THE SITE OF MEMORY IN "THE MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE"
How does a nation of past offenders remember its victims?
While the victors of history have long erected monuments to their triumphs and victims have built memorials to their martyrdom, only rarely does a nation call upon itself to remember the victims of crimes that it has perpetrated.[1] During the Holocaust, approximately six million Jews were deemed racially inferior, persecuted and euthanized by the Nazis, under the command of Germany’s Adolf. Hitler. In order to preserve this memory, the American architect, Peter Eisenman designed The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, or, The Holocaust Memorial (Fig. 1). Inaugurated in Berlin in 2005, the monument consists of 2, 711 concrete slabs, placed three feet apart in a grid pattern, that are 2.38 meters in length and 0.95 meters in width, but vary from 0.2 to 4.8 meters in height. The monument represents a collective memory of the outcome of Jews in the Holocaust, based on its physical site and institutional ideals, but its abstract form allows for the subjective interpretation of that memory.
According to the French historian Pierre Nora, a ‘site of memory’ refers to the symbolic trace of collective memory, such as a monument. Nora proclaims that modern memory is archival and relies entirely on the materiality of the trace and the visibility of the image. As true memory ceases to occur naturally and spontaneously, the archive acts to deliberately preserve the memory.[2] Thus, sites of memory are artificial and purposely constructed by those with power to preserve the past.[3]
The Holocaust Memorial, according to Nora’s definition, is a trace of collective memory. The German Bundesregierung deemed the past persecution of the Jews in Europe as worthy of remembering. Thus, it is the nation that imbued the monument with the responsibility of recalling the past, out of the anxiety over the disappearance of the true memory and the recognition of the responsibility to apologize to the Jews for the atrocities Germany committed during the Holocaust. The memory imbedded in the site-specific monument has the power to bridge the crack between the past and the present, through which Germany is attempting to reconcile its record.[4]
The art historian Miwon Kwon explains that the meaning of a site-specific work can be created through its physicality and institutional frame. In the case of the Holocaust Monument, the state provides the tangible space and the finances for the monument, and thus, the state is the source of its proclaimed memory. The site-specificity of the monument, a symbolic location with distinctive topographical features, lends the structure an authenticity of the trace of the event.[5] Donated by the Bundesregierung, Germany’s federal government, the land consists of 19, 000 square meters of irregularly sloped terrain in the country’s capital – Berlin.[6] The uneven ground creates a disorientating experience for the visitors that enhance the sense of mis-direction and anxiety in the monument. Political buildings, such as the Bundeskanzleramt, the Chancellery, as well as the Reichstag building, Germany’s parliament, surround the space. Additionally, the monument is located between the underground bunker in which Adolf Hitler died and the Brandenburg gate, which, up until 1989, divided East and West Berlin.[7] By occupying the site between distinct political regions, the monument acquired a national memory of physical and racial separation between peoples, by government force. If the monument were to be moved, it’s meaning would change.[8]
Over the passage of seventeen years, the aesthetic conditions of the monument were publicly debated, but, ultimately, it was the state-sponsored, institutional circumstances that defined the site of collective memory. Any confidence that the public’s involvement in a monument competition would lead to a negotiation of a social consensus was nullified, for the debate on the design promoted conflict.[9] The final plan for the monument was conceived out of the second competition, in July of 1997 that consisted of twenty-eight invited artists.[10] A five-member commission of art and architecture specialists was formed, only one of which was Jewish, who were given the power by the federal government to make an authoritative recommendation on the memorial's design that met their idealist imperative of rendering memory as objective and true. At the mercy of those who held the decisive power and situated far from the confines of his personal studio, the artist was invited by the art institution to execute a work specifically configured for the agenda provided by that association. Consequently, as Kwon notes, the artist became a site, dictated by the institutional framework. The artist entered into a contractual agreement with the host institution for the commission to execute a work specifically configured for the framework provided by that institution. The jury settled on Richard Serra and Peter Eisenman's design, a vast, undulating ‘Field of Remembrance,’ marked by 4,000 concrete pillars varying in height from a few inches to fifteen feet, and expressly intended to befuddle visitors.[11] The artists wanted no inscriptions on the stelea, because, as Eisenman said, “having names on them would turn it into a graveyard.”[12]
This is precisely what the architect, Adam Haupt, and the sculptor, Franciszek Duszeńko, did in Poland’s Treblinka Memorial, 1959-64 (Fig. 2), in which seventeen thousand granite shards are set in concrete to resemble a vast cemetery.[13] Several hundred of the plaques bear the names of Polish Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust, and a select few stones inscribe the names of Jewish individuals, but all of them surround an obelisk inscribed with a menorah.[14] The large granite structure created by Duszeńko was not only inscribed with a direct sign of Judaism, but it was purposefully designed to resemble a Jewish tombstone that was located above the site of the gas chambers. In contrast to a memorial that encapsulates all that were impacted by the Holocaust, the Treblinka Memorial provides a distinctly Jewish memory that was situated in Poland. In an attempt to distance itself with such religious and cultural iconography, to appeal to a wider audience and represent a collective memory, Eisenman left engravings off of the concrete slabs.[15]
However, the art council and the government deconstructed Eisenman and Serra’s original design, which minimized the aesthetic bearing that the artists had desired. After an open letter from the public, citing the memorial as “oppressively gigantic,” and not Jewish enough, Chancellor Helmut Kohl requested that alterations be made.[16] Eisenman trimmed the number of concrete blocks to 2,711, shortened the blocks' height, and added trees and an information centre with specific Jewish biographies. After the change, Richard Serra withdrew from the project, possibly because of the drastic state intervention and a lack of artistic ownership that reminded him of his American public sculpture, Tilted Arc, 1981 (Fig.3), which was demolished by the government from its New York City plaza.[17] The significant reduction in size, to half of its original design, meant that the effect of the disorientation is nullified – one is always cognizant of the perimeters, one can never feel entirely lost and one can see the German government structures encircling it on the site.
