At Memory's Edge PDF

After-images of the
Holocaust in v
Art and Architec

f
At Memory's Edge
After- 1 mages of the Holocaust in
Contemporary Art and Architecture
James E. Young
How should Germany commemorate
the mass murder of Jews once commit-
ted in its name? In 1997, James E. Young
was invited to join a German commis-
sion appointed to find an appropriate
design for a national memorial in Berlin
to the European Jews killed in World
War II. As the only foreigner and only

O CD
Jew on the panel, Young gained a unique
cd :s
perspective on Germany's fraught ^ CO
efforts to memorialize the Holocaust.
In this book, he tells for the first time

C CI
the inside story of Germany's national
Holocaust memorial and his own

role in it.
In exploring Germany's memorial crisis,
Young also asks the more general ques-
tion of how a generation of contempo-
rary artists can remember an event like
the Holocaust, which it never knew
directlv. Young examines the works of a
number of vanguard artists in America
and Europe — including Art Spiegelman,

Shimon Attie, David Levinthal, and
Rachel Whiteread — all born after the
Continued on back flap

I
II
At Memory's Edge
At
After-images of the Holocaust in
Contemporary Art and Architecture
Memory's
Edge
James E. Young
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published with assistance from the
Lucius N. Littauer Foundation.
Copyright © 2000 by James E. Young.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole

or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107

and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except
by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Designed by Sonia L. Scanlon.
Set in Minion type.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Card Number: 00- 00482 1
ISBN 0-300-08032-8
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines
for permanence and durability of the Committee

on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council on Librarv Resources.
10 7 I
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
INTRODUI I I ( ) N
t H API
\rt Spiegelman's Maus and the After-images of History 12
CHAPTER I W
I )avid LevinthaTs Mcin Kampf 42
History, Toys, and the Play of Memory
CHAPTER THREE
Sites Unseen 62
Shimon Attic's Acts of Remembrance, 1991-1996
C H A P T E R FOUR
Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument 90
Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread, and
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock
CHAPTER FIVE
Memory Against Itself in Germany Today 120
Jochen Gerz's Countermonuments
CHAPTER SIX
Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin 152
The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture
CHAPTER SEVEN
Germany's Holocaust Memorial Problem — and Mine 184
Notes 224
Bibliography 233
Illustration Credits 243
Index 244
Acknowledgments
The seeds for At Memo) y's Edge were first planted in a handful oi talks and catalogue es-
says I was invited to do on behall ol a postwar generation of artists who came to know the
Holocaust as I did only, and thankfully, as a "vicarious past." For the extended conver-
sations and studio visits by which I came to know their work, and then tor their generous
cooperation in providing images by which I could represent their work in this book, I
very gratefully thank: Art Spiegelman, David Levinthal, Shimon Attie, Horst Hoheisel,
Rachel VVhiteread, Renata St ih and Frieder Schnock, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-
Gerz, Daniel Libeskind, and Peter Eisenman. I can only hope that my discussion of these
artists' ,\Ui.\ architects' work begins to do justice to their complex and highly nuanced for-
mal articulations of Holocaust memory in this decidedly antiredemptory age.
In addition to the catalogue essays and talks occasioned by the artists and archi-
tects themselves, I have presented parts of this book in a number of public lectures
and symposia organized by colleagues as preoccupied by these difficult questions as

I have been. For inviting me to speak and then providing the lively intellectual set-
tings in which I could refine, elaborate, and always improve on my reflections on "the
uncanny arts of memory," I offer warm thanks to: Susan Suleiman at the Center for
Cultural and Literary Studies at Harvard University; Marianne Hirsch and Leo
Spitzer at Dartmouth College; Tody Judt at the Center for European Studies at New
York University; Sander Gilman and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of
Chicago; Peter Homans at the University of Chicago; Froma Zeitlin and the Human-
ities Council at Princeton University; Naomi Sokoloff at the University of Washing-
ton, Seattle; Angelika Bammer at Emory University; Christhard Hoffmann at the
Center for European Studies at the University of California at Berkeley; Rudy Koshar
at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; Murray Baumgarten and Peter Kenez at
the University of California at Santa Cruz; Thomas Schumacher and the School of
Architecture at the University of Maryland; Marianne Doeszema at the Mt. Holyoke
College Art Museum; Bryan Cheyette at the University of London; Barbara Henry
at Scuola Superiore at the University of Pisa, Italy; lorn Riisen at the Zentrum fur
interdisziplinare Forschung at the University of Bielefeld, Germany; Gary Smith at
v 1
the Einstein Forum in Berlin and Potsdam, Germany; and Jorg Huber at the Schule
und Museum fur Gestaltung in Zurich, Switzerland.
Because parts of this book have also appeared in a handful of journals, my writ-
ing has also benefited from the editorial eye of editors like W. J. T. Mitchell at Criti-
cal Inquiry and Martin Morris at the South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as editors at the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Berliner Zeitung, and Tages Spiegel in Germany.
Like others in the academic community, I owe great debts both to foundations
and to administrators at my home institution for so generously supporting my

requests for support and time off from teaching to write. Over the past several years,
work on this book has been supported by generous grants from the American Coun-
cil of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Memorial Foun-
dation for Jewish Culture. I am also extremely grateful to both the Lucius N. Littauer
Foundation and its program officer, Pamela Ween Brumberg, for the very generous
publication grant that has allowed me to show in images, as well as to describe in
words, the uncanny arts of memory here. For helping see this book through its sign-
ing and production at Yale University Press, Ithank my editor, Jonathan Brent, my
manuscript editor, Laura Jones Dooley, and my friend and agent, Deborah Karl. And
of course, none of this writing would have been possible without the kind under-
standing and cooperation of my friend and English department chair, Stephen Cling-
man, and the dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, Lee Edwards, both at
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
It becomes almost impossible to acknowledge just how crucial a role my friends

and family have played in helping me work through the issues at the heart of this
project — on aesthetic, ethical, historical, and personal levels. For both their writings,
which have inspired and instructed me, and the conversations we have had over the
years, I thank: Susan Shapiro, Froma Zeitlin, Geoffrey Hartman, Natalie Zemon
Davis, Saul Friedlander, Christopher Benfey, Lawrence Douglas, Andreas Huyssen,
Anson Rabinbach, Jeffrey Herf, and Michael Wise.

Coming as I have from the literary and historical realms to the subtler, if more
ephemeral worlds of contemporary art and design, I owe an inestimable debt to my
wife, Lori Friedman, and her own uncannily prescient eye for art. In teaching me to see
and to think about contemporary art, she has also taught me to see and to think about
memory in ways that would have been otherwise lost to me. Finally, it is to our two
young sons, Asher and Ethan, that I dedicate this book, for it is from them that I learn
all over again how memory and life necessarily generate, and regenerate, each other.
viii Acknowledgments
Introduction
"Some people want to forget where they've been; other people wont to remember
where they've never been."
— Eli Cohen ami Gila Almagor, from their film Under the Domini Tree
The Holocaust as Vicarious Past
how is a post-holocaust ci e n e r at i n of artists supposed to "re-
member" events they never experienced directly? Born after Holocaust his-
tory into the time of its memory only, a new, media-sawy generation of
artists rarely presumes to represent these events outside the ways they have
vicariously known and experienced them. This postwar generation, after all,
cannot remember the Holocaust as it occurred. All they remember, all they
know of the Holocaust, is what the victims have passed down to them in their
diaries, what the survivors have remembered to them in their memoirs. They
remember not actual events but the countless histories, novels, and poems of
the Holocaust they have read, the photographs, movies, and video testi-
monies they have seen over the years. They remember long days and nights in
the company of survivors, listening to their harrowing tales until their lives,
loves, and losses seem grafted onto their own life stories.
Coming of age after — but indelibly shaped by — the Holocaust, this
generation of artists, writers, architects, and even composers does not attempt
to represent events it never knew immediately but instead portrays its own,
necessarily hypermediated experiences of memory. It is a generation no
longer willing, or able, to recall the Holocaust separately from the ways it has
been passed down. "What happens to the memory of history when it ceases to be
testimony?" asks Alice Yeager Kaplan. 1
It becomes memory of the witness's
memory, a vicarious past. What distinguishes many of these artists from their
parents' generation of survivors is their single-minded knack for representing just
this sense of vicariousness, for measuring the distance between history-as-it-hap-

pened and what Marianne Hirsch has so aptly called their "post-memory" of it. 2
By portraying the Holocaust as a "vicarious past," these artists insist on main-
taining a distinct boundary between their work and the testimony of their parents'
generation. Such work recognizes their parents' need to testify to their experiences,
even to put the Holocaust "behind them." Yet by calling attention to their vicarious
relationship to events, the next generation ensures that their^post-memory" of events
remains an unfinished, ephemeral process, not a means toward definitive answers to

impossible questions.
What further distinguishes these artists from their parents' generation, more-
over, is their categorical rejection of art's traditional redemptory function in the face of
catastrophe. For these artists, the notion either that such suffering might be re-
deemed by its aesthetic reflection or that the terrible void left behind by the murder
of Europe's Jews might be compensated by a nation's memorial forms is simply in-
tolerable on both ethical and historical grounds. At the ethical level, this generation
believes that squeezing beauty or pleasure from such events afterward is not so much
a benign reflection of the crime as it is an extension of it. At the historical level, these
artists find that the aesthetic, religious, and political linking of destruction and re-
demption may actually have justified such terror in the killers' minds.
Not only does this generation of artists intuitively grasp its inability to know the
history of the Holocaust outside of the ways it has been passed down, but it sees history
itself as a composite record of both events and these events' transmission to the next
generation. This doesn't mean that their vicarious memory of the past thereby usurps
the authority of history itself, or that of the historians and their research; after all, as
they are the first to acknowledge, they inevitably rely on hard historical research for
their knowledge of what happened, how, and why. But in addition to the facts of Holo-
caust history, these artists recognize the further facts surrounding this history's trans-
mission to them, that its history is being passed down to them in particular times and
places. These are not mutually exclusive claims or competing sets of facts but part of
history's reality. Neither history memory is regarded by these artists as a zero-sum

nor
game in which one kind of history or memory takes away from another; nor is it a con-
test between kinds of knowledge, between what we know and how we know it; nor is
it a contest between scholars and students of the Holocaust and the survivors them-
selves. For these artists know that the facts of history never "stand" on their own — but
are always supported by the reasons for recalling such facts in the first place.
Introduction
1 .'i \iiki ican .11 lists like An Spiegelman, 1 )avid Levinthal, and Shimon Attic,
w host.- uni k I explore in tins hook's first three chapters, then subjeel is not the I lolo-
i a ust so much >is how they came to know it and how it has shaped their inner lives.
Theirs is .in unabashed terrain ol memory, not ol history, hut no less worthy oi ex-
ploration. When they go to represent this "vicarious past," they do so in the artistic
K
forms and media they have long practiced. When comix"-artist Art Spiegelman re-
members the 1 lolocaust, therefore, he recalls both his lather's harrowing story of sur-
\ iva] a\k\ the circumstances under which Spiegelman heard it. In his "commixture"
of images And narrative, he is able to tell hoth stories simultaneously, turning them
into a single, double-stranded narrative.
When photographer )avid Levinthal was asked by

1 his art teacher at Yale why
he took photographs of toys in historical tableaux instead of historical reality itself,
he answered simply that the vintage Nazi figurines he collected and photographed
were his historical reality, the only remnants of the past he had experienced. By pho-
tographing his imagined re-creations of Nazi pageantry, the fascist war-machine,

and the murder of the Jews, Levinthal would limit his representations to an explo-
ration of that which he knows from history books, photographs, and mass-media
images. Similarly, in his European environmental installations, artist Shimon Attie
has projected archival photographic images of the past — his memory — back onto
the otherwise amnesiac sites of history in order to reanimate these sites with his
"memory" of what happened there. Haunted by what he regarded as the specter of
missing Jews in Berlin's Scheunenviertel, Attie projected photographs of Jews from

this quarter taken in the 1920s and 1930s back onto their original sites, among other
projects of his I explore in Chapter 3. Here he has literally projected the "after-images"
in his mind back onto otherwise indifferent landscapes.
No doubt, some will see such work as a supremely evasive, even self-indulgent
art by a generation more absorbed in its own vicarious experiences of memory than by
the survivors' experiences of real events. 3 Others will say that if artists of the second or
third generation want to make art out of the Holocaust, then let it be about the Holo-
caust itself and not about themselves. The problem for many of these artists, of course,
is that they are unable to remember the Holocaust outside of the ways it has been
passed down to them, outside of the ways it is meaningful to them fifty years after the
fact. As the survivors have testified to their experiences of the Holocaust, their children
and their children's children will now testify to their experiences of the Holocaust. And
what are their experiences of the Holocaust? Photographs, film, histories, novels,
poems, plays, survivors' testimonies. It is necessarily mediated experience, the afterlife
Introduction 3
of memory, represented in history's after-images: the impressions retained in the
mind's eye of a vivid sensation long after the original, external cause has been removed.
Why represent all that? Because for those in Spiegelman's, Levinthal's, and Attie's
generation, to leave out the truth of how they came to know the Holocaust would
would be to ignore half of what happened: we would know what happened to Spiegel-
man's father but miss what happened to the artist-son. Yet isn't the important story
what happened to the father at Auschwitz? Yes, but without exploring why it's impor-
tant, we leave out part of the story itself. Is it self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing to
make the listener's story part of the teller's story? This generation doubts that it can be
done otherwise. These artists can no more neglect the circumstances surrounding a
story's telling than they can ignore the circumstances surrounding the actual events'
unfolding. Neither the events nor the memory of them take place in a void. In the
end, these artists ask us to consider which is the more truthful account: that nar-
rative or art which ignores its own coming into being, or that which paints this fact,
too, into its canvas of history?

For artists at home in their respective media, whether it is the comix of Spiegel-
man or the vanguard photography of Levinthal, questions about the appropriateness
of their forms seem irrelevant. These artists remain as true to their forms and chosen
media as they do to their "memory" of events. But for those less at home in the lan-
guages of contemporary art, the possibility that form — especially the strange and
new — might overwhelm the content of such memory-work leads some to suspect
the artists' motives. Historian Omer Bartov, for example, has expressed his sense of
"unease" with what he describes as the "cool aesthetic pleasure" that derives from the
more "highly stylized" of postmodern Holocaust representations. 4 Part of what trou-
bles Bartov is that such work seems more preoccupied with being stimulating and in-
teresting in and of itself than it is with exploring events and the artist's relationship
to them afterward. Also implied here is an understandable leeriness on Bartov's part

of the possibility that such art draws on the power of the Holocaust merely to ener-
gize itself and its forms.
Even more disturbing for Bartov, however, is the question historian Saul
Friedlander has raised in his own profound meditations on "fascinating fascism," in

which Friedlander wonders whether an aesthetic obsession with fascism may be less
a reflection on fascism than it is an extension of it. Here Friedlander asks whether a
brazen new generation of artists bent on examining its own obsession with Nazism
adds to our understanding of the Third Reich or only recapitulates a fatal attraction
to it. "Nazism has disappeared," Friedlander writes,
Introduction
but the obsession it represents for the contemporary imagination
as well .is the birth oi .1 new discourse th.it ceaselessly elaborates
and reinterprets it necessarily confronts us with this ultimate
question: Is such attention fixed on the past only a gratuitous reverie,
the attraction oi spectacle, exorcism, or the result of a need to un-
derstand; or is it, again and still, an expression of profound fears

and, on the part ot some, mute yearnings as well? 3
As the artists whose work I explore here suggest, the question remains open. Not be-
cause every aesthetic interrogation of the Holocaust also contains some yearning for
"fascinating fascism." But because they believe that neither artist nor historian can
positively answer yes or no to this question.
In fact, here we must ask simply: Can the historian ever really know the history
of an era without knowing its art and literature? That is, can any historian truly repre-
sent events of a bygone era without understanding how the artists and writers of that
time grasped and then responded to the events unfolding around them? I would an-
swer simply, No, it is not possible. By extension, I would like to ask how well histori-
ans can represent the past without knowing how the next generation has responded to
it in its art and literature. That is, without knowing how such history is being medi-
ated for the next generation and why it is deemed so important to remember in the first
place. For these phenomena, too, are part of the history that is being told after the fact. 6
The Arts of Memory in an Antiredemptory Age
On one hand, it's true that the Holocaust, unlike World War I, has resulted in
no new literary forms, no startling artistic breakthroughs; for all intents and pur-
poses, it has been assimilated to many of the modernist innovations already gener-
ated by the perceived rupture in culture occasioned by the Great War. On the other,
what has certainly changed is the redemptory promise that traditionally underlay in-
novation and "newness" in modern art and culture: where antirealist and fragmen-
tation motifs were seen as redemptory of art's purpose after the Great War precisely
because they refused to affirm the conditions and values that made such terror pos-
sible, art and literature after the Holocaust are pointedly antiredemptory of both
themselves and the catastrophe they represent.
Indeed, of all the dilemmas facing post-Holocaust writers and artists, per-
Introduction
haps none is more difficult, or more paralyzing, than the potential for redemption
in any representation of the Holocaust. Some, like philosopher Theodor Adorno,

have warned against the ways poetry and art after Auschwitz risk redeeming events
with aesthetic beauty or mimetic pleasure. 7 Others, like Saul Friedlander, have
asked whether the very act of history-writing potentially redeems the Holocaust
with the kinds of meaning and significance reflexively generated in all narrative. 8
Though as a historian Friedlander also questions the adequacy of ironic and ex-
perimental responses to the Holocaust, insofar as their tran*gressiveness seems to
undercut any and all meaning, verging on the nihilistic, he also suggests that a post-
modern aesthetics might "accentuate the dilemmas" of history-telling. 9 Even by

Friedlander's terms, this is not a bad thing: an aesthetics that remarks its own lim-
itations, its inability to provide eternal answers and stable meaning. Works in this
vein acknowledge both the moral obligation to remember and the ethical hazards
of doing so in art and literature. In short, he issues a narrow call for an aesthetics
that devotes itself primarily to the dilemmas of representation, an antiredemptory
history of the Holocaust that resists closure, sustains uncertainty, and allows us to
live without full understanding.

