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

How do cultures memorialize traumatic events and what aesthetic strategies do they employ? The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between, a collection of essays spanning the influential career of James E. Young, explores these questions. The essays bring together interpretations of memorials, works of art, and exhibitions that Young helped create, as well as those for which he was not directly involved. Beginning with the watershed design of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) and ending with Norway’s memorial process for the July 22 Utøya attack (2011), the essays document changes in attitudes toward memorials dedicated to tragedy.

In the introduction, Young describes his participation in the commission of the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan. Young traces the evolution of memorials from Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to the development of Holocaust memorials in the 1980s (particularly in Germany), to the current state of memorial making. Holocaust memorials had a major impact on memorial culture. The ensuring chapters explain how.

In chapter 1, “Stages of Memory at Ground Zero: The National 9/11 Memorial Process,” Young documents the commission and jury process for the memorial at the World Trade Center (WTC), in which he took part. The chapter is broken up into three parts: “The Planning Stage,” which includes the commission; “The Jury Stage,” which incorporates recommendations for changes to submissions; and the “Judging Stage.” Young weaves personal experience and interpretation together with original source material, including his op-ed in New York Newsday (Sept. 8, 2002); the Memorial Mission Statement; the World Trade Center Memorial Jury Statement; Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s design statement; and the WTC Memorial Jury Statement for Winning Design.

Young begins chapter 2,”Daniel Libeskind’s Houses of Jewish Memory: What Is Jewish Architecture?” with a question: “What makes any expression of culture ‘Jewish’?” (79) He quotes Gavriel Rosenfeld that “deconstructivist” architecture arose from the “massive rupture in Western civilization caused by the Holocaust” (81). He then turns to works of architecture by Libeskind, including the Jewish Museum in Berlin (with a discussion of the museum’s original founding in 1933), the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, the Danish Jewish Museum, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. (More in-depth analysis of each building might have been useful; Libeskind’s Danish Jewish Museum borrows elements from the boats Danes used to rescue Jews, a fact that goes unremarked in the analysis.) This chapter provides very helpful discussions of each building, often referring to the commissioning documents and integrating rich excerpts of the author’s interview with the architect.

In “Regarding the Pain of Women: Gender and the Arts of Holocaust Memory” (chapter 3), Young is self-reflexive about his assumptions about death, sexuality, and the Holocaust—and the limits of those assumptions. He analyzes in subtle ways historical photographs of women during the Holocaust and works of art that incorporate those photographs. At Yad Vashem, Young explains, curators exhibited photographs of nude women who were murdered, but the orthodox community objected to the photographs’ depictions of explicit female nudity. The curators nonetheless insisted on historical accuracy, and the photographs remained. David Levinthal’s staged photographs of found toy nude figurines and soldiers reenact scenes of sexualized brutality, calling attention to the unique way that women suffered during the Holocaust. On his initial viewing, Young had rejected the images, but he later realized that he “had reflexively split off an aspect of the killing” that he had found difficult to assimilate (115). The acceptance of the unique atrocities against women during the Holocaust are echoed not only in works of art but also in memoir. Are my experiences of rape and sexual abuse worth telling, asks one female survivor, given that our villages have been burned, our families murdered (110–11)? Young says yes, they must be spoken. But showing them proves to be more contentious. We should be wary of sexualization in historical objectivity, claims Young, but also recognize that it is integral to the experience of women during the Holocaust.

In chapter 4, “The Terrible Beauty of Nazi Aesthetics,” the author weaves together scholarly work on Nazi aesthetics (such as Frederic Spotts and Saul Freidländer) with quotations from the makers of the Nazi aesthetic themselves (including Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer) to demonstrate that aesthetics were a fundamental part of the redemptive antisemitism to which Hitler aspired. Parades and events became grounds for an almost-religious tone: the soldiers who would die for Germany were already being “sacrificed”; the death of Jews would redeem the death of German soldiers in World War I. Monuments of the present were envisioned as great ruins in the future: the aesthetic picture of Nazism was a picture of “artistry.”

Chapter 5, “Looking into the Mirrors of Evil: Nazi Imagery in Contemporary Art at the Jewish Museum in New York,” documents a controversy about art that uses Nazi imagery in ways that were seen as heretical, antisemitic, and unsympathetic to survivors’ experiences and feelings (Young was a consultant for the exhibition). Works such as Tom Sachs’s Prada Deathcamp (1998) and Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO Concentration Camp (1996) utilize signs of a consumer-obsessed culture to comment upon the Holocaust. The technique is common in conceptual art circles, Young explains, but newspaper previews of the exhibition emphasized trivialization of the Holocaust, rather than a contemporary art vocabulary. While the public outcry was vociferous, Young maintains that the exhibition represents a new generation of artists who critically explore how conceptual art and history are in critical dialogue with one another.

The work of four artists is analyzed in chapter 6, “The Contemporary Arts of Memory in the Works of Esther Shalev-Gerz, Mirosław Balka, Tobi Kahn, and Komar and Melamid.” Young analyzes the early work of Esther Shalev Gerz to rethink the origins of the term “counter-monument,” which he had previously coined.¹ Komar and Melamid, known for their satirical approach to modern and contemporary art, are by far the most internationally recognized of all artists in this chapter. In 1993, for their Monumental Propaganda project, they invited 160 street artists from around the world to examine the life and fate of socialist realist monuments—and to propose ways to recycle them as public art. Thomas Lawson, for instance, turns a felled statue of Lenin into a water fountain. Conceptually and artistically, the other works in this chapter pale in comparison.

Chapter 7, about Utøya and Norway’s July 22 memorial process, provides an insightful but harrowing synopsis of the murderous attack on a Norwegian island and the process of designing a memorial to the victims. In one illuminating passage, Young speaks to a counselor who hid with young adults in lavatory stalls (203–4). Young realizes that the lavatories were a testament to survival and should be incorporated into the memorial. The elucidation of the very quick process of memorial strategies being formed by designers and consultants is insightful: Young immediately relays the counselor’s story to the architect, who promptly pulls out large sheaths of butcher paper to begin sketching.

The book is accessible to both general readers and academic audiences. Single chapters, or the entire book, will be of interest to scholars in history, comparative literature, art history, Jewish studies, and gender studies, among other fields. This book is a testament to the intellectual rigor and dedication to interpreting the dialogue around memorials for which Young is known.