The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between by James E. Young (review)

In the seventy years since World War II, commemorative efforts have been more widespread, diverse, and complex than for any previous period. James Young has been a significant contributor to this memorial culture. In a new volume of selected writings, he calls attention to key stages in the process of memorialization, drawing here on his own direct involvement in it. His role has consisted in struggling in the trenches: he has been called on to make decisions—political and practical as well as aesthetic—among competing conceptions for memorials at distinctive and complex “sites of memory.” Having served as a jury member for both the fraught Berlin Denkmal and the memorial commemorating the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Young describes their planning processes in detail. Along similar lines, other essays refer to lesser-known yet significant sites. Some sites recall World War II in situ (as in Hamburg) or in movable exhibitions (such as “Mirroring Evil” at New York’s Jewish Museum). Young makes the point that in its continuing public presence, World War II has fostered an expanding memorial culture more generally. Still other essays relate to later tragedies, such as the one on the memorial for the victims of the Norwegian Utøya massacre of 2011 (Young served as an advisor to the judging commission). A telling comment about Young’s combination of commitment and skepticism in relation to the importance of these projects was his initial response to the invitation to judge the Berlin Denkmal after the first competition for it had foundered: “Why me? I don’t think it can be done.”

Deliberation on the monuments of the post–World War II period, further-more, has continued even after their unveilings; like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva taking flight only at dusk, retrospective analysis of the concept of memorialization is no less pressing. Young’s discussions along these lines are at once informative and challenging, effectively pointing in the direction of a theory of memorials. The founding question, as reflected in the settings of the Berlin Denkmal and the 9/11 Memorial, remains: What is to be commemorated? For the Berlin Denkmal, the challenge arose from the imperative to reflect on the six million Jewish victims and the horrific mechanism of their destruction; the role of Germans (Nazis or otherwise) in that process; and the efforts at subsequent reparation including the construction of the monument itself—all without hinting at redemption in the peaceful Berlin of the present. Analogous constraints applied in the case of the 9/11 memorial. The need there was to answer the question: “How to … articulate the loss of nearly three thousand lives at the hands of terrorists and, at the same time … create a memorial site for ongoing life and regeneration?” (p. 12). The clearest conclusion, on the basis of Young’s own assessment of how the two monuments have met these challenges, is that no general response is possible; there can be reports only of individual experiences. Despite his phrasing of it in impersonal terms, Young’s reaction to the Berlin Denkmal’s 2,700 stelae demonstrates this subjectivity: “Looking up and down the pitching rows of stelae, one catches glimpses of other mourners.… At the same time, however, one feels very much alone, almost desolate, even in the company of hundreds of other visitors.… The experience of the memorial varies—from the reassurance one feels on the sidewalk by remembering in the company of others … to the feelings of existential aloneness from deep inside this dark forest” (p. 10). Well, perhaps.

Hovering over Young’s analyses of these recent instances of commemoration is Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ memorial, which Young regards as crystallizing the ideal of the “counter-memorial.” That ideal, for him, has shaped the most important—or memorable—contemporary monuments. Lin...