For many artists, the breach between past events and their art now demands
some kind of representation, but how to do it without automatically recuperating it?
Indeed, the postmodern enterprise is both fueled and paralyzed by the double-edged
conundrum articulated first by Adorno: not only does "cultural criticism share the
blindness of its object," he writes, but even the critic's essential discontent with civi-
10
lization can be regarded as an extension of that civilization. Just as the avant-garde
might be said to feed on the illusion of its perpetual dying, postmodern memory-
work seems to feed perpetually on the impossibility of its own task."
In contrast to the Utopian, revolutionary forms with which modernists hoped
to redeem art and literature after World War I, the post-Holocaust memory-artist, in
particular, would say, "Not only is art not the answer, but after the Holocaust, there
can be no more Final Solutions." Some of this skepticism is a direct response to the
enormity of the Holocaust — which seemed to exhaust not only the forms of mod-
ernist experimentation and innovation but the traditional meanings still reified in
such innovations. Mostly, however, this skepticism stems from these artists' contempt
for the religious, political, or aesthetic linking of redemption and destruction that
seemed to justify such terror in the first place. In Germany, in particular, once the
land of what Friedlander has called "redemptory anti-Semitism," the possibility that
public art might now compensate mass murder with beauty (or with ugliness), or
Introduction
thai memoi ials might somehow redeem this past with the instrumentalization of its
memoi v, continues to haunl a postwar gcncr.it ion oi memory-artists. 1
Memorial artists in Germany, moreover, are both plagued and inspired by a

series oi impossible questions: I low does a state incorporate shame into its national
memorial landscape? I low does a state recite, much less commemorate, the litany of
its misdeeds, making them part of its reason tor being? Under what memorial aegis,
whose rules, does a nation remember its barbarity? Where is the tradition for me-
morial mea C ulpa, when combined remembrance and self-indictment seem so hope-
lessly at odds? Unlike state sponsored memorials built by victimized nations and
peoples to themselves in Poland, I lolland, or Israel, those in Germany are necessarily
those of former persecutors remembering their victims. In the face of this necessary
breach in the conventional "memorial code," it is little wonder that German national
memory of the lolocaust remains so torn and convoluted. Germany's "Jewish ques-
I
tion" is now a two-pronged memorial question: How do former persecutors mourn
their victims? How does a nation reunite itself on the bedrock memory of its crimes?
One of the most compelling results of Germany's memorial conundrum has
been the advent of its "countermonuments": brazen, painfully self-conscious me-

morial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being. At home in an
era of earthworks, of conceptual and self-destructive art, postwar artists now explore
both the necessity of memory and their incapacity to recall events they never expe-
rienced directly. After examining in the first half of this book how three American
artists — Spiegelman, Levinthal, and Attie — have represented their "vicarious past,"
therefore, I turn to the ways that the public "counter-arts" of memory in Germany
have begun to resist the certainty of monumental forms, the ways European artists
have begun to challenge the traditional redemptory premises of art itself.
I thus explore both the early critique of Germany's "memorial problem" by

Berlin-born lochen Gerz, as embodied in his EXIT / Dachau project of 1971 as well as
his disappearing and invisible memorials in Harburg and Saarbriicken, among other
,
installations. In his and Esther Sha\ev-Gerz s Monument Against Fascism in Harburg-
Hamburg, for example, a forty-foot-high lead-covered column was sunk into the
ground as people inscribed their names (and much else) onto its surface; on its com-
plete disappearance in 1993, the artists hoped that it would return the burden of
memory to those who came looking for it. With audacious simplicity, their "counter-
monument" thus flouted a number of memorial conventions: its aim was not to con-
sole but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to
disappear; not to be ignored by its passersby but to demand interaction; not to re-
Introduction 7
main pristine but to invite its own violation; not to accept graciously the burden of
memory but to throw it back at the town's feet. 13
How better to remember a now-
absent people than by a vanishing monument?
In this vein, I explore the negative-form monuments and installations of
Horst Hoheisel in Kassel and Weimar, as well as his proposal to blow up the Bran-
denburger Tor in Berlin in lieu of Germany's national Holocaust memorial. In two
further installations by Micha Ullman and Rachel Whiteread, one realized and the
other as yet only proposed, I look at how these artists have also turned to both book-
ish themes and negative spaces to represent the void left behind by the "people of the
book." Like Attie, other artists in Germany have also attempted to reanimate other-
wise amnesiac sites with the dark light of their pasts, reminding us that the history of
such sites also includes their own forgetfulness, their own lapses of memory. Berlin
artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock have thus mounted eighty signposts on the
corners, streets, and sidewalks near Berlin's Bayerische Platz. Each includes a simple
image of an everyday object on one side and, on the other, a short text excerpted
from Germany's anti- Jewish laws of the 1930s and 1940s. Where past citizens once
navigated their lives according to these laws, present citizens now navigate their lives
according to the memory of such laws.
If part of these artists' work has been the reinscription of Jewish memory and
the memory of the Jews' murder into Berlin's otherwise indifferent landscape, an-
other part has been to reveal the void in postwar German culture that demands this
reinscription. To this end, architect Daniel Libeskind has premised his design for
Berlin's new Jewish Museum on the very idea of the void. In my chapter on Libes-
kind's design for Berlin's Jewish Museum, begin with I the prewar story of the mu-
seum itself, its own fraught past and ill-fated opening only weeks before Hitler was
installed as chancellor in January 1933. But here I also ask the impossible questions
facing the architect at the outset of his project: How does a city like Berlin "house"
the memory of a people that is no longer at "home" in Germany? How does a nation
like Germany invite a people like the Jews back into its official past after having
driven them so murderously from it? I suggest here that a "Jewish museum" in the
capital of a nation that not so long ago drove its Jews from a land they had consid-
ered "home" cannot be Heimlich but must be regarded as unheimlich — or uncanny.
My aim in this penultimate chapter is not merely to explain Libeskind's difficult de-
sign but to show how as a process, it uncannily articulates the dilemma Germany
faces whenever it attempts to formalize the self-inflicted void at its center — the void
of its lost and murdered Jews.
Introduction
Finally, in a sell examining coda, I tell the story of ( lermany's proposed na-
tional I lolocaust memorial and my own role in it, my evolution from a highly skep-
tical *. ritic on the outside of the process to one of its arbiters on the inside. Although
I had initially opposed a single, central I lolocaust memorial in Germany for the ways
it might be used compensate such irredeemable loss, or even put the past behind a
newly reunified Germany, over time I began to grow skeptical of my own skepticism.
Eventually, I was invited to become the only foreigner and Jew on a five-member
Findungskommission charged with choosing an appropriate design for Germany's na-
tional memorial to Europe's murdered Jews. In this coda, I tell the story of {Berlin's
"memorial lor the murdered Jews of Europe" on one hand even as I explore the col-
lapsing line between my role as critic and arbiter on the other — all toward bringing
the issues at the heart of Germany's memorial conundrum into clear, if painful focus.
Like my previous studies of Holocaust narrative and memorials, this book is
by no means intended as a survey of the contemporary arts of Holocaust memory. 14

Instead, I have tried to present a handful of artists whose works I believe best embody
some of the difficult questions faced by all post-Holocaust artists, works that throw
complex issues into sharp relief. These essays are thus premised on three interrelated
preoccupations shared by these artists and me. First, memory-work about the Holo-
caust cannot, must not, be redemptive in any fashion. Second, part of what a post-
Holocaust generation must ethically represent is the experience of the memory-act

itself. Last, the void left behind by the destruction of European Jewry demands the
reflection previously accorded the horrific details of the destruction itself. For these
artists, it is the memory-work itself, the difficult attempt to know, to imagine vicar-
iously, and to make meaning out of experiences they never knew directly that con-
stitutes the object of memory.

It's also true that dozens of artists other than the ones I discuss could have been
included here, many of them well known. In fact, in spite of their profound effect on
a postwar generation of artists preoccupied by the Holocaust, the works of Anselm
Kiefer, Josef Beuys, and Christian Boltanski are not addressed here — partly because
they have been discussed so thoroughly and insightfully before me. Still others, like
filmmakers Chantal Ackerman and Abraham Ravett and the performance artist Deb
Filler, have profoundly shaped my thinking in this book, as have installation artists
Susan Jahoda, Vera Frenkel, Ellen Rothenberg, and Melissa Gould. The musical com-
position Different Trains, by Steve Reich, has similarly inspired me, especially for the
ways it echoes his postwar generation's preoccupation with not having been "there"
Introduction
but still being shaped by the Holocaust. All of these artists deserve wide audiences and
demand discussions as sophisticated and illuminating as their works are profound. 15
In the end, this book is also premised on difficult, at times uncomfortable

questions directed toward the post-Holocaust generation of artists and architects
and their works: How much is this work about the Holocaust, and how much is it
about the artist's vicarious memory of the Holocaust? How can contemporary art
formalize such questions without making form itself the subject of their works? Fi-
nally, is it possible to enshrine an antimonumental impulse in monumental forms?

In my discussions of these artists, I don't pretend to answer these questions but
rather hope to lay them bare for all to see.
And as also becomes painfully clear, must direct similarly difficult questions
I
to myself, the critic and explicator of these works: At what point do I cross over from
disinterested critic of these works to their explicator? And then, at what point do I go
from being explicator of these at times difficult works to serving as their advocate? In
my case, such questions cannot be merely academic. For two of these essays were,
in fact, written initially as catalogue essays for exhibitions by David Levinthal and
Shimon Attie. And as my reflections on my role in Germany's attempt to build a na-
tional Holocaust memorial will show, I went from being what I regarded as a princi-
pled opponent of the project to spokesman for the Findungskommission appointed
to select an appropriate design for the memorial. This crossing-over of roles is not so
unusual in an art world where scholars, curators, museum and gallery directors, and
artists have long blurred the lines of their work, where interpreters and evaluators of
art have also established canons and market value. But it is new terrain for a cultural
historian of the Holocaust. If my aim here has been in part to lay bare these connec-
tions, the other, more important part of my aim here has been to explore the ways a
new generation of memory-artists have made a critique of institutional memory
fundamental to their work.
From Friedlander's integrated historiography to Spiegelman's commixture of
image and narrative; from Levinthal's "play of memory" to Attie's wall-projections;
from the countermemorial installations of Gerz, Hoheisel, Whiteread, Ullman, and

Stih and Schnock to the uncanny architecture of Libeskind and Peter Eisenman,
these works succeed precisely because they refuse to assign singular, overarching
meaning to either the events of the Holocaust or our memory of them. This is the
core of their antiredemptory aesthetic. Such artists and historians continue to sug-
gest meaning in history but simultaneously shade meaning with its own coming into
being. In side-shadowing both the history and memory of the Holocaust in this way,
10 Introduction
imi only do they icsist the temptation foi redemptory closure in their work, hut they
i. in make visible win such history is worth recalling in the first place."'
Some critics, like Michel Foucault, have suggested that because every record
of history, even the archival, IS also a representation of history and thus subject to all
of a culture's mediating forces, the study of history can only be the study ol com-
memorative forms. To date, in fat t, I have also made commemorative forms — such
as monuments, museums, and days of remembrance — part of the object my histor-
ical inquiry. Unlike Foucault, however, I would not displace more traditional notions
of history with hypermediated versions but only add the study of commemorative
forms to the study of history, making historical inquiry the combined study of both
what happened and how it is passed down to us.
In this way, historical inquiry might remain a search for certainties about
substantive realities even as it is broadened to encompass the realities of history's
eventual transmission. Extended backward into the notion of history "as it happened,"
such a conception includes as part of its search for verifiable fact the search for ver-
ifiable, yet highly contingent representations of these facts as they unfolded. Instead
of enforcing an absolute breach between what happened and how it is remembered,

we might also ask what happens when the players of history remember their past to
subsequent generations — and then suggest that this is not memory only but also
another kind of history-telling.
Indeed, I would suggest here that these memory-artists may even lead the
next generation of historians to a more refined, if complex kind of history-telling,
one that takes into account both events and how they get passed down to us. In
turn, I would like to see their works force scholars to reflect on their own academic
commodification of Holocaust history, how the next generation simultaneously
feeds on the past and disposes of it in their work. Although academic critics have
been quick to speculate on the motives of filmmakers, novelists, and artists, we have
remained curiously blind to our own instrumentalization of memory, to the ways
an entire academic industry has grown up around the Holocaust. It is time to step
back and take an accounting: Where does all this history and its telling lead, to what
kinds of knowledge, to what ends? For this is, I believe, the primary challenge to
Holocaust art and historiography in an antiredemptory age: it is history-telling and

memory that not only mark their own coming into being but also point to the
places — both real and imagined — they inevitably take us.
Introduction 1
CHAPTER ONE
Art Spiegelman s Maus and

the After-images of History
"How does history become 'personal' — only when it is survived, or only when private
lives become public knowledge? What constitutes an 'experience' of history — 'being
there,' being told about it (telling it), being taught it (teaching it), reading about it,
writing it? Or does history become 'personal' when an individual cares about it?"
— Susan Crane, "(Not) Writing History"
in spite of the brilliant ex a m p l e of his work Nazi Germany and the Jews,
Saul Friedlander is still not convinced that an antiredemptory historiography of the
Holocaust is possible. 1
For even that narrative that integrates something akin to the
deep, unassimilated memory of survivors as a disruption of "rational historiography"
also seems to mend these same disruptions with the inexorable logic of narrative it-
self. The question arises: To what extent will the introduction of the survivors' mem-
ory into an otherwise rational historiography add a destabilizing strain to this nar-
rative, and to what extent will such deep, unassimilable memory be neutralized by
the meaning generated in any and all narrative? Or will such a working through al-
ways remain the provenance of artists and novelists, whose imaginative flights bridge
this contradiction even as they leave it intact? Friedlander is not sure. "Even if new
forms of historical narrative were to develop," he says, "or new modes of representa-
tion, and even if literature and art were to probe the past from unexpected vantage
points, the opaqueness of some 'deep memory' would probably not be dispelled.
'Working through' may ultimately signify, in Maurice Blanchot's words, 'to keep
2
watch over absent meaning.'"
Here Friedlander also draws a clear distinction between what he terms "com-
mon memory" and "deep memory" of the Holocaust: common memory as that which
12
*o>rtov\n&c- WT where to go?!
"tends to restore or establish coherence, closure and possibly a redemptive stance,"
and deep memory as that which remains essentially inarticulable and unrepre-
sentable, that which continues to exist as unresolved trauma just beyond the reach of
meaning. 3 Not only are these two orders of memory irreducible to each other, Fried-
lander says, but "any attempt at building a coherent self founders on the intractable
return of the repressed and recurring deep memory" 4 That is, to some extent, every
common memory of the Holocaust is haunted by that which it necessarily leaves un-
stated, its coherence a necessary but ultimately misleading evasion.
As his sole example of deep memory, Friedlander refers to the last frame of
Art Spiegelman's so-called comic book of the Holocaust, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, in
which the dying father, Vladek, addresses his son Artie with the name of Richieu,
Artie's brother who died in the Holocaust before Artie was even born. The 5
still ap-
parently unassimilated trauma of his first son's death remains inarticulable — and
thereby deep — and so is represented here only indirectly as a kind of manifest be-
havior. But this example is significant for Friedlander in other ways, too, coming as it
does at the end of the survivor's life. For Friedlander wonders, profoundly I think,
what will become of this deep memory after the survivors are gone. "The question re-
mains," he says, "whether at the collective level ... an event such as the Shoah may,
after all the survivors have disappeared, leave traces of a deep memory beyond indi-
vidual recall, which will defy any attempts to give it meaning." The implication
6
is
that, beyond the second generation's artistic and literary representations of it, such
deep memory may be lost to history altogether.
In partial answer to this troubling void in Holocaust history, Friedlander pro-

poses not so much a specific form but a way of thinking about historical narrative
that makes room for a historiography integrating deep and common memory. For
the integrated historian, this means a historiography whose narrative skein is dis-
rupted by the sound of the historian's own, self-conscious voice. As Friedlander

writes, such "commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narra-
tion, introduce alternative interpretations, question any partial conclusion, with-
stand the need for closure." These interruptions would also remind readers that this
7
history is being told and remembered by someone in a particular time and place, that
it is the product of human hands and minds. Such a narrative would simultaneously
gesture both to the existence of deep, inarticulable memory and to its own incapac-
ity to deliver that memory.

