REMEMBERING, REDEEMING AND RENOUNCING THROUGH ART

MONUMENTS, MEMORIALS AND MOURNING THE HOLOCAUST

BRUNO DE ALMEIDA

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The artist has always known that the encountered, remembered and imagined are equal experiences in our consciousness; we may be equally moved by something evoked by the imagined as by the actually encountered. Art creates images and emotions that are equally true as the actual situations of life. Many of us can never mourn our personal tragedy with the intensity we suffer the fate of the fictitious characters of literature, theatre and film, distilled through the existential experience of a great artist. Fundamentally, in a work of art we encounter ourselves and our being-in-the-world in an intensified manner. Art offers us alternative identities and life situations, and this is the great task of art. Great art gives us the possibility of experiencing our very existence through the existential experience of some of the most refined individuals of mankind.1

A work of art, however, cannot give the viewer emotions stored in its layers. The work receives the emotions of the viewer. A work of art does not reflect the affections of the artist; the subject lends his own emotions to the work. When experiencing a work of art, we project ourselves onto the object of our experience.2

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INDEX

INTRODUCTION

GESCHICHTE. HISTORIE.COLLECTED. COLLECTIVE.

REMEMBERING. RENOUNCING. REGRETTING. REDEEMING.

DENIAL. DENIAL. DENIAL.

DENIAL #1THE MONUMENT AGAINST FASCISM.

DENIAL #2ASCHROTT BRUNNEN MONUMENT.

DECEPTION. DISSIMULATION. DISTRACTION.

POSSIBILITYMEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE

MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE. RELATION TO THE URBAN CONTEXT.

ASCHROTT BRUNNEN MONUMENT. RELATION TO THE URBAN CONTEXT.

THE MONUMENT AGAINST FASCISM. RELATION TO THE URBAN CONTEXT.

INVISIBLE. INTRINSIC. INCONCLUSIVE.

ENDNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WEBSITES & IMAGE CREDITS

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This theoretical research paper was initiated within the subject of Architettura e Memoria dell’Olocausto (Architecture and Memory of the Holocaust). An optional historical-humanistic course, part of the second semester’s study-program of the first year of Master at the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio (2009/2010), University of the Italian Switzerland. A course lectured by professor Christoph Frank,3 who also accompanied the first stages of the following research.

The work started as a culmination of several lectures during the semester, where numerous questions, related to various Holocaust memorials’ design, constructed throughout Europe since 1945, were addressed. These questions concerned the changing aesthetics of the concept, the ways to express the inexpressible and the challenges the design of such pieces poses for artists and architects, amongst others. An important key-moment for the understanding of the matter was a study trip to Berlin, Potsdam and Wannsee (Germany), organized by the chair as a back-up to the subjects addressed. By visiting some of the monuments, memorials and sites where key moments of the genocide happened. It became less abstract and more graspable “…how difficult and painful it can be to design an architectural frame for a collective memory in relation to sites of unimaginable and unimagined horror and devastation.” 4 Is it after all possible and\or desirable, to lend artistic expression and architectural form to the otherwise unspeakable?

The second part of the study was developed independently by the author and culminated in the following essay. This work attempts to study the relation between these landmarks of remembrance, personal memory and national memory. Collective memory versus collected memory. Baring the ambiguities and contradictions of this tantalizing altercation through a carefully selected body of works which show us how thinkers tackled with this daunting and stimulating task. Not only responding to a specific set of requests but also subverting and questioning the need for a catalyst of remembrance such as memorials and monuments.

INTRODUCTION

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GESCHICHTE

COLLECTED

“Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it (...) History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. (...) there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence it claims to universal authority. (...) Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative.5

(...)

(...) we should be aware of the difference between true memory, which has taken refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories, and memory transformed by its passage through history, which is nearly the opposite: voluntary and deliberate, experienced as a duty, no longer spontaneous; psychological, individual, and subjective; but never social, collective, or all encompassing.

(...)

Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. (...) The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs.” 6

What we call memory today is therefore not memory but already history. What we take to be flare-ups of memory are in fact its final consumption in the flames of history.

HISTORIE

COLLECTIVE

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National mythologies and symbols are the skeleton supporting the signs that inform populations about important events or figures from the past. Subliminally reinforcing the primacy of contemporary political power and encouraging identification with the state by emphasizing its continuity and ubiquity. Monuments have long played an integral role in this, helping to develop a logic of national unity and strengthening a sense of collective identity. The monument, has been defined by James E. Young, as that which, by its land-anchored permanence, could also assure the durability of a particular idea or memory attached to it. He quotes Arthur Danto, as to clarify the difference between monument and memorial: “We erect monuments so that we shall always remember and build memorials so that we shall never forget… Monuments commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings. Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends…” 7 More than serving distinct purposes, monuments and memorials share the attempt of condensing and reconciling two distinctly independent concepts. On one side, lived history, expressed by the German term Geschichte, and on the other, the intellectual operation that renders it intelligible, Historie, also in German.8 Two distinct terms that curiously only appear differentiated in the German language, whereas in other tongues are simply unified under what we call, History. By creating common shared spaces for memory, monuments spread the impression of collective remembrance. But Geschichte (lived history) is always personal and disparate. Everyone memorializes something different. Context and circumstances change, politics and culture as well. Memorial spaces and monuments inevitably assume lives of their own, dependent on the attributes of those who experience them. Having this in mind, how accurate and realistic is it to talk about a memorial’s “collective memory”? Would it be more reasonable to talk about a memorial’s capacity to congregate “collected memories”? As in “the many discrete memories that are gathered into common memorial spaces and assigned common meaning (…) an aggregate collection of its members’ many, often competing memories.” 9

