In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Figures of Memory: The Rhetoric of Displacement at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Michael F. Bernard-Donals
  • Mark A. Mengerink
Figures of Memory: The Rhetoric of Displacement at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Michael F. Bernard-Donals (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016), 234 pp., hardcover $80.00, paperback $20.95, electronic version available.

Michael F. Bernard-Donals' previous work interrogated the boundaries between history and memory and examined how Holocaust survivors and scholars create representations of the Holocaust, with an emphasis on ethics, authenticity, limitations, and rhetoric work. A truly interdisciplinary scholar, he draws here on literary theory, philosophy, and history. He mines the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's (USHMM) institutional archives, including committee reports, committee meeting minutes, and visitor comments, to analyze memory, representation, rhetoric, and authenticity as they relate the design and implementation of the museum. Following an introduction establishing the theoretical framework of his study, Bernard-Donals presents five chapters of analysis. Figures of Memory provides an insightful examination of the challenges faced by the [End Page 494] United States Holocaust Memorial Council (USHMC) and its various committees tasked with designing the USHMM.

His study rests on the idea that the museum serves as a "rhetorical instrument that provides an opening between the past and the future by compelling a change in ethical orientation in the present" (p. 3). Bernard-Donals details the design of the USHMM "in rhetorical terms." He also examines how visitors enact this rhetoric in the museum's space. He argues that memory "moves" (p. 4) and causes a "displacement" (p. 4) in four crucial ways as visitors experience the permanent exhibit. First, memory can shift a visitor's attention to the past. For the USHMC, this kind of movement to Holocaust memory was key. Second, when a visitor encounters an event or an artifact in the exhibit, the memory it causes is "figurally associated with other objects or events" (p. 4); the visitor's memory is displaced to events that may or may not be related to the Holocaust. USHMC members were aware this could happen but hoped to contain this kind of memory. Third, memory moves with the visitor and travels through the Museum space. Interaction between the impression generated by the Museum and the visitor's previous knowledge, biases, and personal context generates many potential memories, complicating the work of the Museum. Fourth, the emotions generated in the visitor's memoryscape moves him or her toward ethical action.

These four paths focus the main chapters in Figures of Memory. Chapter 1, "Delinquent Spaces," traces the iterations of the Museum's interior as the various committees debated its purpose. By the late 1980s, planners agreed that the Museum should educate visitors about the Holocaust. They mandated that the Museum space must bear witness to the millions of victims and their suffering, invoke empathy among the visitors, and encourage visitors to ask questions. As Bernard-Donals points out, even these goals caused conflict among planners, and they eventually decided to stress the chronological telling of the Holocaust as the main goal, encouraging visitors to think about past events.

Presenting the Holocaust experience generated much debate among planners and proved genuinely problematic for the designers. Chapter 2, "Figures of Authenticity," focuses on the artifacts to be displayed in the permanent exhibit, and specifically what artifacts would be included, how to acquire them, and whether reproductions would suffice. Some planners believed the authenticity of the visitor's response was more important than the authenticity of the object. However, as Bernard-Donals argues, the key issue remained how artifacts—whether authentic or not—might displace memory.

Chapter 3, "Enacting Memory," examines the work of the Committee on Conscience (CoC), created to draw attention to, and influence policy on, genocides or potential genocides anywhere in the world. Planners recognized the ethical imperative of the USHMM and hoped the CoC could mobilize any ethical reorientation visitors experienced in the Museum. Deliberations explored "whether there was a link—and if so, what that link looked like—between the understanding of the Holocaust forged by the museum and the moral or political force of the action that resulted from that memory" (p. 98...

pdf

Share