Perhaps even more important for Friedlander, though he gives it equal weight
in his argument, is the possibility that such commentary "may allow for an integra-
14 Spiegelman's Maus
lion oi the so called m\ thi( memoi \ ol the victims within the overall representa
hon oi this past without its becoming an 'obstacle' to 'rational historiography.'" 8
Merc, it seems, Iricdlandcr would not only answer German historian Martin
Broszat's demand thai the mythic memory of victims be granted a place in "rational
historiography," but he would justify doing so asa necessary part of an integrated his-
9
toi ) rather than on the basis ol "respect for the victims" (as Broszat has suggested).
Such history necessarily integrates both the contingent truths of the historian's nar-
rative and the fact of the victims' memory, both deep and common. In this kind of
multivocal history, no single, overarching meaning emerges unchallenged; instead,
narrative and counternarrative generate a frisson of meaning in their exchange, in
the working through process they now mutually reinforce.
The Comix-ture of Image and Narrative
Here I would like to return to Art Spiegelman's Maus, not because it answers
Friedlander's call for an integrated history of the Holocaust but because it illustrates
so graphically the dilemmas that inspire Friedlander's call. At the same time, I find
that by embodying what Marianne Hirsch has aptly termed an aesthetics of post-
memory, it also suggests itself as a model for what I would like to call "received his-
tory" — a narrative hybrid that interweaves both events of the Holocaust and the
ways they are passed down to us. 10
Like Hirsch, I would not suggest that postmem-
ory takes us beyond memory, or displaces it in any way, but would say that it is "dis-
tinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal
connection. Post-memory should reflect back on memory, revealing it as equally
constructed, equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination ....
Post-memory is anything but absent or evacuated: It is as full and as empty as mem-

11
ory itself."
As becomes clear, then, especially to the author himself, Art Spiegelman's
Maus: A Survivor's Tale is not about the Holocaust so much as about the survivor's
tale itself and the artist-son's recovery of it. In Spiegelman's own words, "Maus is not
what happened in the past, but rather what the son understands of the father's story.
... It is an autobiographical history of my relationship with my father, a survivor of
the Nazi death camps, cast with cartoon animals." 12 As his father recalled what hap-
pened to him at the hands of the Nazis, his son Art recalls what happened to him at
the hands of his father and his father's stories. As his father told his experiences to Art
Spiegelman's Maus 15
Art Spiegelman, Maus, 1:12.
in all their painful imme-

diacy, Art tells his experi-
ences of the storytelling
sessions themselves — in
allwof their somewhat less
painful mediacy.
"In 1970 I drew a short
comic strip called 'Maus'

for a San Francisco artists'
comic book," Spiegelman

has written. "It was based
on my parents' experi-
ences as Jewish survivors

of the ghettoes and death
camps of Nazi Europe. In
that early work I repre-
sented the Jews as mice

and the Germans as cats.
(Kafka's tale, 'Josephine
the Singer, or the Mouse

Folk' offered a precedent,
tfAKe tfWC*, SOT f\LUM5 as did the Saturday mor-
I
tOOU? f\f\K£ f\ LIVING-
ning cartoons and comics
of my childhood.)." 13
That Spiegelman has chosen to represent the survivor's tale as
passed down to him in what he calls the "comix" is neither surprising nor contro-
versial. After all, as a comix-artist and founder of Raw magazine Spiegelman has only
turned to what has always been his working artistic medium. That the comix would
serve such a story so well, however, is what I would like to explore here. On the one
hand, Spiegelman seems to have realized that in order to remain true to both his fa-
ther's story and his own experience of it, he would have to remain true to his
medium. But in addition, he has also cultivated the unique capacity in the "comix-
ture" of image and narrative for telling the double-stranded tale of his father's story
and his own recording of it.
\// Spiegelman,
Breakdowns.
©ITRl 3* «P'<gjeW»«
While Spiegelman acknowledges that the very word comics "brings to mind
the notion that they have to be funny," humor itself is not an intrinsic component of
the medium. "Rather than comics," he continues, "I prefer the word commix, to mix
together, because to talk about comics is to talk about mixing together words and
pictures to tell a story" 14 Moreover, Spiegelman explains, "The strength of commix
lies in [its] synthetic ability to approximate a 'mental language' that is closer to actual
human thought than either words or pictures alone." 15 Here h.e cites the words of
what he calls the patron saint of comix, the nineteenth-cegtury Swiss educational
theorist and author Rodolphe Topfer: "The drawings without their text would have
only a vague meaning; the text without the drawings would have no meaning at all.
The combination makes up a kind of novel — all the more unique in that it is no
more like a novel than it is like anything else." 16 For unlike a more linear historical
narrative, the "comix-ture" of words and images generates a triangulation of meaning
— a kind of three-dimensional narrative — in the movement among words, images,
and the reader's eye. Such a form also recognizes that part of any narrative will be this
internal register of knowledge — somewhere between words and images — conjured

in the mind's movement between itself and the page. Such a mental language may
not be reproducible, but it is part of any narrative just the same.
Thus, in describing Winsor McKay, another pioneering cartoonist, Spiegel-
man further spells out what he calls the "storytelling possibilities of the comic strip's
unique formal elements: the narrative as well as design significance of a panel's size
and shape, and how these individual panels combined to form a coherent visual
whole." 17
That is, the box panels convey information in both vertical and horizontal
movements of the eye, as well as in the analogue of images implied by the entire page
that appears in the background of any single panel. The narrative sequence of
Spiegelman's boxes, with some ambiguity as to the order in which they are to be read,
combines with and then challenges the narrative of his father's story — itself con-
stantly interrupted by Art's questions and neurotic preoccupations, his father's pill-
taking, the rancorous father-son relationship, his father's new and sour marriage. As
a result, Spiegelman's narrative is constantly interrupted by — and integrative of
life itself, with all its dislocutions, associations, and paralyzing self-reflections. It is a
narrative echoing with the ambient noise and issues that surround its telling. The
roundabout method of memory-telling is captured here in ways unavailable to a
more linear narrative. It is a narrative that tells both the story of events and its own
unfolding as narrative.
( )thei aspec is ol Spiegelman's specific form and technique further incorpo-
rate the process ol drawing Maus into its finished version. By drawing his panels in
a one- to one ratio, for example, instead of drawing large panels and then shrinking
them down to page size, Spiegelman reproduces his hand's movement in scale — its
shakiness, the thickness of his drawing pencil line, the limits of miniaturization, all
to put a cap on detail and line line and so keep the pictures nnderdetermined. This
would be the equivalent of the historian's voice, not as it interrupts the narrative,
however, hut as it constitutes it.
At the same time, Maus resonates with traces of Spiegelman's earlier, experi-
mental foray into antinarrative. According to Spiegelman, at the time of his first
Maus narrative in 1972, he was actually more preoccupied with deconstructing the
comix as narrative than he was in telling a story. As Jane Kalir has observed, Spie-
gelman's early work here grew more and more abstruse as he forced his drawings to
ask such questions as "How does one panel on a page relate to the others? How do
a strip's artificial cropping and use of pictorial illusion manipulate reality? How
much can he elided from a story if it is to retain any coherence? How do words and
pictures combine in the human brain?" 18
Later, with the publication in 1 977 of Breakdowns, an anthology of strips from

this period of self-interrogation, the artist's overriding question became: How to tell
the story of narrative's breakdown in broken-down narrative? 19 His answer was to
quote mercilessly and mockingly from mainstream comics like Rex Morgan, M.D.,
and Dick Tracy, even while paying reverently parodic homage to comics pioneers like
Winsor McKay and his Dream of the Rarebit Fiend ("Real Dream" in Spiegelman's
nightmarish version). In Breakdowns, Spiegelman combined images and narrative in

boxes but with few clues as to whether they should be read side to side, top to bottom,
image to narrative, or narrative to image; the only linear narrative here was generated
by reading, a somewhat arbitrary reassembling of boxes into sequential order. In his
introductory panels to Breakdowns, Spiegelman even rejects the notion of narrative as
story, preferring to redefine story as the " 'complete horizontal division of a building
[From Medieval Latin historia ... a row of windows with pictures on them.]'" 20
But although he explodes comix narrative into a kind of crazy quilt to be read in all
directions, Spiegelman deliberately maintains a linear narrative for the Holocaust seg-
ment of Breakdowns. When I asked why, he replied simply that he wasn't interested in
breaking the story of the Holocaust itself into incoherence, only in examining the lim-
its of this particular narrative for telling such a story.
In fact, what Spiegel-
man admires in the form
itself, he says, he once
admired in Harvey
Kurtzman's Mad maga-
zine: "It was about some-
thing. — reality, for want
o£ a better word — and
was also highly self-
reflexive, satirically ques-
tioning not only the

world, but also the un-
derlying premises of the
comics medium through
which it asked the ques-
21
tions." For Spiegelman,
there is no contradiction
between a form that is
about reality on one

hand and that which
questions its own under-
lying premises on the
other. It is clear that part
of the world's reality here
is the artist's own aching inadequacy in the face of this reality.
As for possible objections to folding the deadly high-seriousness of the Holo-

caust into what some regard as the trivial low-seriousness of comics, Spiegelman
merely shows how the medium itself has always raised — and dismissed — issues of
decorum as part of its raison d'etre. Here he recalls that even the distinction itself be-
tween the high art of the masters and the low art of cartoonists is challenged by the
way "modern masters" like Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz, and Juan
Gris divided their time between painting and cartoons. Indeed, as Kirk Varnedoe and
Adam Gopnik have suggested, the comics in the twentieth century have served as a
"metalanguage of modernism, a fixed point of reference outside modern painting to
which artists could refer in order to make puns and ironic jokes." 22 As an unusually
retentive mirror and caricature of stvles in modern art, the comics have at once cat-
"If tha Buthor of this /if He \*Jume /'* "Jfha* a writer hesjust midJIlrn. But
in artist hedrxus poorly, but he has a has a nic&litt/a.
to yruke up for thrt hi
torttin knack fa* writlrg- flair for drawing-
-RudolpheTspffer, Comic strip artist.1837
V
t* !x Hwl
mi i
1 \h ut
My dictionary defines COMIC STRIP a» A NARRATIVE Is defined as ''a story." Except the one that sayx>"A complete-
"a nan-ativB series of cartoon*." Mott definitions of STORY leave me cold. horizontal division of a Wildini-.
CFrom Medieval Latin HISTORlfi'-a row
of windows with pictures on them!]"
Art Spiegelnmn, Breakdowns.
"
"It is up to the careful comic artist ".„/)!!in ail, drawing comic strips is "~ins du/(jnonoionoua sort of way.
to see that he offendsno one, hurts very interesting ... -Chic Yowg, creator of 8L0NWE1
no group and that his strip is all in
good clean flin..,
^^H ^— ^ls^
Art Spiegelman, Breakdowns.
Art Spiegeltnan, Breakdowns.
alogued and mocked modern art with its own high seriousness — making them the
postmodern art par excellence.
Written between 1972 and 1985, the first volume of Maus integrated both nar-
rative and antinarrative elements of the comics, embedding the father's altogether
coherent story in a medium that constantly threatened to fly apart at the seams. The
result is a continuous narrative rife with the discontinuities of its reception and pro-
duction, the absolutely authentic voice of Spiegelman's father counterposed to the
fabular images of cartoon animals. In its self-negating logic, Spiegelman's comix also
suggests itself as a pointedly antiredemptory medium that simultaneously makes and
unmakes meaning as it unfolds. Words tell one story, images another. Past events are
not redeemed in their telling but are here exposed as a continuing cause of the artist's
inability to find meaning anywhere. Meaning is not negated altogether, bul whatev
er meaning is < reated in the father's telling is immediately challenged in the sons
reception and visualization ol it.
In fact, the "story" is not a single story .it all but two stories told simultaneous-
ly: the father's story and Spiegelman's imaginative record of it. It is double-stranded
and includes the competing stories of what his father says and what Artie hears, what
happened during the [olocausl and what happens now
1 in Artie's mind. As a process,
it makes visible the space between what gets told and what gets heard, what gets heard
and what gets seen. The
father says one thing as
we see him doing some-

thing else. Artie promis-
es not to betray certain

details, only to show us
the promise and the
betrayal together. Indeed,
it may be Artie's unrelia-
bility as a son that makes

his narrative so reliable.
Throughout Maus,
Spiegelman thus con-
fronts his father with the
record of his telling,
incorporating his father's
response to Art's record

of it into later stages of
Maus. Maus thereby feeds

on itself, recalling its own
production, even the
choices the artist makes
along the way (would he

draw his French wife who
converted to Judaism as a
frog or as an honorary
mouse?). The story now includes not just "what happened" but how what happened
is made sense of by father and son in the telling. At the same time, it highlights both
the inseparability of his father's story from its effect on Artie and the story's own nec-
essarily contingent coming into being. All of which might be lost to either images or
narrative alone, or even to a reception that did not remark its own unfolding.
By weaving back into his narrative the constant reflection on his role in extract-
ing this story from his father, Spiegelman graphically highlights not only the ways that
testimony is an event in its own right but also the central role he plays in this event.
Moreover, as Dori Laub has noted, "The listener is a party to the creation of know-
ledge de novo? 25 That is, what is generated in the interaction between father and son
in this case is not a revelation of an existing story waiting to be told but a new story
unique to their experience together. This medium allows the artist to show not only
the creation of his father's story but the necessary grounds for its creation, the ways
his father's story hinges on his relationship to the listener. Artie is not just a shaper
of testimony during its telling, or after in his drawings, but an integral part of its very
genesis, part of its raison d'etre. By making this telling and receiving the subject of
Mans, Spiegelman acknowledges multiple levels of creativity and knowledge-making
in the telling and his subsequent drawing. In this way, Spiegelman becomes both mid-
wife to and eventual representer of his father's story.
Maus as Side-Shadowed History
Throughout its narrative, Mans presumes a particular paradigm for history
itself, a conception of past historical events that includes the present conditions
under which they are being remembered. The historical facts of the Holocaust, in
this case, include the fact of their eventual transmission. This is why the "auto-
biographical history of the survivor's tale" necessarily begins, then, not in the fa-
ther's experiences but in Artie's. Neither the three-page 1972 version of "Maus" in
Breakdowns nor the later, two-volume edition of Maus opens in the father's boy-
hood Poland; rather, both open with the son's boyhood in Rego Park, Queens. The
1972 version begins with Poppa mouse sitting on the edge of his adoring little boy's
bed, telling him "bedtime stories about life in the old country during the war":
"and so, Mickey, die Katzen made all the mice to move into one part from the town!
It was wery crowded in the ghetto!" "Golly!" says little mouse in his pajamas. Hence,
24 Spiegelman 's Maus

\n Spiegelman, Maus, 1:6.
the "real dreams" thai
follow m Breakdowns.
Maus: A Survivor's
Vale opens in 1958, with
the young Artie's rela
tionship to his father.