As James E. Young, once again discerns: “…we might distinguish between unified forms of commemoration and the unification of memory itself, between unified meanings and unified responses to memory. For despite unified forms of commemoration, memory in these shared moments is not necessarily shared, but in fact varies distinctly from person to person.” 10 Monument-makers know about this, so they endeavor to create something open-ended enough to allow for a personal appropriation from each of the individuals in the crowd. Nevertheless, they also

COLLECTED

GESCHICHTE

COLLECTIVE

HISTORIE

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need to make sure that the masses’ private reaction is guided towards what the monument aims to remember. The Achilles’s heel of this smooth operation lies on the thin balance between naturally triggering memory and, on the other hand, forcing the viewer to remember something ascribed. Indeed, without people’s intention to remember, memorials are just inert fragments on the landscape. If regarded as objects, they might even not live to its fullest quality and potential. Very often, they only are invested with national soul and memory when they become a part of a nation’s rites or the matter of people’s national pilgrimage. Consequently, by gaining meaning when assembled into a national collective memory, these objects are susceptible to variations in significance as a result of the nation’s own progression. The monument’s image is turned into a kind of memorial currency, whose significance fluctuates in every new time and place. Although its image never changes, the pictures and thoughts projected by the viewers are volatile and ethereal.

“… these sites of memory begin to assume lives of their own, often as resistant to official memory as they are emblematic of it. In some cases, memorials created in the image of a state’s ideals actually turn around to recast national ideals in the memorial’s image. Later generations visit memorials under new circumstances and invest them with new meanings.” 11

“… neither the monument nor its meaning is really everlasting. Both a monument and its significance are constructed in particular times and places, contingent on the political, historical, and aesthetic realities of the moment.” 12

It is clear that it is easier for visitors to react more directly to objects than to verbalized concepts. But, what does the comprehension of these objects has to do with our knowledge of historical events? Moreover, how can one single object maintain and express the core of its meaning when so many changes surround it? Wouldn’t it be better to create space and time for the many layers and dimensions of collected national memory than to produce an immutable collective Historie for every nation? Once we assign monumental form to memory, have we exempt ourselves from the obligation to remember?

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REMEMBERING RENOUNCING REGRETTING REDEEMING

The XIX century, which saw the rise of the German state, simultaneously witnessed a pummeling to that image of national unity due to Germany’s repeated losses to the French as well as the repercussions of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which culminated in political disunity. In need for physical manifestations of their blossoming nationalism, Germans turned themselves towards an idealized past to rescue a sense of national identity. The period following victory in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and the emergence of a fervent state-worship has profound parallels with Hitler’s manipulation of national monuments and symbols, using them to mobilize Germans towards his agenda. Nationalism and state identity had been rising but incapable to merge around a bordered territory. Therefore, the unification of Germany and the creation of the German Empire was a deeply symbolic moment for the country. In result, this period saw the erection of monuments all over Germany that exhibited grandiosity, size, and intent different from monuments in the past. The convergence of the aesthetic with the political is a trademark of National Socialism and it has succeeded in infecting the whole concept of monumental architecture and national monuments. Nazi monuments played a key role in the creation of a German national identity not just for their symbolism of nationalized strength but also in their usage as public meeting sites and festival settings. Places and symbols acted as binding forces elevating people above individualism towards a manipulated collectivity.“… the didactic logic of monuments – their demagogical rigidity and certainty of history – continues to recall too closely traits associated with fascism itself. How else would totalitarian regimes commemorate themselves except through totalitarian art like the monument?” 14

“Germany faces what would seem like an insuperable difficulty in attempting to memorialize the Holocaust; how can the nation that perpetrated the largest and most systematic mass murder in modern history a mere sixty years ago honor the dead, and at the same time publicly assume the burden of guilt without disrupting all the conventions of public memorials. What exactly is such a state to commemorate, and how do present day German artists show the answer to that question in the aesthetic and ethical gestures of their memorial forms? Stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of remembering, renouncing, regretting, and redeeming, the artists, statesmen, and citizens of today’s Germany lack even a firsthand memory on which they might draw to express both their shame and their wish to purge it.” 13

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Therefore, a monument against fascism, would amount to a monument against itself: against the conventionally educational task of monuments, against their propensity to relocate the past they would have the viewer contemplate. And finally, against the dictatorial tendency in all art that diminishes viewers to passive spectators. Perhaps, the best way to let the nation remember is not with a monument, but only with the memory of an absent one. Could it simply be the never-to-be-resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to do it, in whose name, and to what end? As it is often the case, the subsequent story surrounding the unbuilt memorial can be more instructive than the finished piece. This way, instead of allowing the past to rigidify in its monumental forms, memory is vivified through the never completed memory work itself. Stuck in a limbo between the desire for denial and an endless obligation to tangibly represent their guilt, Germans endlessly struggle with the question of how best to acknowledge and atone their Nazi past.

“… engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany may actually lie in its perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process can guarantee the life of memory. For it may be the finished monument that completes memory itself, puts a cap on memory-work, and draws a bottom line underneath an era that must always haunt Germany. Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany than any single “final solution” to Germany’s memorial problem.” 15

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DENIAL DENIAL DENIAL

Acknowledging the impossibility of embodying memory-work and expressing this acknowledgement in their challenge to every aspect of traditional monument culture, the posture of contemporary artists, especially the Germans, would be of questioning the status and representativeness of monuments/memorials, inquiring and breaking-down their purpose.

“Rather than creating self-contained sites of memory, detached from our daily lives, these artists would force both visitors and local citizens to look within themselves for memory, at their actions and motives for memory within these spaces. In the cases of disappearing, invisible, and otherwise “counter” monuments, they have attempted to build into these spaces the capacity for changing memory, places where every new generation will find its own significance in the past.” 16

The concepts of “vanishing monument” and “counter-monuments” have begun to emblematize Germany’s conflicted struggle with Holocaust memory. Counter-monuments are memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of monument. They assume a new posture in memory work, with an anti-presentational character, as well as a non-hierarchical, anti-authoritative, self-consuming and self-negating relationship with the viewer. The counter-monument formalizes its impermanence and mutation of form in time and in space. In its conceptual self-destruction, it refers not only to its own physical impermanence, but also to the emergency of all meaning and memory, especially that embodied in a form that insists on its eternal fixity. It stimulates memory no less than the traditional perpetual memorial, but by pointing openly at its own shifting face, it remarks also the inevitable evolution over time of memory itself. In its egalitarian conception, the counter-monument would not just celebrate the antifascist urge, but perform it, breaking down the hierarchical relationship connecting art object to its spectators.

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In 1983, Harburg’s (a neighborhood of Hamburg, Germany) local council held a design competition for a monument that would stand against fascism. During the 1970s rise of conservative parties and ideas, Harburg’s Social Democratic faction first considered creating a memorial to the victims of fascism. This 1979 proposition came at a time when the German Left was defining itself as the leader of Denkmal-Arbeit,18 memory-work, with monuments and memorials dotting the West German landscape. It was not until 1983, under Christian Democratic majority and a reinvigorated national quest for memorialization, that Harburg’s Municipal Council agreed to open a design competition to six artists. At the time of the competition (and throughout much of the memory boom of the 1970s and early 80s) the German memory discussions revolved around the experience of fascism. They focused on the problem of German public involvement in and support for fascism in the 1930s and 40s and the impossible reconciliation between the generation that allowed the rise of Nazism and the rebellious generation of the 1960s. For this reason in 1983, the Municipal Council commissioned a monument that would recall the terror of fascism. Only in the mid-1980s did the Holocaust, specifically the massacre of the Jews, become a focus of this memory-work. The Harburg monument spanned the course of this shift in the memory debates. It remained, however, a “Monument against Fascism” and, while occasionally categorized with Holocaust monuments, should be distinguished from more specifically Holocaust-focused representations.19 The winning design came from Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev–Gerz. The local art committee’s parameters anticipated the design to be built in a park. But the Gerzes wanted their work to oppose the convention of traditional monuments erected in out-of-

“All my work is based on the potentiality of trust. Though we rarely speak of trust in relation to art, a work of art may well be the ultimate expression of trust. It is as if we trust, for instance, that some inked piece of paper or painted canvas will receive us and speak truly about our world and its own. It is this space of trust that enables dialogue to unfold. Dialogue is a group of people freely reaching a place and verbally exchanging thoughts in a present and immediate way whilst listening, not only to others but also to themselves with others, then coming together and exchanging again, and after having left, coming together yet again. Such gathering is never spontaneous; still, it must be proposed.” 17

DENIAL #1 THE MONUMENT AGAINST FASCISM

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the-way parks or in specific Nazi-related sites. Rather, they authors wanted it to confront Harburg’s citizens in their ordinary urban space, so they chose a market square in the city. The design was constructed as a four-sided, steel column, twelve meters high. The outside of the column was coated with lead, which offered a surface soft enough on which to write. A stylus was provided, allowing everyone to mark the column. The intention was for people to sign their names as a pledge against fascism. By inviting its own damage, it forced viewers to desanctify the memorial, demystify it, and become its equal. At its base, was a temporary inscription in German, French, English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish, which read: “We invite the citizens of Harburg and visitors to the town to add their names here to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12–meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day, it will have disappeared completely and the site of the Harburg Monument against Fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.” 20

As soon as a reachable part of the column was covered with writing, it was sunk 140 centimeters, providing new, clear space, on which the public could write again. The ceremonious lowering of the monument was staged at more or less yearly intervals. Creating a town-wide spectacle, complete with newspaper coverage, politicians and a thrilled public. Ultimately the monument completely disappeared underground, on 10 November 1993, with only a small portion still capable of being viewed through a window on a staircase. Many people wrote their names on the monument, but the general public reaction was much more varied than the orderly columns of names that one might have anticipated. It was only days after the debut of the monument that the first neo-fascist graffities appeared. The citizens condemned the piece as an eyesore and a magnet for graffiti. Anti-fascist groups were angry, because it did not honor victims. The monument’s detractors would refer to it as the Schandsäule (column of disgrace). On the other hand, the local newspaper had its own interpretation of the monument: “The filth brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-meaning signatures. The inscriptions, a conglomerate of approval, hatred, anger and stupidity, are like a fingerprint of our city applied to the column.” 21

