Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation

6. Museums and the Imperative of Memory: History, Sublimity, and the Divine

6 Museums and the Imperative ofMemory: History) Sublimity) and the Divine One'sfirst encounter with the photographic inpentory ofultimate horrors is a kind ofrepeiation, the prototypically modern rel'elation: a negatipe epiphany. . . . Indeed, it seems plausible to me to dipide my life into two parts, before I saw the photographs . .. and after. ... Some limit had been reached, and not only that ofhorror. .. . Susan Sontag, cited in Linenthal Outside the Hall of Remembrance in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), just before visitors leave the exhibit and proceed down the long stairway to the main hall of the museum, there is an open, loose-leaf binder in which visitors are asked to record their thoughts. These thoughts range trom the sublime ("I cannot believe what I have just seen; and yet I know it has happened and understand it because of my disbelief") to the obscene ("If only the Jews had not murdered Jesus Christ and accepted Him they could have been saved"). They record what people believe they have learned at the museum about the Holocaust and about their encounter with the artifacts and testimonies there. In this chapter we will examine how two museums-the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on the national mall in Washington, D.C., and the complex of museums and memorials to the Shoah in Jerusalem known as Yad Vashem-negotiate the historical imperative to construct a knowledge (or, if you prefer, a narrative) of the events of the 131 132 Between Witness and Testimony Shoah and the traumatic kernel whose trace is made present in those narratives . The dit1erences in the two museum complexes-as well as the tensions that exist within the museums-reside in the ways they construct the museum visitor, situating them inside narrative or a community that either naturalizes that "residency" or dct:101iliarizes it so much that the visitor is forced out of historical time and place altogether and into an encounter with moments shot through with what Benjamin calls "messianic time." Such moments are experienced as shock but reveal history's inaccessibility as something learned. We'll argue further that there is a connection between these moments that rupture history and what could be called the divine. It is possible to understand how history works by means of presenting the incommensurable , forcing the reader or viewer to come face to flee with objects that seem to present time out of time. This is the divine, in the sense that it is what precedes the naming of time as history, the naming of a self as a subject . It is what originates the utterance but is not coequal with the utterance , with history or the name, itself. There is the often-cited scene in Elie Wiesel's novel, Night, where, after a youngster is hanged for failing to implicate another inmate, a man watching asks, "Where is God now?" Wiesel replies to himself and to the reader, "Here He is-He is hanging here on this gallows" (62). But the Holocaust does not so much mark a departure of the divine and the historical , or God's turning away from his creation in the 6ce of that creation 's desecration of life, as it marks the rearticulation of the connection between the divine and the human, the divine and the experiential. But that connection is a connection of incommensurability, of-in Kant's terms-sublimity. It is in that incommensurable connection, in the trauma that flJ[ces us to say things we did not mean to say or to remember things we could not have imagined, that something intervenes to provide us with a sense of the structure not of the event-Shoah-but of the human capacity for knowledge and ethical action in the face of trauma. Questions surrounding how we represent trauma, how we consider memory within acts of representation, are certainly not new. We can simply look at the Second Commandment's imperative of not making an object out of the divine: one cannot represent what defies knowledge, what transcends the very possibility of signification. This simple assertion of course leads to highly complex problems with regard to how we speak about anything that lacks the possibility of signification, how we can know anything about it through representation. Jewish and Christian traditions have wrestled with this issue throughout their histories: the kabbala, as MUSEUMS AND THE IMPERATIVE Of MEMORY 133 we've suggested...