Aesthetic conditions are decreed subordinate to the political aims of socially cohesive memory. One’s response to the site of memory will inevitably be influenced by knowledge about its land-anchored connotation and the institutional strictures that govern it.[18] However, the attempt to foster a collective memory by the institution does not preclude subjective memory. In fact, archival art historian, Joan Gibbons notes that we must caution the viability of conventional narratives in the art as objective truths, as there is relativity of memory in history. Memory inhabits a threshold between the objective and the subjective, in terms of what is remembered and what is forgotten. Art is not a precise transcription of the collective memory, but is allusive and suggestive of the past, tapping into our vessel of emotions as much as into our stockpile of cognitive knowledge.[19] The lone monument could never encompass and express the memories of every member of the nation and should not be considered in these terms as national consensus. By providing a site of collective memory, however, the monument allows for a locus in which re-cognitions of memory can be communicated amongst an intersection of many minds.[20] Miwon Kwon posits that the site-specific piece is to be experienced in the present moment “through the bodily presence of each viewing subject, in a sensorial immediacy of spatial extension and temporal duration.”[21] In this Cartesian notion of phenomenological experience, the site-specific work has an indivisible relationship between the work and its site, a relationship that necessitates the physical presence of the viewer for the work’s completion. The viewer theoretically becomes a self-conscious subject and participant in the formation of the works meaning.[22] The visitors can enter the monument from any of its four sides, and move through the swaying land that tilts the slabs three degrees off of their vertical. The undulating grid of multiple dense slabs of varying height on the slopping topography helps to create a sense of instability and irregularity that symbolizes differences in time, in order to create the connotation and feeling of loss, contemplation and elements of subjective memory.[23]
The abstract form of the monument allows the public to associate different meanings to the site, to recollect their own understanding of the Holocaust. Abstraction can be socially binding, since it appeals to the greatest number of people who may experience the site and interpret the conceptual signs in a way that corresponds to their own interests.[24] By making the piece abstract, instead of specific, it allows for all subjective memories to group under the category of collective memory. As well, the ambiguous nature of the monument allows for redefinition and recycling of meaning of the memory over time, as new generations visit the memorials under new circumstances and invest it with new meaning.[25]
However, abstract signs are also less emotionally binding and more controversial.[26] Many survivors believed that the searing reality of their experiences demanded a precise memorial expression, while generalization was thought to ameliorate the work’s sense of mimetic witness; an imitation of that time. Germany’s choice in determining how it wishes to commemorate what happened to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was not reflective of the sentiments of its Jewish population. The Jewish community objected to the monument because of its lack of Jewish emblems, as well as having been initiated by a non-Jew, German Lea Rosh.[27] It is incorrect, however, to think that the commissioning members would sway their ideology so easily by the public. A change occurred only because Germany’s political dogma shifted when the 1998 elections ousted Chancellor Kohl of the Christian-Democratic party, in favour of the Social-Democratic party’s Gerhard Schröder. Under the direct agency of Chancellor Schröder, the recently established ministry of cultural affairs sought a more pedagogical memorial.[28] Eisenmann compromised with the minister by including a subterranean, multimedia information center called the Ort, meaning ‘place’ in German. The Information Centre’s five rooms provide a brief overview of the events between 1933 and 1945; feature personal Jewish accounts of persecution; present an auditory reading of the names of those six million victims that were recorded; and supply a database of Holocaust museums, memorials and persecution sites throughout Europe.[29] The Ort distinguishes the murdered Jews from the other victimized groups, including the homosexuals, the Sinti and the mentally disabled. The Information Center takes the abstract nature of the field of stelae above it and breaks it down to the level of the individual victim, which, therefore, provides the bridge between the abstract and the concrete experiences of the Holocaust. Although abstraction and sentiment are not mutually exclusive, the monument could not be dominantly abstract, as Serra and Eisenman had initially conceived, if its chief purpose was to maintain memory and appeal to emotional.