The hostility of the monument was perceived as an oppression to Harburg’s community and a tarnishing of the city. The citizens felt that they had become victims to an imposed disgrace over something that was criticized from its conception as a “waste of money” because of its taxpayer funding. This rejection is simultaneous to the collective encouragement for construction of other, less destabilizing memorials within Hamburg. The Harburg monument was by design and reception extremely public, consequently becoming highly political. The public discourse surrounding this work is an essential aspect of the piece that must be examined. One evident facet of this were the solemn lowerings. For the Gerzes, as for James E. Young, the pomp and circumstance seemed ironic, as did the public’s enthusiasm at getting rid of this problematic work. “That so many Germans would turn out in such good faith to cheer the destruction of a monument against fascism exemplified, in the artist’s eyes, the essential paradox in people’s attempt to commemorate its misdeeds.” 22

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The Aschrott Fountain was a forty-foot-high neo-Gothic pyramidal fountain, built outside Kassel’s City Hall in 1908 and funded primarily by local Jewish entrepreneur, Sigmund Aschrott. With the rise of Nazis to power, the fountain was condemned as the “Jewish Fountain” and destroyed overnight by local Nazis on Reich Fighters Day on 9 April 1939. The city reconstructed the fountain in 1963, nothing like its original design. “When asked what had happened to the original fountain,” Young writes, “they replied that to their best recollection, it had been destroyed by English bombers during the war.” 23 Former Kassel mayor, recalls from his childhood in Kassel in the 1960s, “The fountain had become a symbol of memories repressed, the desire to forget.” 24

Finally in 1984, the Association for the Preservation of Historical Monuments in Kassel initiated a design competition for reinstating the fountain in some form that would recall its original benefactors, particularly Sigmund Aschrott. In December 1986, Horst Hoheisel was commissioned to execute his design. “…Hoheisel decided that neither a preservation of the fountain’s remains nor its mere reconstruction would do. For him, even the fragment was a decorative lie, suggesting itself as the remnant of a destruction no one knew very much about. Its pure reconstruction would have been no less offensive (…) the artist feared that a reconstructed fountain would only encourage the public to forget what had happened to the original.” 25 His design consisted in a carved-out space, a negative form, rebuilding the fountain sculpture as a hollow concrete form, a mirrored image of the old one. Then he sunk it twelve meters deep into the ground, rescuing the history of the place as a wound that would permanently stay open inside the consciousness of the city. Like the Gerzs’ counter-monument, Hoheisel’s attracted a great deal of negative attention from the citizens of Kassel, who petitioned for a regular monument such as the recreation of the Ashcrott Fountain in a nearby park.

DENIAL #2 ASCHROTT BRUNNEN MONUMENT

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DECEPTION DISSIMULATION DISTRACTION

Monuments and memorials hold a responsibility apart from their artistic qualities or intents. They are not only the private expression of individual artists, but also a result of the mediation between the nation’s historical memory and the population. Not every memorial/monument can be considered a work of public art. So what would be a more adequate alternative critique to rightly evaluate them? Are they entirely exempt from art’s critical discourse? Considered as pieces on the (urban)landscape, they shouldn t be spared of a careful assessment that examines their relevance beyond the capacity of remembering previous events. Older cities have monuments positioned at locations that were previously significant. But planned cities, like Washington DC, New Delhi or Brasília, use such elements to organize their public spaces. Not only turning monuments into landmarks but also giving them a function that goes beyond art’s boundaries and merges into the realms of urban-planning, architecture, politics and even economy. These monuments do not claim the spectator’s active engagement. The viewer is shrinked by the sheer size of the structure and becomes a passive observer of a state’s idea, instead of an active participant in shaping an historical heritage. Ultimately, what sets monuments further from art is that they serve a very specific purpose: preserving and cultivating the memory of an historical moment through a nation’s idealized self-presentation. Encouraging the masses to identify with a self-righteous national past. Instead of placing memory at the disposal of public awareness, traditional memorials close

“Where contemporary art is produced as self reflexive, public Holocaust monuments are produced specifically to be historically referential, to lead viewers beyond themselves to an understanding or evocation of events. As public monuments, these memorials generally avoid referring hermetically to the process that brought them into being. Where contemporary art invites viewers and critics to contemplate its own materiality, or its relationship to other works before and after itself, the aim of memorials is not to call attention to their own presence so much as to past events because they are no longer present. In this sense, Holocaust memorials attempt to point immediately beyond themselves.In their fusion of public art and popular culture, historical memory and political consequences, therefore, these monuments demand an alternative critique that goes beyond questions of high and low art, tastefulness and vulgarity.“ 26

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memory from the consciousness of its viewers. Transforming what should be an exercise in self-determination and non-conformity, into a servile response to a dissimulated standardization of memory. Such a deception would be the ultimate exploitation of art, whose function is to challenge and denaturalize the viewers’ assumptions.

Making art subservient, as a means to another purpose or value, is an attack to art itself.