Every detail of Artie's
childhood is fraught
with his father's memo-
ry, is shaped by his fa-
ther's experiences. In the
opening panel, some-

thing as innocent as
being ditched by friends

in childhood sparks the
father's indignant com-
parison: "Friends? Your
friends? If you lock them

together in a room with
no food for a week, then
you could see what it is,
friends" (1:6). The fa-
ther's seemingly inexpli-

cable response to his
young son's tears evolves
out of a deep memory

that becomes sensible only over the course of the narrative that follows.
After this preamble, Artie appears again, now grown, to visit his father for the
first time in nearly two years. He is on a mission, a self-quest that is also historical. "I
still want to draw that book about you," Artie says to his father, who answers, "No
one wants any way to hear such stories," to which Artie answers, '7 want to hear it."
And then he asks his father to begin, in effect, with his own implied origin: "Start
with Mom ..." he asks. "Tell me how you met" (1:12). He does not ask him to start
with the war, deportation, or internment but with his mother and their union — that
is, with his own origins. But even here, Artie's needs are frustrated by his father's
actual memory: he begins not with Artie's mother, Anja, but with an earlier girlfriend,
Lucia, where his memory of Anja begins.
Though Vladek tells his son that Lucia and his other girlfriends had nothing
to do with the Holocaust, Spiegelman includes them nevertheless. In so doing,
Spiegelman extends the realm of Holocaust history not only forward to include its
effects on the next generation but also backward to include the rich, prewar tangle
of lives lost. For Spiegelman, the Holocaust is much more than the sum of Jews mur-
dered or maimed; it is also the loss of all that came before. By including the quotid-
ian and messy details of his father's love affairs before the war (against the father's
wishes), the artist restores a measure of the victims' humanity. More important, he
preserves the contingency of daily lives as lived and perceived then — and not only as
they are retrospectively freighted with the pathos and portent we assign them now.
At the same time, he shows how the victims themselves, for perfectly understandable
reasons, are occasionally complicit in the kind of back-shadowed history Spiegelman
now rejects. 24
It is as if Spiegelman realizes that at least part of his aim here as skeptical son,
as teller of side-shadowed history, is to show how his father has made sense of his
Holocaust experiences through many tellings, even as he would sabotage the ready-
made story with his questions, his search for competing and contradicting details. The
father might prefer a polished narrative, with beginning, middle, and end; but Artie
wants to know the forks in the road, the paths not taken, how and why decisions were
made under those circumstances, mistakenly or otherwise. In the nearly fifteen hun-
dred interlocking frames that follow, therefore, the survivor's tale includes life before
the war: leaving Lucia; marrying Anja for a mixture of love and money; going to work
for his father-in-law; having a baby boy, Richieu; taking Anja to a spa for treatment
of severe depression; being called up by the Polish army in the weeks before war.
As a Polish soldier, Vladek sees combat on the front when Germany invades
Poland and even kills a German soldier. But the Polish army is overrun, and Vladek
is captured. He survives a prisoner-of-war camp and, through a combination of

guile and luck, makes his way home to Sosnowiecz. The details of the Polish Jews'
ghettoization follow: hiding from selections, the gradual loss of hope and the break-
up of the family, various acts of courage and betrayal by lews and Poles, the painful
sending of Richieu into hiding with a relative. The first volume ends with Vladek and
Anja being caught and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.-

*JVA£HlUW\E Fir4l>U.U<-Vo $0*Ho*JiEC. THERE if viM PEOPLE WHfcT Kt*E\*J r*E
\i i Spiegclman, Maus, 2:136
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Vblume 2 opens in
Auschwitz, where Vladek

.uul Anja aw separated,
[ntercul repeatedly with
scenes depicting the ckiv
to day circumstances oi
his tolling, Vladek re-
counts the arbitrariness

ot day-to-day life and
death in Auschwitz, find-
ing work and learning
new skills for survival,
making and losing con-
tact with Anja, libera-

tion, the postwar chaos
of refugees in Europe,
and his search for Anja.
The book literally ends

with Vladek's descrip-
tion of his joyous re-
union with Anja ("More

I don't need to tell you.
We were both very hap-
py, and lived happy,

happy ever after"). Two — >A ?Pv*4eWn , iW-Wl
final panels follow: "So
. . . let's stop, please, your
tape recorder . . . I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it's enough stories for now"
(2: 136). At the bottom of the last page, Art has drawn a picture of a single tombstone
for Vladek and Anja, with their names and dates of life. Beneath the tombstone, Art
has signed his own name and the dates 1978-1991, not his life span but the span of
his writing.
"Which is the true historical project," Alice Yeager Kaplan has asked, "the pin-
pointing of an empirical
cause or the trickier, less
disciplined attempt to
make links between past
and present?" 26 In Maus,
not only are past and
present linked, but they
constantly intrude and
occasionally even collapse
into each other. In relat-
ing, for example, the fate
of his cousin, Haskel, an

infamous Kombinator
(schemer), the very mem-
ory seems to stop Vla-
dek's heart as he grabs his
chest. The narrative is
one thing, the heart-stop-

ping anxiety it produces
in the teller is another.
Both are portrayed

here — the story and the
effect on the teller him-
self — a kind of deep
SUCH FRlENp* VWKCL H&P ,
memory usually lost to

narrative alone (1:118).
Earlier, as the father recounts the days in August 1939 when he was drafted,
just as he gets to the outbreak of war: "And on September 1, 1939, the war came. I was
on the front, one of the first to . . . Ach!" His elbow knocks two bottles of pills onto
the floor. "So. Twice I spilled my drugstore!" He blames his lost eye and cataracts for
not seeing so well and launches into the story of eye operations and neglectful doc-
tors. On that day and in that chapter of the book, he doesn't finish his story of the
Nazi invasion and says it's enough for today. "I'm tired and must count my pills"
(1:39-40). Which is fine with Artie, whose writing hand is sore from taking notes.
Both teller and listener need to recover from the storytelling session itself, though
whether it is the activity of telling and listening or the content of the narrative that
has worn them out is not clear. Throughout Maus, the content ol the lather's tale of
sui viva! is balanced against the literal process ol its recovery, the circumstances under
which it is received and retold.
By making the recovery of the story itself a visible part of Maus, Spiegelman
can also hint darkly at the story not being recovered here, how telling one story always
leaves another untold, how common memory masks deep memory. In Spiegelman's
ease, this deep, unrecov-

erable story is his moth-
er's memory of her expe-
riences during the Holo-
caust. Vladek does not,

cannot volunteer this sto-"
ry. It takes Artie to ask
what Anja was doing all
this time. "Houseworks . .
and knitting . . . reading

. . . and she was writing
always her diary" ( 1 :84).
The diaries did not sur-
vive the war, Vladek says,
but she did write her

memoirs afterward. "Oh-
migod! Where are they? I
need those for this book!"

Artie exclaims (1:84). In-
stead of answering, Vla-
dek coughs and asks Artie

to stop with the smoking.
It's making him short of

breath. What seems to be
a mere interruption turns

out to be a prescient de-
&FTEp> Ittilft VlEP V H&P to WiKC Arf Spiegelman, Maus, 7;/59.
Mi OW»£R.U)rrH EAIEIWHlNfr ...
THEJfc ?M>e*$ HM> f»0 MftrW

MEMORIES ÎÔRWEp-mtM.
laying tactic. Vladek had,
after all, burned Anja's

memoirs in a fit of grief
after her suicide. Was it
the memory of smoke

from the burned memoirs
or Artie's cigarettes that
now made him short of
breath?
At the end of the first
volume, Spiegelman de-

picts the moment when
his father admits not
only destroying his mo-
ther's memoirs but leav-
ing them unread. "Mur-
derer," the son mutters

(1:159). Here he seems
to realize that his father's
entire story is haunted

by Anja's lost story. But
worse, it dawns on the
son that his entire
project may itself be

premised on the destruc-
tion of his mother's
memoirs, their displacement and violation. "I can tell you," says the father (1:158).
Spiegelman does not attempt to retell Anja's story at all, but leaves it known only by
its absence; he is an accomplice to the usurpation of his dead mother's voice. It is a
blank page, to be presented as blank. Nancy Miller has even suggested, profoundly,
that "It's as if at the heart of Maus's dare is the wish to save the mother by retriev-
ing her narrative; as if the comic book version of Auschwitz were the son's normal-
ization of another impossible reality: restoring the missing word, the Polish note-
hooks." ,\s ,i void .u the heart of Maus, the mother's lost story may be Mate's neg-
ative center oi gravity, the invisible planet around which hoth the father's telling and
Spiegelman's recovery oi it revolve.
1 [ere Spiegelmail seems also to he asking how we write the stones of the dead
without tilling m then absence. In a limited way, the commixture of image and nar-
rative allows the artist to do just this, to make visible crucial parts oi memory-work
usually lost to narrative alone, such as the silences and spaces between words. How
to show a necessary silence? Art's therapist, Pavel, suggests at one point that because
"lite always takes the side of lite" (2:45), the victims who died can never tell their
stories. Maybe it's better
not to have any more sto- admirable to svrvwg.

5>o«} tnat mean A * HOT
1
ries at all, Pavel says."Uh, i4«n>r»We-U) HOI Hnitft.''
huh," Art nods in agree-
ment and adds, "Samuel

Beckett once said, 'Every
word is like an unneces-

sary stain on silence and
LifeaWyjtakejthefcdear Kfe.,
\*>meW> the V»itimf are Warned
) X^H j /
ooV now,
figh.t'mnot talking abowtYotfrs boo
bvt look at how many book? Wave, al
already
nothingness." "Yes," Pavel ,
\
wasn't the ft£jr peofUwno */rwu«A,
t it \ / been *»«**«* »W.t <he Holocaust.
-
.t.Whafj
the p^nt ? feoote haven't chancy*...
answers. And then there tAoHbe.thev*«C<i
anevxjr.b
follows a panel without
words, just an image of

Art and his therapist sit-
ting in silence, a moment

in the therapeutic context l\r\YWa^ itho.\iitti<»\$ who died can t\e>/« UhVwh $amue\6etWtt once. $a\d. 'Every .
, word \$ KMc, on v*>nece$«»ry rtain on

better not to have 'Hence and noth\no/va$>-
as fraught with signifi-
cance as narrative itself.
For this is not silence as

an absence of words but
silence as something that
passes actively between
Onthe other) He wa>ri4ht.Maybe.you
two people — the only honcl, he t\ci incli/ae it in your booK-
,
^^^
i\
n i*i m
J
frame in the two volumes u i
without words or some wiB^N
Art Spiegelman, Maus, 2:45. f^(9te£dfl

other sign denoting words. And yet, Art points out in the next frame, "he said it."
"Maybe you can include it in your book," the therapist replies.
How to show the unshowable may also underpin Spiegelman's use of ani-
mals for humans here. When Spiegelman is asked, "Why mice?" he answers, "I need
to show the events and memory of the Holocaust without showing them. I want to
show the masking of these events in their representation." 28 In this way, he can tell
the story and not tell it at the same time. As ancient Passover Haggadoth used to put
birds' heads on human forms in order not to show humansând to show them at the
same time, Spiegelman has put mouse heads on the Jews. By using mice masks, the
artist also asks us not to believe what we see. They are masks drawing attention to
themselves as such, never inviting us to mistake the memory of events for the events
themselves.
In his review of Maus, Adam Gopnik echoes Spiegelman's words, but with a
slightly different twist. It's not just that Spiegelman wants to show this story by mask-
ing it, says Gopnik, but that the story itself "is too horrible to be presented unmasked."
Moreover, Gopnik finds that Spiegelman may even be extending an ancient Jewish
iconographic tradition, it tor very untraditional reasons:
The particular animal "masks" Spiegelman has chosen uncannily
recall and evoke one of the few masterpieces of Jewish religious
art — the Bird's Head Haggadah of 13th-century Ashkenazi art. In
this and related manuscripts, the Passover story is depicted using
figures with the bodies of humans and heads of animals — small,
common animals, usually birds.
Now, in one sense the problems that confronted the me-

dieval Jewish illuminator and the modern Jewish artist of the Holo-
caust are entirely different. The medieval artist had a subject too
holy to be depicted; the modern artist has a subject too horrible to
be depicted. For the traditional illuminator, it is the ultimate sacred
mystery that must somehow be shown without being shown; for
the contemporary artist, it is the ultimate obscenity, the ultimate
profanity, that must somehow be shown without being shown. 29
Though Gopnik goes on to suggest that this obscenity has also become our sacred
subject, we might do better to keep in mind not this apparent conflation of sacred and
profane but the medium's essential indirection, its simultaneous attempt at repre-
\n Spiegelman, Maus, 2 / /
senting and its sell
declared inadequac \.
Moreover, .is Spiegel-
man attempts to ironize

narrative, he also uses
images against them-

selves. By adopting the
mouse .is allegorical
image for lews, Spiegel-
man is able to carica-
ture — and sub-

therein'
vert — the Nazi image of

Jews as vermin. Subju-
gated groups have long
appropriated the racial
epithets and stereotypes
used against them in
order to ironize and

thereby neutralize their
charge, taking them out
of the oppressors' vocab-
ulary. In this case, the
images of mice led in
turn to other animal fig-
ures insofar as they are related to mice: the wily and somewhat indifferent cat is the
obvious natural enemy of the mouse and, as German, the principal killer of mice
here. The hapless Poles are saddled with a more ambiguous figure: though not a
natural enemy of the Jews during the Holocaust, as pigs they come to symbolize
what is treif, or non-Kosher. They may not be as anti-Jewish as the cats, but they are
decidedly un-Jewish. The only other animal to resonate a Nazi cast would be the
friendly, if none-too-bright dogs as stand-in for Americans, regarded as a mongrel
people by Hitler but pictured here as the natural and more powerful enemy of the
cats. The rest of the animals are more literallv benign: reindeer for the Swedes, moths
for Gypsies. But none of these, aside from the mouse, is intrinsic, witness Spiegel-
man's deliberations over whether to make his French-born wife, Francoise, a frog or
a mouse (technically speaking, she has to be a mouse).
Though he has tried to weave the process of drawing Maus back into its
narrative, Spiegelman is also aware that as a finished text, Maus may not truly cap-
ture the process. Which is why two exhibitions in New York City, one at the Galerie
St. Etienne and the other in the projects room Museum of Modern Art, were
at the
so central to Spiegelman's project at the time. In these exhibitions, each entitled

"The Road to Maus," the artist mounted the originals of his finished panels se-
quentially in a horizontal line along the walls of the gallery. Each panel in turn had
all of its earlier drafts running vertically down into it, showing the evolution of
each image from start to finish. Cassette players and earpieces were strategically
interspersed along the walls of the gallery so that viewers could listen to Art's orig-
inal interviews with his father. In this way, Spiegelman hoped to bring his true ob-
ject of representation into view: the process by which he arrived at a narrative, by
which he made meaning in and worked through a history that has been both pub-
lic and personal. Though the ostensible purpose of the exhibition was, according
to Robert Storrs, "to illuminate the final entity — a mass-produced work — by
showing its complex genesis in the artist's mind and on the draftsman's page," 30
the artist himself preferred to see the exhibition as the total text, he told me. "If I
had my way," he said, "this would be the text of Maus, replete with how I got to the
so-called final panels." 31
With the advent of cd-rom, the artist has had his wish at least partly ful-
filled, for here is an interactive text in which the panels of Maus are accompanied by
complete genealogies of their origins. Where did a particular story or set of images
come from, and how did they first enter the artist's consciousness? It's all here. We
press the interactive screen on one of the colored boxes, and up comes a complete
(pre-)history of that panel: Vladek's tape-recorded voice, with Art's interruptions,
tells one version. The artist's early sketches done as his father spoke tell another.
Photographs and drawings from Art's library that inspired certain images appear
one after the other, even video footage of Art's trip to Poland and Auschwitz. By
making visible the memory of this memory-text's production, the cd-rom version
of Maus reveals the interior, ever-evolving life of memory — and makes this life, too,
part of its text.

The Ambivalence oj Memory
like other artists in his antiredemptory generation, Spiegelman cannot escape
.in essential ambivalence lie feels toward Ins entire memory enterprise. For he recog-
nizes that both Ins lather's story and his own record of it have arisen out ol a conflu-
ence ot conflicting personal, professional, M\d not always heroic needs. V'ladek tells his
Story, it seems, more lor the sake of his son's company than for the sake of history; it
is a way to keep his son nearby, .1 kind of tether. Indeed, as a survivor par excellence,
Yladck is not above bartering the story itself to get what he wants: first, as leverage to
keep his son nearby, and then later as part of an exchange for food at the local mar-
ket, where he receives six dollars of groceries for one dollar, a partially eaten box of
Special K cereal, an acknowledgment of his declining health, and, of course, a little
about "how it was in the camps" (2:90). In a pinch, as it turns out, the savvy survivor
can trade even his story of survival for food.

