between the two cases. Most strikingly, in both cases, Carrier shows that arguments over the form the monuments should take were persistently overshadowed by the (wholly impossible) expectation that the monuments should represent 'symbolic reparation of the entire nation' (p. 157). Above all, the study suggests that the two monuments should open up productive dialogue about the relation between present and past and about whether a 'national memory-culture' or even a 'national monument' can ever exist as such.