The Gerzes and Hoheisel (alongside many other artists exploring the potential of counter-monuments) were very much aware of this fundamental paradox; the nation’s attempt to commemorate its own misdeeds through a quasi-dictatorial predisposition to turn viewers into passive spectators of monuments. What the aforementioned examples tried to do was to allow for space for the spectator’s intromission (more evident on the Monument against Fascism) while frustrating their expectations with the lack of a conventional, lasting physical presence (more evident on the absence of the Ashcrott Fountain) that would do their memory work, therefore, exempting them from that task. Both examples formalize through vanishing and disappearance, the guilty struggle implicit on the secret wish to forget painful memories. “Even setting aside the suspicion that the very act of disappearance would inevitably reinstate the prestige and aura of the vanished original”. Indeed, “one might question the longing for purity inherent in the works’ own self-negation”. Was this actually efficient in throwing back the task of remembering to the viewers, or did it just (consciously or unconsciously) exteriorized the denial of general remembrance and “the secret promise of tabula rasa”? 27 Irit Rogoff suggests that an important shift from conventional monuments was nevertheless achieved, trying to get rid of a posture of pious obeisance: “from the confrontation of the viewer with a visually embodied narrative structure of which he or she is the spectator, to the activity of commemoration as the site upon which a form of memory production is triggered.” 28 In Harburg s case-study, the column was a basis for a democratic manifestation of banality, a prop that helped people express their thoughts even without owning a formed discourse of response. As Gerz stated, “Germans tend to be speechless when it comes to fascism. But here, you see, they have been given a blank page on which to vent their feelings.” 29

However, as Rogoff has argued, the counter-monument fails to eliminate didacticism, or even to create a new didactic in which the correlation between observer and monument would escape the opposition of presence/absence. We are still, albeit in a far more attenuated and speculative way, within a trajectory of a presence/absence, since all of the activity of eliciting a response from the viewer centers on the existence of some form of presence which triggers re-memory. Though these presences may be partial, self-negating, vanishing, transparent or self-destructing, although they are enormously self-conscious about both the form and process of commemorative activity, nevertheless they begin this work through staging it, in and around and through a concrete entity.30 This didacticism involves the monument as narrator of an event, a representation of the very event that the counter-memorial project claims cannot be meaningfully represented. For it is only by the presence of the physical monument, or the presence of its absence, that the counter monument can succeed.

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While the Gerzes and Hoheisel’s designs were certainly distinct from traditional ones, their reception came always from within the discourse of such traditional designs. It is therefore unsurprising that, for instance, the Harburg public would envision the Gerzes’ monument as an abstracted version of conventional monuments and anchor their reception within the same discourse of metaphoric representations. One Harburg citizen even said, “not so bad as far as chimneys go, but there ought to be some smoke coming out of it,” 31 imagining the stele as an abstracted depiction of a crematorium chimney. As for Hoheisel’s monument, it was immediately understood as a cliché metaphor for depth, loss and darkness easily associated with the Holocaust. Reinforcing preexisting representations of the genocide’s meta-narrative and enlivening old metaphors that were already part of German awareness. Furthermore, the site was given a sacred aura from which the spectator was distanced, severely spoiling the anticipated confront between viewers and (absent) monument. Sanctification is precisely what the counter-monument attempts to negate. And once again both examples did not escape this fate. After its final lowering, the Harburg monument became a sort of silenced archive, visible throw a small window alongside a timeline of its life. It acquired a relic status, as if it was an archaeological remain of primordial hieroglyphs from an ancient barbarian civilization. Its conflictive character is lost and it cannot incite more engagement from viewers than any embalmed piece at a Natural History Museum. Kassel’s inverted fountain has been turned into a symbol, both figuratively and literally. Figuratively in the form of a ‘Symbol of Remembrance’ as former mayor of Kassel declared, and literally in that its blueprint has been used as the official emblem for the “Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation.” Like conventional monuments and memorials, both were subject to appropriation into the meta-narrative of redemptive memorialization. And both created non-sites of memory, a present absence that is tangibly (in)visible. Thus, there are many ways in which these two counter-monuments can be seen as not fulfilling their goals and in fact being no more than an attenuation of the monument as representation.

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POSSIBILITY MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE

Among the hundreds of submissions for a German national memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, Peter Eisenman’s winning scheme was approved on 25 June 1999. It envisaged 2711 concrete parallelepipeds (stelae) arranged in a grid pattern. Each measuring 0.95 cm deep and 2.38 m wide and varying only in height, ranging from 0,2 to 4,7 m.33 These were spaced 95 cm apart to allow for only individual passage through the grid. The stelae stand on gently and unevenly sloping ground covering 19,000 square meters (4,7 acres). Where the public is able to enter and walk through the field from all four sides. Experiencing the wave-like form differently from each position. While the dissimilarity between the ground plane and the top plane of the stelae may appear to be a matter of pure expression, it is not the case. Each plane is determined by the intersections of the voids in the grid and the gridlines of the larger site context of Berlin. The agitation of the field shatters any notions of absolute axiality arising from the grid-structure and instead reveals an omnidirectional reality.34 Additionally, under this field of concrete blocks lies an Information Centre, which visitors can access from an entrance designed to minimize any disturbance to the Memorial’s field of stelae. This entry works as a transition space from the abstract plane of the memorial to that of concrete content of the exhibition. It is interesting to note that Eisenman’s memorial, when compared to Hoheisel and Gerzes’, inverts the spatial relation between the subjective physicality of the memorial and its strictly didactic part. Harburg and Kassel’s conter-monuments were sunken, disappearing from view and avoiding any interference with the public space and urban surroundings. Yet, an instructive plate and/or explanatory inscriptions were placed where once stood these pieces. So, the didactic fragment was placed atop, whereas the subjective bearer of meaning was buried. Apart from this, little was left on site but the visitors themselves standing in remembrance and looking inward for memory. In Eisenman’s case, the information is sunken, only appearing to the public once they are in the middle of the memorial’s site. Visitors are then invited to submerge under the memorial to embark on a tour