Although this kind of self-interested storytelling might drive the son a little
crazy, Art must face the way he, too, has come to the story as much to learn about his
origins, his dead mother, his own meshugas, as he does to learn Holocaust history. In
fact, the Holocaust-telling relationship literally redeems the father-son relationship for
Artie. "I'll get my tape recorder, so today isn't a total loss, okay?" he says after a par-
ticularly trying visit with Vladek (2:23). Moreover, he recognizes not only that he, too,
has capitalized on his father's story but that in so doing, he has even delayed the rest of
the story's publication. What with all the business and promotional deals surrounding
Maus 1, Art could hardly find time to continue what had been a single project, now
broken into two parts for the sake of publication. The Holocaust has been good to a
starving artist who admits choosing his life's work partly to spite his father with its im-
practicality. And now it has made him quite comfortable as well, which becomes part
of the story in Minis 2 — a recognition of his debt to his father's story, the way Art has
traded it for his own survival. In this way, history is received as a gift and as a com-
modity to be traded, the sole basis for any relationship at all between father and son.
All of which generates a certain self-loathing in the artist, even as it saps the
author of his desire to continue telling the story. The first five frames of the second
chapter in volume 2 open with Art's morbid reflections on the production and suc-
cess of volume 1. With flies buzzing around his head, he contemplates the stages of
his parents' life weighed against the stages of his own, while trying to make sense of
the yawning gap between their life experiences and his:
Vladek died of congestive heart failure on August 18, 1982. . . .
Francoise and I stayed with him in the Catskills back in August

1979. Vladek started working as tinman in Auschwitz in the spring
of 1944. ... I started working on this page at the very end of Feb-
ruary 1987. In May 1987 Francoise and I are expecting a baby. . .
Between May 16, 1944 and May 24, 1944 over 100,000 Hungarian
Jews were gassed in Auschwitz In September 1986, after 8 years
of work, the first part of MAUS was published. It was a critical and
commercial success. At least fifteen foreign editions are coming out.
I've gotten 4 serious offers to turn my book into a T.V. special or

movie. ( I don't wanna. ) In May 968 my mother killed herself. (She
1
left no note.) Lately I've been feeling depressed. [2:41 ]
Out of his window, where one of New York City's signature water towers might be
standing, we see what Art sees: a concentration camp guard tower (its base and out-
line not unlike that of the water towers). Now, flies buzz around the crumpled mouse
corpses that litter Art's floor as he slumps dejectedly onto his drafting board.
Part of what gets Art down, of course, is that he is not an innocent bystander
in all this, a grateful vessel into which his father has poured his story. When he re-
members his father's story now, he remembers how at times he had to wring it out of
him. When his father needed a son, a friend, a sounding board for his tsouris, Art de-
manded Holocaust. Before rejoining his father's story in Auschwitz, Art draws him-
self listening to the tape-recorded session he's about to tell. "I was still so sick and
tired," Vladek is saying about his return from a bout in the hospital. "And to have
peace only, I agreed to make [my will] legal. She brought right to my bed a notary."
To which Art replies, "Let's get back to Auschwitz . .

."
"Fifteen dollars he charged to
come! If she waited only a week until I was stronger, I'd go to the bank and take a no-
tary for only a quarter!" "enough!" screams the son. "tell me about Auschwitz!"
Artie shrinks in his seat and sighs as he listens again to this exchange. Defeated, his
father returns to the story (2:47).
Indeed, Spiegelman is both fascinated and repelled by the way he can actually
assimilate these stories so seamlessly into the rest of his life. At one point, his wife,
Francoise, peeks into Art's studio and asks cheerfully, "Want some coffee?" Art is replay-
ing the tape recording in which his father describes the moments before his brother
was killed. "And then she said, 'No! I will not go in the gas chambers. And my children
will not . . . [clik]." Art turns off the cassette and answers eagerly, "You bet!" (2:120).

What do these stones do to the rest of the lives in which they are embedded? Should-
n't they foul everything they touch with their stench? ( !an we keep such stories sepa-
rate or do they seep into the resl of our lives, and how corrosive are they? Maybe, just
maybe, we can live with these stories, alter all.
"Why should we assume there are positive lessons to be learned from [the
Holocaust]?" essayist Jonathan Rosen has asked in an article that cuts excruciat-
ingly close to the bone of Spiegelman's own ambivalence. "What if some history
does not have anything to teach us? What if studying radical evil does not make us
better? What if, walking
through the haunted Time f lie*-
halls of the Holocaust

Museum, looking at evi-
dence of the destruction

of European Jewry, visi-
tors do not emerge with

a greater belief that all
men are created equal
but with a belief that

man is by nature evil?" 32
As we see in the case
of Vladek's own racist
attitudes toward African-

Americans, the Holocaust
may have made him even
worse. And if the Holo-
caust does not enlighten
its victims, how will its
story enlighten the next
generation? It is an irony
with a very clear judg-
ment built into it: the
Holocaust was an irre-
deemably terrible experi-
AtvA $0
WHEN CAME OUT FROrv^THE HOJ

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,
,
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1
authority now. Categories
like good and evil remain,
but they are now stripped

of their idealized certain-
ties. Neither art nor nar-

rative redeems the Holocaust with meaning — didactic, moral, or otherwise. In fact,
to the extent that remembering events seems to find any meaning in them, such mem-
ory also betrays events by blinding us with our own need for redemptory closure.
Postmemory and the Evasions of History
At no place in or out of Mans does Spiegelman cast doubt on the facts of the
Holocaust. Moreover, he is positively traditional in his use of documentary artifacts
and photographs as guides to describing real events. When his book made the New
York Times bestseller list in 1991, Spiegelman was surprised to find it on "the fiction
side of the ledger." In a letter to the Times, he wrote,
If your list were divided into literature and nonliterature, I could

gracefully accept the compliment as intended, but to the extent that
"fiction" indicates that a work isn't factual, I feel a bit queasy. As an
author I believe I might have lopped several years off the 13 I de-
voted to my two-volume project if I could only have taken a nov-

elist's license while searching for a novelistic structure.
The borderland between fiction and non-fiction has been

fertile territory for some of the most potent contemporary writing,
and it's not as though my passages on how to build a bunker and
repair concentration camp boots got the book onto your advice,
how-to and miscellaneous list. It's just that I shudder to think how
I )avid 1 Hike it he could read would respond to seeing a care
full) resean bed work based closely on my lather's memories oflife
in I liilei s Europe and m the death camps classified as fiction.
1 know that by delineating people with animal heads I've
i aised problems of taxonomy tor you. Could you consider adding a

your 33
special "nonfiction/mice" category to list?
In the end, the editors at the Times did not add this special "nonfiction/mice" cate-
gory, but they did move Maus over to its nonaction list. But in this context, it is not
surprising that the author sees no contradiction between his tabular medium and his
devotion to tact in Maus. For his positivist stance is not a negation of the vagaries of
memory but that which makes the recognition of memory necessary. Together the
facts of history and their memory exist side by side, mutually dependent for suste-
nance and meaning.
Thus will a received history like Maus also remain true to the mistaken per-
ceptions and memory of the survivor. What might appear as historical errors of fact
inMaus, such as the picture of Poles — one in a Nazi uniform (1:140) and others say-
ing, "Heil Hitler" (1:149), when it would have been almost impossible to find any
Pole saluting Hitler to another Pole during the war or to find a Polish Nazi — are ac-
curate representations of his father's possibly faulty memory. The truth of such
memory is not that Poles actually gave the Nazi salute to each other but that Vladek
remembered Poles to be Nazi-like in their hatred of Jews. Whether accurate or not,
such a perception may itself have played a role in Vladek's actions during the war
and so deserves a place in the historical record.
Issues of historical accuracy and factuality in a medium like Maus are bound
to haunt its author, raised as they are by the medium but impossible to resolve in it.
Nancy Miller has put the question most succinctly: "The relationship between accu-
racy and caricature for the cartoonist who works in a medium in which accuracy is
an effect of exaggeration is a vexed one." 34 But in an era when absolute truth claims are
under assault, Spiegelman's Maus makes a case for an essentially reciprocal relation-
ship between the truth of what happened and the truth of how it is remembered. The
facts of the Holocaust here include the facts surrounding its eventual transmission to
him. Together, what happened and how it is remembered constitute a received his-
tory of events.
Here I would like to suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that "what is at issue here
is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to
I RAN "to THE WKP0 M CHARGE Fwjm AlXTHE 5H0P.
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How will it enter (or not
•enter) the historical re-

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HOLE J.
Hutton again, "How will
the past be remembered
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1$ CL0>EP. memory to history?" Will
it always be regarded as so
overly laden with pathos
as to make it unreliable as
documentary evidence?
Or is there a place for the
understanding of the wit-

ness, as subjective and
skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events?
In spite of (or perhaps because of) their sophistication, even when historians
and philosophers of history like Hayden White, Amos Funkenstein, and Saul Fried-
lander look for models of such history, the best they can come up with are often
kinds of fiction, imaginative memoirs, and hybrid forms like the comix. In a paral-
lel vein, Michael Andre Bernstein has also found that the best examples of what he
calls "sideshadowed" and "anti-apocalyptic history" are similarly the fiction of Robert
Musil or poetry of Yehuda Amichai. What might this antiredemptory middle voice
look like? Very much, according to Bernstein, like the end of Yehuda Amichai's poem
"Tourists":
Once was I sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and
I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists
stood there around their guide, and I became their point of refer-
ence. "You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the
righl oi Ins head there's an arch from the Roman period. A little to
the right of his head.""But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to my

self: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see
thai arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, hut
near it, a little to the left and then down a hit, there's a man who has
just bought irnit a\\(\ vegetables lor his family." 36
Prosaic? Yes. Banal? No. Like Iriedlander's or Spiegelman's, this is the uncanny mid-
dle voice ol one who is in history and who tells it simultaneously, one who lives in
history as well as through its telling.
CHAPTER TWO
David LevinthaFs Mein Kampf
History, Toys, and the Play of Memory
"Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art ..."
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
"We make, we seek, and finally we enjoy, the contrivance of all experience. We fill our
lives not with experience, but with images of experience."
—Daniel Boorstin, The Image
it may be the company keep, but some of my best

i friends grew up playing with the
Holocaust. Not lightheartedly, of course, but in the obsessive earnestness of children
trying to work through a family's trauma. For many of my friends growing up in
post -World War II America, the Holocaust was a haunting fixture in their house-
holds, a constant ache inherited by children ever-watchful of their parents' fears and
preoccupations. One friend, in particular, now a philosopher of post-Holocaust the-
ology, recalls that as a six-year-old, she played an ongoing game of "Holocaust hide-
and-seek." From morning until night, she bundled her Barbie, Ken, and Shirley Temple
dolls, along with her little brother, from closet to closet half a step ahead of the Nazis
in her mind. The enemy and chase were easily imagined, she tells me, but what would
happen if they caught her and the babies was then literally unimaginable to her,
though no less terrifying in its horrible mystery.
As we both realize now, it was here that my friend first learned to imagine his-
tory, not as it really happened, but as it mattered in her life. Of course, the Holocaust
is a terrible subject for any child's fantasy life, but for a generation of Jewish children
growing up in the 1950s — far removed from the killing fields of World War II Europe
42
w %
JL
— schoolyards and bedrooms strewn with toys were their sites of history, the places
where they worked through the whispered terror that still gripped their parents' gen-
eration. For it is here, in their play and in the company of toys and make-believe
companions, where children first articulate their sense of a vicarious past. It is here
where they reenact relationships, recently witnessed discussions, and parental argu-
ments and thus begin to adopt a previous generation's history as their own.
As it turns out, the play between history and memory is also a necessarily
gender-inflected activity. At about the time my friend was hiding her dolls from the
Nazis, David Levinthal was a little boy in California, sending his beloved toy soldiers,
cowboys, and Indians into ferocious battle. He, too, was playing Holocaust, but his
imagined history was an essentially military one: his bedroom was cluttered with
battalions of toy soldiers locked in mortal combat. No women or children here. The
little boy's imagination and war narratives were fueled by television images from
Combat, Gunsmoke, and Rawhide. Like other children of his generation, or like all
who were blessedly removed from Europe during the war, David Levinthal's memory
of the Holocaust was only and always a composite pastiche of television images, toys,
and the stories he made up during years of war play. The reality of war and Holocaust
was necessarily reduced to the miniature reality of his playthings, the intensely felt
reality of his romper- room simulations.

It cannot be surprising, therefore, that when photographer and toy collector
David Levinthal began to reexamine his memory of the Holocaust, he found him-
self reflecting on the toys by which he had first grasped history. But when he began
to photograph these toys in 1972, one of his M.F.A. photography teachers at Yale's
School of Art asked him, "Why don't you take pictures of the real world, of reality?"
Levinthal answered, perhaps a little too honestly, that "These toys are my reality!"
Rather than forgetting that his relationship to the Holocaust would always be an
imagined, make-believe one, he chose to make his vicarious past — as embodied in
these simulations — the subject of his photographs.
For when an artist like David Levinthal sets out "to remember" the Holocaust,
all he can actually remember are the numberless images passed down to him in
books, films, and photographs. When he sets out "to photograph" the Holocaust,
therefore, he takes pictures of his Holocaust experiences — that is, recirculated images
of the Holocaust. Indeed, the visual reality of the Holocaust for Levinthal and his gen-
eration is forever only the record of photographs and documentary film. The physi-
cal reality of the Holocaust exists now only in its consequences, its effects and simu-
lations: the rest is memory, itself increasingly shaped by the reality of our simulations.
44 Levinthal's Mein Kampf

I liis nuiii.u \ is not the animate memory ol one who was there bul is rather as static
and inert .is the photos themselves, the images already small and toylike.
As a late twentieth century photographer, David I evinthal is hardly alone in
his fascination with the read) made simulacrum. "One of my favorite |

Eugene Atgct]
photographs is a shop window full of hats on [mannequin] heads," Levinthal tells
us. 1
1 ike Atget's photographs ol mannequins, or 1 lans Bellmer's surreal photographs
ofrecomposed dolls in process, or Forge Ribalta's more recent portraiture ol sculpted
busts, or Laurie Simmons's photographs of mock-domestic doll tableaux, or Cindy

Sherman's disturbing mutilated doll images, Levinthal's photographs have always
taken the imitations ol reality, not reality itself, as their subject. 2 For Levinthal's
media-saturated generation, it could even be said that these ready-made simulations
have become the primary reality of events to which they refer. Because historical
events constantly pass into the ether of time, they remain "present" only in memory,
imagination, and their material representations.
The artists of the photoconceptual vanguard have thus turned their interro-
gating eye to the simulations of reality as relentlessly as a prior generation of pho-
tographers once explored what they regarded as a natural and unmediated world. In
the process, Levinthal and others continue to reveal the ways the world is constantly
packaged and repackaged for us in a commodity culture. By taking as their subject
ready-made simulations only, such photographs mock the culture with the reductive
banality of its simulations, even as they leave us hungry for the "real thing," for a real
world constantly displaced by its media product. In the hands of photoconceptual

artists, toys and their reflected images not only evoke memories of childhood and
private inner lives but also embody the realities and preoccupations of adult life, as
well as larger public issues of history and our vicarious relationship to it through art.
Finally, through their "fabricated photography," these artists also ask to what extent
reality itself is always a kind of ongoing fabrication — not as a kind of fiction, but
more literally as that which is constantly being improvised, moment by moment. 3
In the case of Mem Kampf( 1994-1996), the artist's second foray into mem-
ory of the wartime, the result is a disturbing and provocative series of oversized
Polaroid photographs depicting the artist's dramatically staged tableaux of toy Nazi
soldiers and their figurine victims. As Levinthal is quick to clarify, these images
do not capture Holocaust history so much as they do the artist's struggle to capture
his own hypermediated reality of the Holocaust. Moreover, Levinthal's carefully

choreographed and staged photo-tableaux have their own history, their own process,
that are as much a part of their significance as the content of the glossy images
LevinthaVs Mein Kampf 45

themselves. In this chapter, I explore the several strata of meaning-making at
work in Levinthal's "toyland of Holocaust history." For like much contemporary art,
these images were not meant to stand by or for themselves. But rather, they are neces-
sarily part of the artist's larger oeuvre, a life's work dedicated to exploring the fuzzy
line between the photograph's traditional function as documentary record of ex-
ternal reality and its more recently acknowledged role in revealing the inner realities
of the mind's eye. 4
The Toy as Cultural Icon
It is true that David Levinthal's photographs have largely "eschewed reality for
a world constructed and reinvented in the studio." 5 Yet at the same time, they also ex-
amine a particular kind of reality — that of the cultural icon and myth. From the be-
ginning, Levinthal has used toys to examine and break down the mythological icons
of popular culture: from Hitler Moves East ( 1977) to Modern Romance (1985), from
The Wild West (1987) to American Beauties (1989), the aim has been to photograph
toys in ways that estrange their archetypal forms from themselves. In his Wild West
series, for example, Levinthal dramatically reconverts the simulacra of miniature toy
cowboys back into their mythologically proportioned archetypes. lust as the myth of
the cowboy has grown bigger than life, the toy miniature reduces the cowboy to
smaller than life: and it is this smaller-than-life image that Levinthal then exposes in
his large-format Polaroid photographs. In these images, the toys are returned to
mythological proportions with an ironic twist, part of an imagined tableau, exag-
gerated by the imagination itself.
Similarly, his American Beauties and Modern Romance series take the male-
idealized female icon as embodied by erotic Japanese dolls and turns it against it-
self. At every level, the images remind viewers of women's subjugation at the hands
of men: first in the "sexy" little dolls themselves; then in the ominous arrangements
of dolls threatened by male figures standing over them; and then again in the pho-
tographer's carefully crafted "dark light," a film-noir atmosphere laden with danger
and ambiguity.
In all of his toy subjects, men's and women's body types are cast according to
prescribed cultural molds: men are square -jawed, finely chiseled, muscular; they are
clothed in soldiers' uniforms or cowboy and Indian outfits. The women are always
voluptuous, whether blond or dark-haired, their skin shining luminously. They come

clothed in long settlers' dresses and bonnets or short skirts; often they arc naked. The
male figurines are in still and aggressive poses, ready to fight. The female figurines
are supple and somehow inviting, often lying provocatively or sitting passively, never
threatening, excepl as possible sexual predators. As mini icons, these toys both reflect
and embody the myths of our culture: the self-fulfilling myths of strength and ag-
gressiveness in men, of passive sexuality in women. Because Levinthal's photographs
are what he calls "object-driven," inspired by the figures themselves, the subjects of
his tableaux and images are not just the toys but the reductive idealizations and cul-
tural myths they embody.

