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  • Memory Passages: Holocaust Memorials in the United States and Germany by Natasha Goldman
  • Jody Russell Manning (bio)
Memory Passages: Holocaust Memorials in the United States and Germany. By Natasha Goldman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020. 235 pp.

Without remembrance of the past there is no present or future. Therefore, scholarship seeks to unpack and scrutinize memory by examining memorialization in its various forms and representations. Scholars have recently paid particular attention to memorial museums and sites of trauma, specifically to the scientific progression of memory studies and their historical development within the national context of Holocaust remembrance and commemoration. While study of individual, collective, and commemorative Holocaust memory remains essential, consideration of how national and cultural artistic forms shape and rely on history and memory, especially in the age of mass tourism and Holocaust education, is overdue. Natasha Goldman answers this call by providing much needed commentary on the essence of art within memorialization that ultimately challenges monolithic understandings of Holocaust remembrance.

Following in the footsteps of James E. Young's groundbreaking books The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (1993) and At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (2000), Memory Passages offers a fresh look at social interactions and negotiations of Holocaust memorials by analyzing visual forms. Goldman's comparative, interdisciplinary cultural study spotlights various memorials in the United States, the former West Germany, the former East Germany, and contemporary unified Germany. The exchange of ideas, connections, and influence among these countries determined Goldman's research. Foregrounding the details of finished memorials, her innovative approach works within what she calls the visual field, which "refers to the art historical, social, political, historical, and philosophical contexts for the artistic conception of memorials, including aesthetic choices that do or do not respond to both commissions for those sculptures and public attitudes toward the [End Page 438] Holocaust at the time of their commissions" (1). In essence, she remains chiefly interested in the visual design that the final finished architecture or sculpture communicates artistically by exposing how stylistic choices of the artist(s) shape collective memory of the Holocaust. Opening up a broader scrutiny of memory, the individual (and collectives) interact and engage with these works of art, as the visitor not only walks around memorials but through visual and textual memory passages. Relying on archival documents as well as interviews with survivors and artists, the study moves beyond purely national negotiations of Holocaust memory by incorporating often overlooked spaces.

Goldman examines art and sculptures of memory that have not been explored by scholars or those with considerable stylistic impact in the field of Holocaust memory. She weaves from Germany to the United States while emphasizing each country's negotiations with difficult history. Beginning with East and West Germany, she scrutinizes comparative attitudes and representation respectively. Goldman then turns to the significance of Warsaw-born Jewish sculpture and painter Nathan Rapoport's collaboration with the local Jewish community in Philadelphia for a generally forgotten monument overshadowed by his work in Poland. Chapter three moves back to Germany with an emphasis on neighborhood communities confronting the past by way of Hamburg and East Germany. Visual language and the architecture of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provides the transition to the effects of global and national competition in the next section. Goldman concludes with the breathtaking (and ever naturally growing and shifting) Action 7,000 Oaks display (1982) depicting the hope of Holocaust survivor healing at the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial. Ultimately, Goldman argues that looking at Holocaust memorials encourages "new ways to remember the past, memorialize events happening in our time and warn the future." In turn, creators of memorials "generate new forms of contemplation," through their works of art (15).

Whether analyzing site museums or collected national memorials of the Holocaust, scholars have focused on interpretation and representation. The presence or absence of language (or text) remains a vital factor in conveying meaning and depiction. One of the most valuable contributions of Memory Passages is the attention to absence, a reminder of what may be missing or silenced in a given memorial, as Goldman shows in...

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