“In a prescient moment in “In Search of Lost Time”, Marcel Proust identifies two different kinds of memory: a nostalgia located in the past, touched with a sentimentality that remembers things not as they were but as we want to remember them, and a living memory, which is active in the present and devoid of nostalgia for a remembered past. The Holocaust cannot be remembered in the first, nostalgic mode, as its horror forever ruptured the link between nostalgia and memory. Remembering the Holocaust can therefore only be a living condition in which the past remains active in the present.” 32

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through a sequence of rooms displaying an overview of the National Socialist terror policy. Only then, the monument’s purpose is explained and associated to the Holocaust. Still, this underlying discourse is an optional one. Visitors can choose to continue wandering around the field instead of entering the information center. Which means, no political, historical or educational discourse is inflicted a priori. “The context of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is the enormity of the banal. The project manifests the instability inherent in what seems to be a system, here a rational grid, and its potential for dissolution in time. It suggests that when a supposedly rational and ordered system grows too large and out of proportion to its intended purpose, it in fact loses touch with human reason. It then begins to reveal the innate disturbances and potential for chaos in all systems of seeming order, the idea that all closed systems of a closed order are bound to fail.” 35 The traditional monument is understood by its symbolic imagery, by what it represents. It is not understood in time, but in an instant in space. Even absent or hidden, counter-monuments carry this reading too, further depending on the physical presence of a trace or explanation to guide individual understanding towards their task of remembering. Yet, Karen Till notes that once entering in Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; “individuals are asked to interpret a field that moves and changes in relation to the human body, rather than be told how to mourn for the past through a centrally placed sculptural form atop a pedestal.” Because of its seemingly labyrinthic layout, there is a space-time continuum between experiences and knowing. There is no goal, no end, no working one’s way in or out. The duration of an individual’s experience within the memorial grants no further understanding, since understanding is impossible. The time of the monument is disjoined from the time of experience. In this context, there is no nostalgia, no memory of the past, only the living memory of the individual experience. Here, we can only know the past through its manifestation in the present.36

The dialogue the memorial establishes with the city is also a fundamental side to its understanding. It does not shy away from existing and occupying a large and politically charged portion of Berlin. The physical presence of that immense field is something detached from any need for explanation. The created urban circumstance gains a powerful ambiguity since it does not literally states its purpose. By making it impossible for the viewer to grasp its totality, the memorial requests time, patience and movement. Wisely balancing monumentality with counter-monumentality, its sheer size does not shrink the viewer into a passive observer but engulfs him into an individual, self-reflexive event. This engagement, in and through time, was also endeavored by the Gerzes in their Harbrug Monument against Fascism. But, in this case, viewers were treated as actors in a political staging. The encounter and appropriation of the work was inescapably associated with the ceremonious lowerings that would allow further messages to be written on the column, until the piece reached its expiration date, putting an end to the audience’s active interference. In the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, there is no beginning or conclusion, no entrance or exit, allowing for a freer and more democratic physical and psychological appropriation. It also differs from traditional permanent memorials because duration is an indispensable constituent, not only to be able to understand the wholeness of the project, but also to be physically able to arrive in the core of the actual didactic content, the Information Centre and Exhibition.

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MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE RELATION TO THE URBAN CONTEXT

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THE MONUMENT AGAINST FASCISM RELATION TO THE URBAN CONTEXT

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ASCHROTT BRUNNEN MONUMENT RELATION TO THE URBAN CONTEXT

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INVISIBLE INTRINSIC INCONCLUSIVE

Would memory and history go away if this commemorative vigilance didn’t exist? Memory is already vanished since most of our generation hasn t witnesses in first person what should be remembered. In addition, most of these moments reach us already half-dead, battered from history’s deforming capacity. Nevertheless, the creation of a common memorial experience can indeed unify plural segments of population, even if it is only during a brief “memorial moment”. But, through which means is this “common memorial experience” created? Is the monument or the memorial a catalyst of this? Are national holidays or even the never-ending discussions about Holocaust, enough, efficient or even necessary? Although past history is shared, the ways to remember cannot be unified. It is important to reconsider our need to have public monuments that will do our memory work for us. While this is happening, we become much more forgetful. As a result, the initial impulse to memorialize events like the Holocaust may actually come from a conflicting and equal wish to forget it. And “forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.” 38

Every day, in every city, we unknowingly pass by monuments and memorials. They have become part of the city’s fading wallpaper. We have forgotten their meanings and purposes, we have seen their rusty commemorative plates, but didn t quite grasp their contents. As Robert Musil wrote, “the most striking feature of monuments is that you do not notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument… Like a drop of water on an oilskin, attention runs down them without stopping for a moment.” 39

Have these forgotten monuments failed to achieve their goals? If so, what is causing this failure? By being the receivers of collected memories, indifference glances and disparate interpretations, their failure or success depends of what one expects to take out of them. What is

“Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, fraternal orders - these are the boundary stones of another age, illusions of eternity. It is the nostalgic dimension of these devotional institutions that makes them seem beleaguered and cold - they mark the rituals of a society without ritual; integral particularities in a society that tends to recognize individuals only as identical and equal.” 37

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causing the disappointment towards the forgotten monument is the naïve believe that it is possible to condense in an object the task and expectation to commit to a prescribed memory-triggering, when memory itself is volatile and ever-changing. Remembering, redeeming and regretting genocides through monuments, is a futile and deceptive effort. And can only be understood as a political advertising of its redemption. But, the State should know that more than remembering and regretting the Holocaust, it is important to incite a position where any genocide will not be allowed to happen again. History proves that politics aren t enough to prevent human rights from being disrespected. Indeed, they may become its worst enemy. So, civil and humanistic responsibility has to be thrown back to the average citizen’s scruples. Bringing into evidence the action potential that each individual carry within themselves. The Holocaust was the culmination of a much more corrupted collective attitude towards Jews, dating back to the accusation that they had “murdered Christ”, and impelled even further by racism and eugenics,40 already deeply implemented in German society before the Third Reich. The population s lack of common sense and of ability to think prepared the grounds for the genocide. This inactive posture is considered by German philosopher Hannah Arendt, as the birthplace of evil. A kind of “banal evil” that results from a particular capacity to stop thinking, fostered by the fact that everyone goes along unquestioningly. Exactly as it happened under Hitler’s reign. According to the philosopher, evil is not an ontological category, is not nature or metaphysics. It is political and historical: it is made by men and manifests itself only where it finds institutional space for that. To Arendt, the trivialization of violence corresponds to the emptiness of thought, where the banality of evil settles.41 If we are to use art in the effort to prevent episodes, such as the Holocaust, from happening again, we should take advantage of art’s capacity to push people away from a tendency to obey orders and to conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions. We should find ways to combat all tendencies toward a steady, enduring, definitive sate: everything that increases the level of dependency, apathy and passivity attached to habits, to the conventional criteria, to myths and other mental schemes born from a complicity with the established power structures. Systems of life that, even if political regimes change, will be maintained if they are not questioned.42

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1. PALLASMAA, The Architecture of Image, 22.

2. Ibid, 31.

3. Christoph Frank: Graduated in History of Art and History of the Classical Tradition from the Courtauld and Warburg

Institutes of the University of London. From 1994 until 2006 he was responsible for the department of art history at the

Forschungszentrum Europäische Aufklärung at Potsdam and was at the same time Lehrbeauftragter at the Institute of

Art History of the Technische Universität in Berlin. From 2000 until 2002 he held Max-Planck-Research-Fellowship at the

Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. In 2005 he was Research Associate at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in

Paris and at Columbia University of New York. In his recent publications he has dealt with European art and architecture

of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the history of collecting in Germany and Russia, the impact of agents and

correspondents of art and architecture, and the art theory of Denis Diderot and Friedrich Melchior Grimm. (source: http://

search.usi.ch/people/af777719f68c1ff9ad8f247bcf563d41/Frank-Christoph). (1 October 2013).

4. FRANK, Christoph, Description of the course Architettura e Memoria dell’Olocausto (Architecture and Memory of

the Holocaust), Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, Universittá della Svizzera Italiana, Mendrisio, Switzerland, 2010.

5. NORA, Between Memory and History, Les Lieux de Mémoire, 8-9.

6. Ibid, 13.

7. DANTO, Arthur cited by YOUNG, The Texture of Memory, 3.

8. NORA, Between Memory and History, Les Lieux de Mémoire, 8. The fact that only one word exists in French to

designate both lived history and the intellectual operation that renders it intelligible (distinguished in German by Geschicht

and Historie) is a weakness of the language that has often been remarked; still, it delivers a profound truth: the process

that is carrying us forward and our representation of that process are of the same kind.

9. Two different situations distinguished by James E. Young in the Preface of “The Texture of Memory”, XI.

10. YOUNG, The Texture of Memory, 280.

11. Ibid, 120.

12. HORNSTEIN, Image and Remembrance, 62.

13. HARRIS, German Memory of the Holocaust: The Emergence of Counter Memorials, 1.

14. HORNSTEIN, Image and Remembrance, 63.

15. Ibid, 61.

16. HORNSTEIN, Image and Remembrance, 76.

17. SHALEV-GERZ, Esther, The Trust Gap. In BOWMAN, Esther Shalev-Gerz: The Contemporary Art of Trusting

Uncertainties and Unfolding Dialogues.

18. LUPU, Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined. Author and researcher Noam Lupo uses the term Denkmal-

Arbeit and explains: The more commonly used term Erinnerungsarbeit refers only to memory or recollection as initiated

ENDNOTES

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privately. While the more grammatically correct term Denkmalsarbeit would refer to memorialization, I use Denkmal-Arbeit

to create a double-entendre with the word for thinking, Denken. Denkmal-Arbeit thus refers not only to memorial activity as

collectively or publicly initiated, but also to the work of the individual in memory, or re-memory.

19. Ibid.

20. Quoted in YOUNG, At Memory’s Edge, 130.

21. YOUNG, The Texture of Memory, 36.

22. Ibid, At Memory’s Edge, 135.

23. Ibid, 97. Cited by LUPU, Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined, 148.

24. EICHEL, Hans, “Preface”. In HOHEISEL, Horst (ed.), Aschrottbrunnen, 21. Cited by LUPU, Memory Vanished,

Absent, and Confined, 148.