In this way, the photographer reminds us that toys are not antimonuments so
much as the\ are dcmonumentalizations of their worldly counterparts. As the over-
sized monument inflates the importance o( its subject, turning it into a seemingly
natural part of the landscape, as true and enduring as nearby rocks and trees, the toy
conversely deflates its subject's pretensions, mocking it with its puniness. Instead of
providing grand sites around which the national story accrues, as monuments do,
toys play supporting roles in the inner play-lives of children. And instead of playing
a role in the public's mind, toys play a role in the private fantasy worlds of the chil-
dren who hold them. At the same time, however, like monuments, toys are also fixed
images, types concretized and meant to stand for all like them.
The Play of Memory
As M.F.A. students at Yale in the early 1970s, David Levinthal and Doonesbury
cartoonist Garry Trudeau shared a fascination for alternative history-telling, the kind
that Art Spiegelman would later characterize as the "comixture of image and narra-
tive." While Levinthal was staging his toy Nazi soldiers in various narrative tableaux
and photographing them, Trudeau was planning to tell the fictional story of a Ger-
man Luftwaffe lieutenant through what he called a "narrative collage" drawing on

archival photographs and documents. In such a medium, the comix artist hoped to
generate two levels of meaning-making activity. "One was in the narration," Trudeau
writes, "in the details of the actions of the subject. The other was in the directed pro-
gression of visual elements from one composition to the next. The intentions were
to create a sort of sequential montage and to establish cinematic relationships among

consecutive images." Working together, Levinthal and Trudeau
6
wed their respective
projects to each other in Hitler Moves East ( 1977) to chronicle Operation Barbarossa,
LevinthaVs Me in Kampf 47
David Levinthal and Garry
Trudeau, Hitler Moves East.
Hitler's invasion of the
Soviet Union in June

1941. But instead of us-
ing images drawn direct-
ly from archival sources,

they created their own
"archival" images by
photographing Levin-
thal's toys in carefully
staged war scenarios,

each image inspired by a
remembered photo-
graph from their own
research.
The result was a stun-
ningly arranged assem-

blage of what seemed to
be action-blurred battle
photographs of German
Wehrmacht soldiers moving east. Each section of photographs is accompanied by a
short but pithy historical narrative telling a different stage of Operation Barbarossa.
In the years after its publication, Hitler Moves East attained cult status among pho-
tographers and graphic artists. Between its faux realism and fluent storytelling, it had
come to be regarded as a hybrid form of historical memory, one dependent com-
pletely on recycled archival images, shuffled through the artists' media-saturated
imaginations. As I thumbed through the pages of Hitler Moves East, I kept asking my-
self, What does it mean to tell the story of Operation Barbarossa in photographs of
toys? What am I seeing in these images that remains out of reach to documentary
photographs?
At first blush, the photographs take on a documentary hue in their sepia-
tinted black-and-white tones. But on further reflection, one realizes that this is only
the style of historical documentary. For these images are not about the history of this

pai iuu la i pasl so much as they are about the artists' media-dependenl imagining ol
such history, w li.it is really being documented here is the artists' own, unabashed
imaginations, rhe powerful sense ol the pasl (not its actuality) is being generated
carefully through a measured acl oi simulation. As a result, we arc being moved
partly by the sense oi documentation and partly by the cunning of the memory-
artists. 1 was seeing not "the past" but rather how Garry Trudeau and David Levinthal
have remembered it as passed down to them in photographs and grainy film footage.
Theirs was a visual, yet vicarious memory of events, which they turned into a narra-
tive ot invented images.

First came their countless hours looking at and handling volumes of archi-
val battle photographs, their silting through hours of newsreel footage. Then came
the hundreds of hours spent arranging these soldiers just so, even planting an in-
door lawn to resemble the Ukrainian steppes and mixing explosive charges that would
blow their toys sky-high for the sake of a photograph. No doubt, sound effects and
the dialogue of dying and wounded soldiers accompanied the entire period ofmem-
ory-play. All of which simultaneously evoke and reflect the artists' feel for the past,
its tactile experience in their hands. What lay behind the commixture of invented
photographic images and historical narrative was the free play of memory inspired
by the photographs of those who were there.
Nowhere in this project, however, is there the slightest visual reference to the
mass murder of Jews. At the same time, it is also clear that much of the power of these
images derives from the pathos engendered by our own knowledge of what lay just
beyond the border of these photographs. For such images of Nazi soldiers will always
be haunted by the actions we know were subsumed by Hitler's move east — such as
the mass killing by the S.S. Einsatzgruppen units. What remained just off-stage in
Hitler Moves East would now be brought into the center of consciousness, both the
artist's and viewers', in the photographer's project Mein Kampf.
The Artist's Struggle Between History and Memory
Unlike Hitler Moves East, which Levinthal claims surprised him in its effect,
its raw power, the Mein Kampf series of explicitly Holocaust imagery is deliberate,
polished, and even a little cold-blooded. Nor is Mein Kampf mere sequel
a. to Hitler
Moves East, though it does show us quite graphically what Hitler did once he arrived
in the east. Rather, Mein Kampf embodies the artist's struggle with representing his

vicarious experience of the Holocaust. It is David Levinthal's struggle between what
he knows and how he has known it, between Holocaust history and how it has been
passed down to him in the popular, all-too-mythologized icons of television and
photographs. For whether we like it or not, once icons of the Holocaust enter the
popular imagination, they also turn mythic, hard and impenetrable.
Still, why Mein Kampf? And why the Holocaust? The artist began this series
when he found a sparkling new Hitler figurine in an Austrian toy store. "I discovered
that there was a man in Germany who had molds from the 30's and who was re-
ft
making these figures and hand painting them," Levinthal tells us. 7
But the idea of
someone handpainting newly minted armies of toy Hitlers both fascinated and re-
pelled the artist: he wanted to know why and what it meant. Levinthal's first impulse
was to interrogate the figurine itself, as if it could speak. But what he found lying just
beneath his fascination and revulsion with this Hitler figurine was his own preoccu-
pation with the Holocaust.
This Hitler figurine struck the artist at first as a kind of golem in miniature,
a friendly monster beholden to its maker before running amok, invigorated and em-
boldened by its independence. He began thinking that he would do only a series of
portraits of Hitler and his Nazi figurines. But before long, it became clear that he
could not divorce the pageantry and spectacle of the Nazis, as suggested by these fig-
urines, from the terror of the Holocaust. Indeed, through further "visual research," as
Levinthal calls it, he found that in films like Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will
(1935) it was at least partly this sense of pageantry and spectacle whence the Nazis
derived so much of their public power and appeal. For Levinthal now, once associ-
ated with the horrible deeds of its makers, such spectacle would always carry with it
an ominous, hidden side. To reveal this dark side of the Nazi pageant, Levinthal chose
first to simulate it and then juxtapose it to the phantom of its heretofore hidden anti-
spectacle: the Holocaust.
For Levinthal, part of the "meaning" in his portraits of the Nazi toys was the
process itself, the fashioning of his own miniature spectacles, which involved ex-
tended periods of contemplation. Here, moreover, he seemed to replicate the quasi-
obsessiveness of the handcrafted toy with his own meticulously crafted tableaux,
discovering that the process itself seemed to provide a certain outlet for the artist's
Weltschmerz. In this adult working-through, the memory of childhood is always
double-edged: it is a happy and painful time, when innocence is relentlessly under-

cut by experience.

Even Ins search for such toys has become pari of the artist's historical con-
sciousness, pari dI Ins own memory of the past. Before he could interrogate Hitler,
he firsl had to c apture him from the hands ol specialty toy store owners in Vienna.
"I to you have anything, um, from the Second World War?" Levinthal asked one such
prop] ietor ingenuously. The Viennese toy store owner was an older man behind the
counter, and he studied this American customer warily, his eyes narrowing ever so
slightly. ")a, but they are not for sale." "Oh, but I'd love just to see them," the artist says
he answered excitedly. The proprietor disappeared through a door into the back for
a moment before returning with several small boxes labeled "Lineol,""Hauser," and
"blastolin." These were what Levinthal had been looking for, toy S.S. soldiers cast
from molds designed during the Third Reich. They are hand-painted in a detail that
continues to astound the artist, right down to their polished buttons, black jack-
boots, and death's head insignia." These are real beauties," Levinthal marveled, "How
much are they?" As it turns out, of course, everything has a price, which the artist
pays for admission to his vicariously imagined past.
Levinthal insists that these new mini-spectacles are as object-driven as his
earlier projects: the little Nazi drummer corp is set before something resembling the
Brandenburg Gate; a soldier and dog patrol outside guard tower and wire fence; a
woman holding a child whirls away from a German soldier who aims a rifle at her
from inches away. But it is also clear that each of these toys has sparked a particu-
lar visual association in the artist's mind, the memory of an image, which the artist
then brings into physical relief. And because they are meant to evoke, not mime, and
to stimulate the imagination but not simulate historical realities, these photographs
are shot in what Levinthal terms a "narrative style": what the artist has character-
ized as "intentionally ambiguous to draw the viewer in so that you make your own
story." 8 Or as he elaborates in another interview, "I think I create a window that allows
the viewer to come into an image that appears to be more complete than it really is.
It becomes complete when the viewer becomes a participant and fills in the miss-
ing details." 9 That is, added to the artist's story as he constructed the tableaux are
the stories viewers tell themselves about what they see. These pieces depend on nar-
rative for their lives, animated by the stories we tell about them.
Levinthal accomplishes this ambiguity by shooting these tableaux at Po-
laroid's New York City studio with a 20x24 Land camera, its aperture set wide open,
to create an extremely shallow focal plane — hence the blurry fore- and backgrounds.
The more ambiguous, underdetermined, and oblique the image, the more it seems to

David Levinthal, Mein Kampf.
invite the viewer's own narrative. The sharper the image, the more repellent it is
of multiple readings, for it crowds out the reader's projected story with the clut-
ter of its own detail. The essential tension in Levinthal's medium is that between
the toy's fixedness and the camera's seeming liquification of its material hardness.
In this way, he turns the traditional assumption of photographic precision against
itself, extending the range of the camera inward to include the mind's eye and
imagination.
Depending on the image, the focal plane in Levinthal's work lies just before or
behind the toy objects, never on them. Rather than concentrating the mind on the
toy object, the focal plane takes us into the space between the object and its once-
worldly referent, into the space between it and us — where the mind is forced to
imagine and thereby collaborate. The indistinct lines don't absorb the eye as sharp
images might; instead the soft focus deflects the mind's eye away from the object and
inward, back into itself. In the seemingly iconic image of guard tower, fence, soldier,

and dog) it is the rich hl.uk and blue tints of the sky thai absorb the eye, pulling the
mind through the figures into the space behind them. This is .1 kind of reverse real
itv effe< t: l stare and realize that the darker and less discernible the dog and soldier
are, the more real they become in my mind.

In this regard, such work reminds us ol one of the principles of Jochen Gerz's
disappearing and invisible countermonuments (discussed in ( lhapter 5). Rather than
embodying the work of memory, ( ierx (ears, the monument displaces it altogether.
An invisible monument, or one dial gradually disappears over time, would conversely
return the burden of memory to those who come looking lor it. "Art, in its conspic-
UOUSness, in its recogni/ability, is an indication of failure" Gerz has said. "If it were
truly consumed, no longer visible or conspicuous . .
.
, it would actually be where it be-
longs — that is, within the people for whom it was created." 10
In the case of Levinthal's
photographs, our eye never rests on the objects but remains suspended somewhere in
the space between them and us, between us and our imagination. As a result, the piece
of art has come to exist
more in us, the viewers,
and less on the wall.
What used to be called

"soft-focus portraiture,"
a fountain-of-youth tech-
nique by which photog-

raphers could obscure
the flaws of mortality
and the lines of age, has
been radically extended

by a new generation of
painters and photogra-
phers to turn the camera
into a tool of mimetic
doubt and insecurity, not
certainty. On one hand,

the blurred paintings of
Gerhard Richter or Ed
David Levinthal, Mein

Kampf.
Levinthal's Mein Kampf 53

Ruscha suggest to critics like Donald Kuspit a certain collapse of authoritative mean-
ing in our culture at large." At the same time, such fuzziness also prompts the view-
er to work a little harder, if a little less confidently, toward finding meaning, which
now exists in the tug-of-war between image and viewer, not in the image or viewer
alone. It is a process, a dialogue, in which making meaning, with all its difficulties
and uncertainties, becomes as significant as any particular meaning made.

In almost every one of the images from Levinthal's Mein Kampf series, many
more questions — aesthetic, personal, and historical — are raised than answered:
*»
What is the relationship of the artist to events? Does such a medium trivialize mem-
ory even as it interrogates it? What of history itself is understood through such im-
ages? And what do such images tell us about our relationship to the Holocaust now,
fifty years later? Unlike the evocative rawness of Hitler Moves East, the cool and stud-
ied polish of these images constantly reminds us of their aesthetic intervention be-
tween then and now. They are staged to look deliberately staged, choreographed to
show their choreography. All rawness is gone, all innocence put to flight. Resonant
with our own corrupted memory traces, these photographs show us how far away
12
from events the icons of our culture have taken us.
In one image, for example, a woman cradling a child and whirling away from
an Einsatzcommando's professionally aimed bullet explicitly recalls the horrific
photograph taken on the eastern front by an S.S. photographer during an Einsatz-

commando massacre of Jews. By evoking the photographic image, Levinthal again
reminds us that his are images of other images: the artist's photograph of a diorama
recapitulates the Nazis' own record of their crimes. Not only are we reminded of the
several layers of mediation interposed between the artist's memory and history, but
we must also confront the terrible fact that we are now dependent on the murderers
for any memory of the victims' last seconds.
In this image's recirculation, we find that this Nazi photograph has in itself be-
come part of the iconic currency of the Holocaust — and has thus taken on a life of
its own. Beyond its status as a Nazi artifact, it resonates a conglomerate of axiomatic
truisms, so that the image has become emblematic of killers and victims: the woman
and child represent the vulnerability and blamelessness of the victims, the generations
of Jewish life that would be wiped out in a single blow, a grotesque pieta in which both
mother and child are murdered, a certain sacrifice. The paradox in Levinthal's pho-
tograph is that such emblems are also rehumanized in their recapitulation. What be-
gins as pure emblem is softened and reanimated in Levinthal's handling of it.

