Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin by Irit Dekel (review)

As the first ethnographic monograph written about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Irit Dekel’s Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin proposes a unique theoretical approach to memory studies and to Holocaust memorialization in Berlin and Germany. Dekel argues that the memorial, designed by American Peter Eisenman and opened in 2005, has been a “litmus paper” (19) for the examination of German memory politics and the working through of the past, and, as such, is also a lens through which to view contemporary trends in German memory work. Dekel’s book offers a striking departure from traditional analytical examinations of monument creation that approach the topic from more of a postmodern, post-memory perspective. Instead of basing her analysis in the historical, moral, or aesthetic motivations behind the memorial, as we might have expected of a monument study, Dekel looks at the way performance, participation, and mediation play a role in the memorial. As a result, her analysis considers how visitors engage with remembrance, as opposed to concentrating on the monument itself and issues associated with its creation. Acknowledging that much has already been written about the architectural and aesthetic evaluation of the memorial, as well as its functionality and acceptability, Dekel’s fresh examination instead sees the memorial site as a place for political action, interpretation, and memory work as an act of civic engagement.

In this way, Dekel’s study circumvents the questioning of ethics involved in the act of memory and instead concentrates on the performance of the act of remembrance, and the reflection on this act, as a reflection of memory work in Berlin, but also in Germany as a whole. Key to Dekel’s examination are the roles of the visitors and the guides. For Dekel, visitors play the important role of tools for mediation between the act of Holocaust remembrance and the physical site more specifically. Guides function as mediators and facilitators of knowledge, both of the information found at the memorial site itself and also of their own perspectives on memory and the politics of Germany in broader terms. Many of the extensive and engaging interviews and quotes included in the book focus on the German visitor, and the inclusion of these interviews further serves to support Dekel’s examination of the intersection and interaction between visitor, guide, and memorial.

The book is organized into four chapters that are thematically arranged. In the first chapter, Dekel engages with Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory and Jürgen Habermas’s concept of deliberation in the public sphere to analyze aspects of transformation and transformative experience. Throughout this chapter Dekel proposes a shift away from examining the memory of the Holocaust through a trauma and post-trauma lens, towards a model that speaks to the performance of Holocaust memory and understanding of the memory in terms of “speakability.” Dekel identifies four types of speakability: “witnessing,” “guilt/shame,” “performing silence,” and “provoking knowledge” (75), and she revisits these themes in chapter 2. Here Dekel addresses speakability as a form of social condition that allows the visitor to move away from the previous notion of the inability to speak about the Holocaust that has dominated trauma theory in Germany. Dekel relies on visitor surveys, tours, and examination of the guestbooks to shed light on the type of discussions on memory taking place at the site. In what is perhaps the book’s strongest chapter, Dekel explores the ethics of engagement and the role of articulation in chapter 3. Through an extensive evaluation of guide and visitor interaction, Dekel examines the role of emotions and the performed acts of public sorrow that occur at the site. She argues that there are three moralizing phases of visiting the memorial. “Getting in,” where the visitor arrives at the site; “getting lost,” as a form of invitation to explore the grounds, and an opportunity for the visitor to reflect on the meaning of the...