25. HORNSTEIN, Image and Remembrance, 66.

26. YOUNG, The Texture of Memory, 12.

27. HORNSTEIN, Image and Remembrance, 266.

28. ROGOFF, Irit, “The Aesthetics of Post-History: A German Perspective,” 133.

29. Cited in Michael Gibson, “A Monument against Fascism: Hamburg City Fathers Create a New Concept,” The

World & I, Aug. 1987, 270. In LUPU, Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined.

30. ROGOFF, The Aesthetics of Post-History, 133–34.

31. Cited in GIBSON, Michael, “Hamburg: Sinking Feelings,” ARTnews 86 (Sept. 1987): 105–7. In LUPU, Memory

Vanished, Absent, and Confined.

32. EISENMAN, Peter, “Peter Eisenman about the Memorial.” http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/the-

memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe/field-of-stelae/peter-eisenman.html (22 November 2013).

33. At the factory, the surface of the stelae were also treated with the substance “Protectosil” by Degussa which

provides considerable protection against weather factors and leaching and at the same time serves as graffiti protection.

(Information taken from the official website: http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/the-memorial-to-the-murdered-

jews-of-europe/field-of-stelae.html) (22 November 2013).

34. EISENMAN, Peter, “Peter Eisenman about the Memorial.” http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/the-

memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe/field-of-stelae/peter-eisenman.html (22 November 2013).

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. NORA, Pierre. Between Memory and History, Les Lieux de Mémoire, 12.

38. BAUDRILLARD, Jean cited by YOUNG, The Texture of Memory. Holocaust Memorials and Meanings, 1

39. MUSIL, Robert. Cited by LINGWOOD, James (ed.). “Introduction” in Rachel Whiteread’s House. London, Phaidon

Press Ltd, 1995.

40. The belief and practice of improving the genetic quality of the human population. It is a social philosophy advocating

the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of people with desired traits (positive

eugenics), and reduced reproduction of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics).

41. ARENDT, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

42. LE PARC, Julio. Guerrila culturelle?, originally published in Robho 3 (Spring 1968) and re-edited in Art d’Amerique

Latine. 1911-1968 (Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne/ Centre Pompidou, 1993).

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_ AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive. New York, Zone Books, 1999.

(Translated by Daniel Helter-Roazen.)

_ ARENDT, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London, Penguin Classics, 2006.

_ BOWMAN, Jason E. (ed.). Esther Shalev-Gerz: The Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties and Unfolding

Dialogues. Stockholm, Art And Theory Publishing, 2013.

_ DOHERTY, Claire (ed.). Situations. Documents of Contemporary Art. Whitechapel Gallery, London. Cambridge,

Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2009.

_ HAUPT, Michael, Dr. Wolf Kaiser, Dr. Norbert Kampe, Gaby Müller-Oelrichs, Dr. Caroline Pearce (eds.). The

Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of the European Jews (Catalogue of the permanent exhibition). Berlin, House of

the Wannsee Conference, Memorial and Educational Site, 2009.

_ HOHEISEL Horst, James Edward Young, Fritz-Bauer-Institut Frankfurt, Main (eds.). Horst Hoheisel:

Aschrottbrunnen. Kassel, Fritz Bauer Institut, 1998.

_ HORNSTEIN, Shelley and Florence Jacobowitz. Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust.

Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2003.

_ NORA, Pierre. “Between Memory and History, Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26. California, The

Regents of the University of California, Spring 1989: 7-24. (Translated by Marc Roudebush.)

_ PALLASMAA, Juhani. The Architecture of Image: Existential space in cinema. Hämeenlinna, Building Information

Ltd (Rakennustieto Oy), 2001.

_ ROGOFF, Irit. “The Aesthetics of Post-History: A German Perspective.” In MELVILLE Stephen and Bill Readings

(eds.). Vision and Textuality, London, Duke University Press, 1995.

_ TILL, Karen. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

_ Universittá della Svizzera Italiana (Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio). Rapporto sull’attività didattica-Report

on teaching activities 2009-2010. Mendrisio, Mendrisio Academy Press, 2010.

_ YOUNG, James E.. The Texture of Memory. Holocaust Memorials and Meanings. New Haven and London, Yale

University Press, 1993.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

_ 33 _

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November 2013)

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Review: Vol. 17: Iss. 2, Article 3. http://www.repository.upenn.edu/phr/vol17/iss2/3 (12 November 2013)

_ LUPU, Noam. Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined. The Countermemorial Project in 1980s and 1990s

Germany. http://www.noamlupu.com/countermonuments.pdf (29 September 2013)

_ Università della Svizzera Italiana, USI Search\ People, Christoph Frank. http://www.usi.to/fpr (1 October 2013)

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(21 January 2014)

IMAGE CREDITS

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REMEMBERING, REDEEMING AND RENOUNCING THROUGH ART. MONUMENTS, MEMORIALS AND MOURNING THE HOLOCAUST.

BRUNO ALVES DE ALMEIDA02.2014

REMEMBERING, REDEEMING AND RENOUNCING THROUGH ART

MONUMENTS, MEMORIALS AND MOURNING THE HOLOCAUST

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