To this day, many people insist that some scenes from the Holocaust cannot
ethically be represented. Because no one survived the gas chambers to describe the
terror there, its darkness has remained absolute. Other areas on which artists are
practically forbidden to tread include the sexuality of victims and the possible sado-
sexuality of the killers. This is why some will have trouble assimilating images from
A /(;;/ Kampj ot crematoria stuffed with bodies of women in glaringly sexual poses.
When I objected to what seemed to be a deliberate eroticization of the murder

process .\m\ tried to talk levinthal into eliding from the exhibition several images of
naked Japanese dolls with gaudy red nipples, the artist responded that Art Spiegel-
man had also tried to talk him out of showing those. "But nowhere in the literature
have 1 (ou\m.\ anything to suggest an erotic component to the killing process," I said,
"only in the imaginations of those who weren't there, like D. M. Thomas in his novel
The White Hotel?

To which Levinth-al replied that whether or not there was actually a sexual,
erotic component to the murder process, it remains certainly — if unfortunately

true that in many of its popular representations, the Holocaust has been eroticized.
Because his subject is the ready-made simulation of the Holocaust, he was only
showing a Holocaust porno-kitsch already at play in the cultural transformations of
these terrible scenes. In popular movies like Schindler's List and Sophie's Choice, or
in novels like The White Hotel, for example, Eros and Thanatos are twinned as con-
stituent elements of Holocaust victimization, projected reflexively onto victims by a
culture obsessed with both, a culture that has long linked the two as fatally intercon-
nected, a culture that has eventually grown dependent on their union for commer-
cial and entertainment value. 13 Rather than ignoring them, therefore, Levinthal
makes the erotic Japanese dolls with their bright red nipples and splayed legs part of
his work. He believes, moreover, that both killers and victims understood that part of
the dehumanization of the Jews included their sexual degradation in the moments
before death.
As women have been objectified in these toys and the Jews were objectified by
the Nazis, the victims would here be presented as objectified twice over. Created as
sexual objects, the dolls are used to recapitulate not only the relationship between
killers and victims but also, if more implicitly, that between contemporary viewers
and these very images. Here Levinthal suggests that with every representation of their
murder, the Jews are in some sense murdered again and again. Robbed of life by the
Nazi gunmen, the victims are robbed of their dignity by the observing photographer

David Levinthal, Mein Kampt.
— and then again with the recirculation of such images. Only now we are the pas-
sive bystanders, and not so innocent at that.
The complicated role such images play in the public sphere came into espe-
cially sharp relief in a slightly different context a few years ago in Jerusalem. When
confronted by leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, the curators
at Israel's national Holocaust memorial museum, Yad Vashem, refused to remove
wall-sized photographs taken by the Nazis of naked Jewish women on their way to
the gas chambers at Treblinka (many of them orthodox and so violated unequivo-
cally by the S.S. photographer at the moment). The museum replied that because this
degradation, too, was part of the reality of the Holocaust, it had to be shown as part
of the historical record — even if it offended the religious community's rigorous
sense of modesty. In the eyes of the religious community, however, the humiliation
and violation of these women's modesty was as much a part of the crime as their

eventual murder. I ha! their modesty would be violated vet again by the viewers now
ma) even suggesl not so much a repetition ol the crime .is an extension of it.
\t the same time, despite the curators' stated aim of maintaining the ex-
hibit's historical integrity, the museum may have refused to acknowledge another
historical reality: the possibility of their visitors' pornographic gaze. Will we ever
know .ill the reasons why people are transfixed by these images? Is the historical
record of pasl travesties enough to blind us to the possibility of present travesties on

the parts ot viewers? ( an we sa) with certainty that every museum visitor's gaze is
.is pure as the curators' historical intent? lor the line line between exhibition and ex-
hibitionistic remains as fragile as it is necessary, even in the hands of scrupulous his-
torians and curators.

At least part of what makes these images so unnerving for viewers is their sug-
gestion that we, as viewers, may be no less complicit in the continuing degradation
David Levuithal, Mein Kampf.

German soldiers examine
photographs of a civilian
massacre they had conducted
a few days before.
of the victim than the

original Nazi photogra-
pher. In another calculat-
edly disturbing image in
Mein Kampf, it is Levin

thal's formal design and
composition that foists
this realization upon

viewers, leaving little
room in which to escape
such conclusions. In this
photograph, four women

(portrayed by sexy dolls
with porcelain white
skin) are being shot by
two S.S. gunmen. Their
rifles aim into a perspectival vortex at the center of the image: we look over the shoul-
ders of both gunmen, right into the center of the V. Three women have their arms up,
as if to ward off the bullets, and one woman is already falling down. Only the muz-
zle of one of the rifles is in focus, though the colors of the bodies are bright and sharp,
a swirl of whites, blues, and gun-metal gray, all tinged by red smoke and glare.
From our vicarious but central vantage point, we, too, are implicated in this
shooting — as is the photographer, who seems passively to be watching the scene, a
participant inspired by the S.S. photographers who recorded but did not prevent
similar shootings. Or as Susan Sontag has made so painfully explicit, "Photography
is essentially an art of non-intervention. . . . The person who intervenes cannot
record; the person who is recording cannot intervene." 14 That is, even as a passive
spectator, the photographer plays a role, if by default, in the events he or she would
capture: to some extent, every photographer is both choreographer of an event and

representei of it. In the case oi Levinthal's image which he has literally choreo
graphed before shooting, such a truism is made palpable. And by forcing us to view
the shooting from a vantage poinl between the two gunmen, the artist has, in effec t,
made us the implied third gun.
It this relationship among the killers, their own photographs, and ourselves
as \ iewei s sounds implausible, consider the chilling sequence ol images stored in
the Etablissemenl Cinematographic et Photographie des Armees in Paris. In this
sci us of photographs taken by a ( lerman army photographer, about twenty Serbian

and Jewish men are rounded up in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia in a reprisal action.
The photographs begin with the men's arrest in the center of town and continue
with their transport in the back of a cart to .1 desolate field in the countryside. Here
the) are depicted digging their own graves, taking off their clothes, and being shot
five at a time. Yet the last photographs in the series are not of the men's bodies or
their burial but o( the soldiers themselves sitting around in a group, smoking ciga-
rettes and viewing photographs of the killing. It is not clear whether their action is
being explained for them by a superior or whether curiosity alone compels these
soldiers to look at the images of their action. In either case, the German photogra-
pher seems to be suggesting in such a sequence that the action in its entirety includ-
ed both the shooting of men and the photographic representation of their deaths,
the killing and the killers' subsequent reviewing of their deed in the photographs. 13
"Can war be beautiful?" Garry Trudeau asks in his Introduction to Hitler
Moves East. "Or does it only seem that way in the safety of knowing that it is all con-
trived and make-believe, that the components are only toys and not really the carri-
ers of death?" 16 In these questions, Trudeau wonders also whether simulating is always
a kind of play, whether one of the pleasures of mimesis is the safety we feel in being
so far removed from real events, a safety that heightens the vicarious thrill of a war
imagined. Levinthal would not speak for war itself, but he does acknowledge that like
Goya's paintings or Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will or Steven Spielberg's Schindler's
List, in which the images of killing, Nazi pageantry, and even the Holocaust can be si-
multaneously horrible and beautiful, some of his own images from Mein Kampf, "par-
ticularly those images that deal with the pageantry of the Nazis, [are] seductively
beautiful, as were the actual pageants" themselves. 17

For Levinthal, the question was never whether to show such images but rather
how to ask in them: to what extent do we always reobjectify a victim by reproducing
images of the victim as victim? How extensively do we participate in this degradation

David Levinthal, Mein Kampf
by reproducing and then viewing them? To what extent do these images ironize and
thereby repudiate such representations? Or how heavily do these images feed on the
same prurient energy they purportedly expose? Or as Saul Friedlander has asked, "Is

su< h attention fixed ow the past only a gratuitous reverie, the attraction ol spectacle,
exorc ism, or the resull ol a \\cl\\ to understand; or is it, again and still, an expression
18
of profound fears and, on the pari ol some, mute yearnings .is well? By leaving these
questions unanswered, 1 evinthal confronts us with our own role in the representa-
tion of mass murder, the way we cover our eyes and peek through our fingers at the
same time.
The line between miming a simulacrum and mimicking it is already a fine
and fuzzy one. I )a\ id 1 evmthal's work leaves this line as ambiguous as ever, 1 lis ob-
jects are clearly the myths ^\nd icons that our toy culture reifies in its miniatures: the
beauty queen, the cowboy, the Indian, the soldier, the great leader. Even in its minia-
turization, the type is already mocked somehow — made smaller than life, its idea re-
duced and made childlike. Yet by reproducing it, by taking the edge off, the artist
breathes new life into it, animates it with the stories we tell around such types. Is the
myth or icon thus automatically negated in such work? Not necessarily. But our re-
lationship to the myth is now called into question, and the seeming innocence of our
preoccupations is now not so innocent, after all.

CHAPTER THREE
Sites Unseen
Shimon Artie's Acts of Remembrance, 1991-1996
"Lieux de memoire are created by the interaction between memory and history. . .
Without an intent to remember, lieux de memoire would be lieux d nistoire."
— Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory
some people claim intuitively to s e n s e the invisible aura of past events
in historical sites, as if the molecules of such sites still vibrated with the memory of
their past. Shimon Attie is not so naive. He knows that this presence of the past is
apparent only to those already familiar with a site's history or to those who actual-
ly carry a visual memory of this site from another, earlier time. For Attie, memory
of a site's past does not emanate from within a place but is more likely the projec-
tion of the mind's eye onto a given site. Without the historical consciousness of vis-
itors, these sites remain essentially indifferent to their pasts, altogether amnesiac.
They "know" only what we know, "remember" only what we remember.

For by themselves, these sites lack what French intellectual historian Pierre
Nora has called "the will to remember." That is, without a deliberate act of remem-
brance, buildings, streets, or ruins remain little more than inert pieces of the
cityscape. Without the will to remember, Nora suggests, the place of memory "cre-
ated in the play of memory and history. . . becomes indistinguishable from the place
of history." 1
If it is true that such places of memory exist "only because of their ca-
pacity for metamorphosis," as Nora believes, then here we shall examine the work of
an artist as agent of metamorphosis, one whose acts of remembrance transform the
sites of history into the sites of memory.
In Sites Unseen, Shimon Attie's series of European installations between 1991
and 1996, the artist has done more than simply project his necessarily mediated
62
1
{ i
1 11 1
I
<
W4 '
* f
^~
1
i~~ P
Shimon Attie, foachimstrasse 1 la, 1933, 1992. (Writing on the Wall)
memory of a now-lost Jewish past onto otherwise forgetful sites. He has also at-
tempted a simultaneous critique of his own hypermediated relationship to the past.
By literally bathing the sites of a now invisible Jewish past in the photographic im-
ages of their historical pasts, he simultaneously looks outward and inward for mem-
ory: for he hopes that once seen, the images of these projections will always haunt
these sites by haunting those who have seen his projections. The sites of a lost Jew-
ish past in Europe would thus retain traces of this past, if now only in the eyes of
those who have seen Attie's installations.
When Shimon Attie moved to Berlin in 1991, he found a city haunted by the
absence of its murdered and deported Jews. Like many Jewish Americans preoccu-
64 Attie's Acts of Remembrance

pied by the I lolocausl and steeped in its seemingly ubiquitous images, he saw Jew-
ish ghosts in Europe's every nook ami c ranny: from the Scheunenviertel in Berlin to
the central train station in Dresden; from the canals of Copenhagen to those of Am-
sterdam; from Cologne's annual art fair to Krakow's Kazimierz neighborhood. For
Attic, however, private acts of remembrance in which he alone saw the faces and
forms of now absent lews in their former neighborhoods were not enough. He
chose, therefore, to actualize these inner visions, to externalize them, and in so
doing to make them part of a larger public's memory. Once thus actualized, he
hoped, these images would enter the inner worlds ot all who saw them and would
continue to haunt the sites even when no longer visible. He hoped that once others
Shimon Attie, Almadtstrasse 43 (formerly Grenadierstrasse 7), Former Hebrew Bookstore, 1930, 1992.
(Writing on the Wall, Berlin)
Attie's Acts of Remembrance 65

had become witnesses to his memorial projections, the installations themselves
would no longer be necessary.
At the same time, Sites Unseen was not intended as a series of simple recol-
lective acts, attempts to repair a broken past-continuous. Each installation also recast
memory in some way, re-marking its relation to the site even as it explored the site's
relation to its past. As a result, each project sustained a certain, yet subtle ambivalence
toward itself, even as each mixed the kinds of memory it generated. At each stage, the
distance from personal to public memory was measured, as well as the reciprocal ex-
change between a specific site and its national context, the ways every site resonates
with a nation's self-idealizations.
Part photography, part installation, and part performance, the totality of
these projects might best be described as an "act of remembrance" — retaining the
resonance of actions, staged acts, actors, and acting out. For in equal measure, the
projects included the literal actions that brought them into being, made actors of
local residents, staged interactions between local residents and their homes, and pro-
vided a medium for the artist's own acting out of his obsession with the void left by
Europe's absent Jews. Nor should the book you are now holding be mistaken for the
"acts of remembrance" it explores, which like the historical events being commem-
orated are now over. Rather, this book is an after-image in its own right, a reflection
on these acts.
In the pages that follow, therefore, I ask what happens between the mind of
someone like Attie, immersed in the public iconography of the Holocaust, and the
actual sites of history now seemingly oblivious to their pasts. On one hand, Attie the
artist is painfully aware that all he knows and remembers of the Holocaust has been
passed down to him by others — shaped and filtered by a nation's self-aggrandizing
myths, by a popular culture more intent on entertaining than on teaching him. He

knows, moreover, that his artwork will inevitably interpose yet another mediating
layer between history and memory, another veil of images that might be confused for
the history they would recall.
But then, Attie has no alternative. Instead of memory-acts that collapse the
distinction between themselves and the past, therefore, he proposes acts of remem-
brance that expose just this gulf between what happened in the past and how it now
gets remembered. Whether it is national myth and self-idealization or the silver
screen and its compelling artifice that blurs the distinction between actual past and
present memory of it, or whether it is only the muteness of a cityscape that hides its
history, Attie makes as his object of memory the distance between then and now, the
66 Attie 's Acts of Remembrance

ways thai even Ins own acts oi remembrance cannol but gesture indirectly to what
w.is lost .nul how we now recall it.
The Writing on the Wall: Berlin, 1991-1993
"After finishing art school in San Francisco, I came to Berlin in the summer
of l991,"Shimon Attie writes in his introduction to a hook for The Writingon the
Wall "Walking the streets of the city that summer, I felt myself asking over and over
again, Where are all the missing people? What has become of the Jewish culture and
community which had once been at home here? I telt the presence of this lost com-
munit) very strongly, even though so few visible traces of it remained." Strangely
2
enough, it was not the absence of Berlin's lost Jews that Attie felt so strongly but their
presence. For in fact, though they may have been invisible to others walking those
same streets, Attic's memory and imagination had already begun to repopulate the
Scheunenviertel district in Berlin with the Jews of his mind.
After several weeks of photographic research in Berlin's archives, Attie had
found dozens of images from the Scheunenviertel of the 1920s and 1930s and was
able to pinpoint nearly one-quarter of their precise locations in the current neigh-
borhood just east of Berlin's Alexanderplatz, formerly in the eastern sector of the
city. That September, only three months after moving to Berlin, Attie began project-
ing slides of these photographs onto the same or nearby addresses where they had
been taken earlier in the century. " 'The Writing on the Wall' grew out of my re-
sponse to the discrepancy between what I felt and what I did not see," Attie explains.
"I wanted to give this invisible past a voice, to bring it to light, if only for some brief
moments." 3 And so for the next year, weather permitting, Attie projected these im-
ages of Jewish life from the Scheunenviertel before the Holocaust back into present-
day Berlin. Each installation ran for one or two evenings, visible to local residents,
street traffic and passersby. During these projections, the artist also photographed
the installations themselves in time exposures lasting from three to four minutes.
The resulting photographs of the installations have been exhibited widely in galleries
and museums, works of fine art in their own right, the only remaining traces of the
original installations.
But in fact, the artist is all too aware of the difference between the public in-
stallations in situ and their reduced and codified standing in a gallery or catalogue.
"The point was to intervene in a public space and project right onto those spaces," he
Attie 's Acts of Remembrance 67

Shimon Attie, Almadtstrasse (formerly Grenadierstrasse and corner of Schendelgasse), Religious
Book Salesman, 1930, 1992. ( Writing on the Wall)

Shimon Attic,
Linienstrasse
137, Police Raid
on Former
Jewish Residents,
1920, 1992.
( Writing on the
Wall, Berlin)
Shimon Attie, 107
Joachimstrasse
20, Former Jewish