Germany believed that the persecution of six million Jews under the nation’s reign of Adolf Hitler required remembrance. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe took seventeen years to unveil because the public could not agree upon the visual signs of the memory. In the end, the art institutional directors, backed by state funding and ideology, chose to pose a monument of collective memory, one that was shared by many individuals in order to create social cohesion amongst the nation. The physical site-specificity and institutional framework demanded that Stephen Eisenman create a monument in abstract form, with minimal signs of Jewish identity. However, the vast, abstract form and viewers’ phenomenological experience allowed visitors to develop their own meanings of the Holocaust, to generate an emotional and subjective memory of the murdered Jews of Europe.
Plate List
Fig. 1 Peter Eisenman, The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2003-2005, stelae, 19, 000 m2.
Fig. 2 Franciszek Duszenko and Adab Haupt, Treblinka Memorial, 1959-1964, stone.
Fig. 3 Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981, steel, 120 x 12 x 0.21 ft.
[1] Young, James E., The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 21.
[2] Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” in Representations, No. 26, (California: University of California Press, Spring, 1989), 7-24.
[3] Levinson, Sanford. Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998).
[4] Giddons, Joan, “Introduction,” in Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London: I B Tauris, 2007).
[5] Kwon, Miwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity” in October, Vol. 80 (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 85-110.
[6] Carrier, Peter. Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany Since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Vél' D'hiv' in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin. (New York, Berghahn, Spring, 2005),105.
[7] Ibid.,105.
[8] Kwon, Miwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity” in October, Vol. 80 (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 85-110.
[9] Carrier, Peter. Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany Since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Vél' D'hiv' in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin. (New York, Berghahn, Spring, 2005),106.
[10] Saehrendt, Christian, “The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin” in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 147, No. 1233, (London: The Burlington Magazine Publications, Dec. 2005), 844-855.
[11] Young, James E., “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem – and Mine,” in The Public Historian, Vol. 24, No. 4, (California: University of California Press, 2002), 72.
[12] Green, Ronald, Nothing Matters: A Book About Nothing, (New Alresford: John Hunt Publishing, 2011), 81.
[13] Young, James E., The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993).
[14] Ibid, 184.
[15] Green, Ronald, Nothing Matters: A Book About Nothing, (New Alresford: John Hunt Publishing, 2011), 81.
[16] Carrier, Peter. Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany Since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Vél' D'hiv' in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin. (New York, Berghahn, Spring, 2005),106.
[17] Young, James E., “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem – and Mine,” in The Public Historian, Vol. 24, No. 4, (California: University of California Press, 2002), 77.
[18] Levinson, Sanford. Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998).
[19] Giddons, Joan, “Introduction,” in Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London: I B Tauris, 2007).
[20] Ibid.
[21] Kwon, Miwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity” in October, Vol. 80 (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 12.
[22] Ibid., 85-110.
[23] Young, James E., “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem – and Mine,” in The Public Historian, Vol. 24, No. 4, (California: University of California Press, 2002), 78.
[24] Carrier, Peter. Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany Since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Vél' D'hiv' in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin. (New York, Berghahn, Spring, 2005).
[25] Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” in Representations, No. 26, (California: University of California Press, Spring, 1989), 7-24.
[26] Carrier, Peter. Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany Since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Vél' D'hiv' in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin. (New York, Berghahn, Spring, 2005), 107.
[27] Ibid., 107.
[28] Ibid., 107.
[29] Ibid., 107.
Works Cited
Carrier, Peter. Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany Since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Vél' D'hiv' in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin. (New York, Berghahn, Spring, 2005).
Giddons, Joan, “Introduction,” in Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London: I B Tauris, 2007).
Green, Ronald, Nothing Matters: A Book About Nothing, (New Alresford: John Hunt Publishing, 2011), 81.
Kwon, Miwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity” in October, Vol. 80 (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 85-110.
Levinson, Sanford. Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998).
Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” in Representations, No. 26, (California: University of California Press, Spring, 1989), 7-24.
Saehrendt, Christian, “The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin” in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 147, No. 1233, (London: The Burlington Magazine Publications, Dec. 2005), 844-855.
Young, James E., “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem – and Mine,” in The Public Historian, Vol. 24, No. 4, (California: University of California Press, 2002), 65-80.
Young, James E., The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993).
