Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION In a personal meditation on exile and homesickness titled “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” (1966) the Jewish, Austrian-born Holocaust survivor and essayist Jean Améry writes, “Anyone who is familiar with exile has gained many an insight into life but has discovered that it holds even more questions. Among the answers there is the realization, which at first seems trivial, that there is no return, because the re-entrance into a place is never also a recovery of the lost time.”1 In the original German, these lines reveal more poignantly the resonant echo between the words Wiedereintritt (reentrance) and Wiedergewinn (recovery), thereby ironically underscoring the abyss between the two concepts. Améry’s deceptively simple realization returned to me suddenly, many years after first reading these lines, as I encountered for the first time Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum extension on Berlin’s Lindenstraße and observed the shattered Star of David that extends scar-like across its zinc facade. Faced with the task of designing a museum dedicated to German Jewish culture and history in Berlin—the very landscape within which German Jews were stripped of their citizenship and from which they were violently cast out into either exile or death—Libeskind created an extension that illustrates Améry’s insight with a poet’s economy of phrase. Time here is frozen—the shattered German Jewish relationship and culture lie in pieces, and a coherent narrative that might have connected past and present remains broken. The visitor may enter the museum and may survey the past by reentering, so to speak, the places of history depicted in the exhibits. However, as Améry admonishes us, although one may return to the places of the past, such a reentrance is never a recovery of lost time as well, and the rupture, or caesura, in German Jewish history remains irreparable. 2 Holocaust Memory Reframed The leitmotif that runs throughout this book is this chasm between reentrance and recovery; more specifically, the book engages with the question of how three museums that memorialize the Holocaust—Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (hereafter USHMM) in Washington, DC—draw on particular aesthetic techniques of representation to evoke specific forms of Holocaust remembrance. Because this is a book about Holocaust remembrance and about how Holocaust museums and exhibits encourage different kinds of memory, it necessarily is bound to the past. In his now-classic reading of Paul Klee’spaintingAngelusNovus,WalterBenjamindescribeshowtheangelofhistory stands with staring eyes, open mouth, and spread wings, his face turned toward the past in which he sees a single catastrophe whose consequences continue to pile “wreckage upon wreckage” before him. The angel would like to stay, Benjamin writes, to “awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed,” but the storm called “progress”—the inevitable and unrelenting passage of time—“irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”2 With every passing year the Holocaust recedes further into history and the number of survivors dwindles, but—for many of us—the Holocaust remains the single catastrophe that continues to pile wreckage upon wreckage , growing skyward until it threatens to obscure even the “glimmerings of the dawn” and to darken “twilight stars,” to quote Job 3:9. Despite its backward gaze toward that which can never again be made whole, this is still a book about the present—as all books about memorialization inevitably are—and perhaps a bit about the future as well, for the issues at stake concern not only how we encounter the past but how we understand this past in relation to the present and how that understanding shapes the future. Museums are often conceptualized as containers for memory, and in a certain sense this metaphor rings true; after all, museums with a historical focus are places devoted to constructing a particular view of the past and to putting thatchosenpastondisplay,therebyclaimingtoofferthevisitorawindowinto another time and place for a brief moment. In another sense, and more fundamentally , however, the metaphor falls conspicuously short because it suggests stasis. It fails to acknowledge the transformative effects of a museum—it ignores, in other words, the way that a museum can create, through a particular poetics or language of representation, a narrative powerful enough to Introduction 3...