Resident, Theatre,
and Torah
Reading Room,
1929-31, 1992.
( Writing on the
Wall, Berlin)
has said. "One can always overlay images in a dark-room or with a computer. But I
wanted to touch those spaces." 4 Or one might add, he wanted to "retouch" those
spaces the way one retouches photographs. For the photographic process — in literal
and metaphorical ways — lies at the heart of this project: as the original archival pho-
tographs captured traces of reflected light and dark from the prewar Scheunenvier-
tel, the artist's photographs of the installations would now capture the light of the
photographic images themselves as projected onto building walls. The analogue be-
tween the mechanical process of photography and the memory of images recorded
by the mind's eye is made real here: in both cases, reflected light imprints itself on
light-sensitive surfaces, whether film or retina, that bear its traces afterward.
For Attie recognizes at the outset that public spaces, even the dreariest in our
day-to-day lives, also reflect meaning and significance back to us. They also become
"art" in the eyes of beholders, at once framed and composed by our reflective gaze.
Obversely, the projections themselves become inside-out "frames" for all that sur-
rounds them, turning the rock-hard reality of the present into an extension of the
past images now draped over it.
Once projected onto the peeling and mottled building facades of this quarter,
these archival images seem less the reflections of light than illuminations of figures
emerging from the shadows. Attie says he wanted "to peel back the wallpaper of today
and reveal the history buried underneath." 5 From the doorways, in particular, former
Jewish residents seem to be stepping out of a third dimension. Some, like the resident
standing in the doorway at Joachimstrasse 2, are caught unaware by both the origi-
nal photographer and now, it seems, by us. Others, like the religious book salesman
at the corner of what was formerly the corner of Grenadierstrasse and Schendelgasse,
seem to have been interrupted by the photographer; the book salesman has turned
his head sideways to gaze impassively back at us. Because the streets of the dilapi-
dated Scheunenviertel (called the Finstere Medine, or "dark quarter," by its Yiddish-
speaking denizens) are still largely run down, as were many parts of the formerly East
Berlin when the wall came down, the projected images added a life to these streets
that they appeared otherwise not to have.
If the projected images of Jews going in and out of buildings or sitting in win-
dows or huddled on a corner suggest themselves as a material part of the space they
now reinhabited, once photographed, these subjects take on formal qualities that
were less apparent in the installations themselves. As works now independent of the
installations they represent, the photographs also recompose them, highlighting not
only the apparition of a spatial, human dimension created in the installation but also

now the tomographic play ol signs and symbols. The I lebrew lettering oi Yiddish
signs mixes with ( .ei 'man ( rOthic lettering in the images, both now strewn together
anarchicall) with painted post Berlin Wall graffiti — all of it a kind of literary detri-
tus on scarred walls. The projected lettering of Meier Silberberg's kosher butcher
shop at Mulackstrasse >2 runs into the laggings of graffiti artists and postunification
slogans like "The struggle continues." Even more dramatic in its silence is the pho-
tograph of a slide installation from the corner of Joachimstrasse a\k\ Auguststrasse:
the barely visible head of a lew in prayer philacteries beneath a white Star o\ David
beams over the doorway of a dark building, itself backlighted by the rosy pink of a
sunset. Ihe star stands in stark, formally eloquent contrast to three rows of crucifix-
like white windowpancs on the dark building across the street, arrayed like a battle
formation of Crusader shields.

Even the human figures of Jews, animated by the play of light and air on tex-
tured surfaces, are reformalized in the photographs of the installations, hardened
once again into the icons of the so-called Ost-Juden. It was the traditionally garbed
lews of eastern Europe, after all, who had moved into this quarter in the 1910s and
1920s, already a netherworld of criminals, prostitutes, and the dispossessed. But it is
not this unlikely mixture of the sacred and profane that Attie hopes to capture here.
Rather it is a type, "the Jew" of the Germans' minds so long associated with long
black caftans, beards, and earlocks that Attie brings back to haunt current residents.
Because German Jewry itself was often so well assimilated as to appear effectively in-
visible, Attie has had to rely on the image of Ost-Juden to make visible the otherwise
invisible Jews of Germany — even though they themselves were not representative
faces of German Jewry itself.
When these Ost-Juden tried to return to Poland after the first Nazi-inspired
pogroms and anti-Jewish boycotts, they found that their Polish papers had been in-
validated. As stateless refugees, these Ost-Juden also became Berlin's first true Luft-
menschen, a type reified in Attie's projection of their images back through the air onto
buildings. And it is as both Luftmenschen and as Jewish projections of the Nazi mind
that Attie would have these images haunt contemporary Germans. It would be easy to
work up sympathy in Germans for all the Jews who were murdered "even though they
looked just like us." But it is the idea and treatment of "the other" that concerns Attie
in this project. During his stay in Berlin, Attie was fully aware that the more people ap-
peared as "other" in today's Germany, the more likely they were to be persecuted. The
tragedy of the Holocaust was not the "mistake" in killing those who looked like every-
one else but the hideous rationale that justified killing those who didn't look like us.

Ironically, of course, the "voice" Attie gave these absent Jews was at times also
the voice of residents objecting to the project itself. While Attie was installing the
Buchhandler (bookseller) slide projection, for example, a fifty-year-old man sud-

denly came running out of the building shouting that his father had bought the
building "fair and square" from Mister Jacobs in 1938. "And what happened to this
Mr. Jacobs?" Attie asked the man. "Why, of course, he was a multi-millionaire and
moved to New York." 6 Of course. All of which was captured by German television
crews, who broadcast the incident that night on national news. Attie couldn't have
scripted this projection more powerfully. Another resident called the police to com-
plain angrily that Attie's projections of Jews onto his building would make his neigh-
1
bors think that he was Jewish. Make him stop, he pleaded. The residents response is
as much a part of these works as the installations themselves, says Attie. Without
these responses, the installations, like the buildings themselves, would have remained
inert, inanimate, dead.
Indeed, even though these images may have disappeared from sight as soon
as Attie turned off the high-intensity projector, their after-image lived on in the
minds of those who had seen them once. From this point on, the images of these
Jews "live" only as their subjects lived before them: in the photographs of these in-
stallations. These are quite literally photographs of photographs we are seeing here,
just as the local burghers now walk their neighborhoods haunted by their memory
of Attie's memory-installation. They are now haunted not by the Jews who had once
lived here, or even by their absence, but by the images of Jews haunting the artist's
mind.
As Michael Andre Bernstein has made painfully clear, photography is always
about loss, about the absence of what was once real in front of the lens: hence the
essential melancholia at the heart of the photograph. "To look at a photograph,"
Bernstein writes, "is to experience a certain sorrow at the sheer fact of loss and sep-
aration, curiously mingled with the pleasure of recognizing that what no longer ex-
ists, has been, if not restored to us, then at least memorialized for us, fixed in the sta-
sis of an image now forever available to our gaze." 7

Insofar as this bittersweet mixture
of sorrow and pleasure necessarily haunts our experience of all photographs, its ex-
tremes seem wildly exaggerated in these wall projections. For it's true, they are beau-
tiful and chilling, slightly exhilarating and depressing; they inspire longing and fear,
hope and despair. By keeping the mixture between sorrow and pleasure in balance,
they can also keep their potential for redemption in check, never allowing the pain
of such loss to be redeemed by the beauty of the image itself.

Shimon Attic, Former Dresden Jewish Citizen. ( Trains, Dresden, 1993)
In this way, these installations have served as a somewhat literal metaphor for
the artist's projection of his inner desires onto the walls around him. All of us wish
we could bring the victims back to life, to repair the terrible wound. But The Writ-
ing on the Wall is no such reparation or bringing back to life; it is, rather, the re-
minder of what was lost, not what was. At the same time, it is clear in Attie's mind,
as he means for it to be in ours, that these projections are simulations, not historical
reconstructions. Their immense value lies in showing us not literally what was lost
but that loss itself is part of this neighborhood's history, an invisible yet essential fea-
ture of its landscape.
Trains: Dresden, 1993
Of all the banal sites of daily life in Germany forever corrupted by their history
during World War II, the railways may be the most ineradicably stigmatized in the

eyes of Jewish tourists. Not only is this because the image of cattle cars loaded with
Jews on their way to (and from) death camps remains so pervasive in the iconography
ot the Holocaust. But when riding these trains in Germany after the war, many young
Jewish travelers can't escape the sense of "having been there before." The sense of trav-
eling the same routes as the victims, watching the same landscape flit by, and hearing
the same clackety-clack on the same tracks induces an illusory identification with the
victims unlike almost any other experience in Germany.
Like the Scheunenviertel in Berlin, haunted by its now absent Jews, the Dres-
den train station seemed haunted to Attie by its absence of any sign of the central role
train stations played throughout Germany during the Holocaust. These were the sites
of collections for deportations, the last places many German Jews ever saw of their
homeland, the tracks constituting a literal, material line connecting Germany to the
death camps. In keeping with his medium of photographic projections, Attie and his
collaborator, Mathias Maile, found photographs of Dresden's former Jewish citizens
who either had been deported or had emigrated and then projected them back into
the city's central railway station.
This project was in many ways more confrontational than The Writing on
the Wall, which had more passively chastened local citizens for letting their former
neighbors disappear into the ether of time. For in projecting specific faces from Dres-
den's Jewish community directly onto the trains, tracks and walls of the central sta-
tion, Attie and Maile linked the photographic memory of the victims directly to their
fate: to the literal sites of deportation, of emigration, of German- Jewish leave-taking.

After culling some dozen images from family albums of Dresden's tiny Jewish com-
munity, Attie converted them into high-contrast black-and-white slides. For two
weeks beginning on the ninth of November 1993 (the anniversary of Kristallnacht),
images of handsome, smartly dressed young and middle-aged men and women
shone brightly from the rafters of the station; other images of sad-eyed Jews peered
up at travelers from the tracks or stared down rebukingly from the walls or con-
fronted travelers face to face from the sides of trains. The familiar daily routine of
travel was estranged and disrupted by these immense black-and-white projections;
weekend holidays commenced on a decidedly melancholy, less festive note. For a few
moments every day, postwar Germans were haunted by the vicarious memory of an
American Jew. Now they, too, were forced to see and remember what the Jewish trav-
eler cannot put out of his or her mind: that on this platform, on these tracks, the Jews
whose faces I see began to die.

In a similar installation in I lamburg, Attie projected images without the ben-
efit oi explaining captions. Bui when a unions passerby asked him whether these
were the pictures ol the German Railway founders, he decided to mount large posters
that made the source oi these images explicitly clear. With this lesson in mind, he re
peated the process in 1 >resden. I le had wanted the rebuke of memory to come from
within contemporary travelers as the significance oi these images dawned on
them now trapped in this conflation of time And space. The more he had to ex-
plain, he felt, the less successful and more coercively didactic the project became. But
as word of the memorial projections spread, his accompanying captions became less
necessary; a\u\ in the end, as tens of thousands of travelers saw and thereby internal-
ized these images, the projections themselves became unnecessary altogether.
Portraits of Exile: Copenhagen, June-July 1995
An epitaph written in water is no epitaph at all, as John Keats realized when

he penned his own to read: "Here lies one whose name is writ in water." Unlike the
nameless tombstone bearing these words and marking Keats's grave in Rome's
Protestant cemetery, however, all traces of Denmark's extraordinary rescue of its Jews
were erased by the very water that bore them to safe haven in Sweden. The water that
made their rescue possible, and covered their tracks so well, also made a landscape of
commemorative traces of this rescue impossible. As a memorial medium, in fact,
water is more like fleeting time in its ephemerality than like a fixed landscape in its
stasis, and so more emblematic of memory itself — always taking the shape of the
vessel into which it is poured.

In the memorial and historical culture of Denmark, water is also much more.
It was not only the road to rescue for Denmark's Jews during the Nazi occupation
in October 1943, but it has always constituted Copenhagen's historical and eco-
nomic raison d'etre as ancient seaport, quite literally the capital's historical life-
source. With these thoughts in mind Shimon Attie chose the Borsgraven Canal in
Copenhagen as his installation site for Portraits of Exile — a commemoration of the

fiftieth anniversary of Denmark's liberation from the Nazis. This was not to be
merely a self-congratulatory celebration of the war's end in the monolithic image of
Denmark's heroic rescue of the Jews, however. For unlike the images of Jews pro-
jected back onto the buildings of the Scheunenviertel in Berlin, which seemed to an-

Shimon Attie, Installation Shot. On lightbox in foreground: present-day refugee from the former
Yugoslavia with Danish entry stamp on passport. ( Portraits of Exile, Copenhagen)
imate otherwise inert surfaces, it was the somewhat stock and myth-hardened im-
agery of heroism itself that Attie animated — and thus dissolved — in the watery
medium of Copenhagen's canals.
Here he installed a row of nine light boxes, each approximately six feet by five
feet, about thirty-three feet apart, and submerged nearly three feet below the water's
surface some fifteen feet from the bank of the canal. Eight of these light boxes were
mounted with the transparency of a photograph depicting either the face of a Dan-
ish Jew rescued to Sweden or the face of a present-day refugee living in Denmark.
One light box in the middle of the series was mounted with the transparent image
of a sea map charting the straits between Denmark and Sweden. Visible by night and
day, these backlighted faces stared up eerily, stirring with life as the water rippled over
them. From a distance, the images seemed to float on the surface as orbs of light, a
trail of stepping stones leading out to sea.

Shimon Attic, in foreground: Danish Jew rescued to Sweden in October 1943 with yellow star.
( Portraits of Exile, Copenhagen)
Attic's Acts of Remembrance 77

But the spectacle itself might have blinded viewers to details apparent only on
closer inspection. When the wind and tides were perfectly still, and the water's sur-
face took on a mirrorlike sheen, other layers of these images came into view just be-
yond the surface reflection of one's face. Each image was of a different refugee, each
overlaid with a different sign of exile: a portrait of a Danish Jewish man overlaid onto
an image of a yellow Jewish star; another of a Danish Jewish woman overlaid onto a
sea map; other faces of rescued Danish Jews overlaid onto images of a fishing boat
and a commercial freighter used in the rescue. The middle image of the sea map was
itself overlaid by two boats, one with Jews on their way to Sweden, the other with
present-day refugees coming to Denmark.
At this point, the narrative created in this sequence of images began to gen-
erate a decidedly double-edged memorial message, fraught with pride and shame.
For the next portrait of a Bosnian Moslem refugee in turban was followed by a Bos-
nian woman overlaid by an image of the Flotel Europa moored one canal away —
notoriously overcrowded floating hotel ship crammed with refugees awaiting polit-
ical asylum in Denmark, some of them for years. The last two images consisted of the
face of a Yugoslav man seemingly textured by an overlaid sea map and a Yugoslav
woman whose face was blotched by the image of a passport entry stamp. Placed in
the center of a topographical triad composed of the Danish foreign ministry, the par-
liament, and the National Bank of Denmark, these portraits of exile seemed simul-
taneously to shine as commemorative and warning lights to the government.
This mixed memorial message was intended not to refute Denmark's
reigning self-idealization as a perennial haven of refuge but only to pierce the self-
congratulatory side of this myth that blinds it to other, conflicting historical realities.
Nor were such images juxtaposed to imply equivalence between refugees but to
heighten a troubling contrast: where almost all Danish Jews were saved, not all
Bosnians have found refuge, many more murdered at home than given safe haven in
Denmark or other European countries. At the same time, the artist showed how
every national commemoration necessarily occludes as much history as it recalls. For
even this greatest of mass rescues during the Holocaust, once mythologized as part
of the national character, has overshadowed another, less well known fact of this era:
that Denmark had refused to grant asylum to thousands of Jews attempting to flee
Nazi Germany before the war.

Such a fact does not diminish the brilliance of Denmark's national heroism
but only complicates it, thereby making it less mythlike, more real. Public memory
here is as fraught and contradictory, as complex and multisided, as the history being

commemorated. In its mixed message, sue h an installation may even suggest that it
is the memory ol a mixed past thai actually impels a nation toward new acts of res-
cue. For the national memory of heroism, like the heroic act itself, stems from a mix-
ture of motives high, low, and ambivalent.
Brick by Brick; Cologne, November 1995
The physical sites of history are not the only potential sites of memory. In
\ttie's eyes, even the designs of household objects can recall the times of their ori-
gin ,\nc\ y by extension, the households from which they have been torn. Pieces of
Bauhaus or Art [^>cco furniture come to stand as icons of an era that point beyond
themselves to the dark age they passed through and to the owners — both killers and
victims — they may have survived. Having reanimated public sites in Berlin and
Dresden with images of their forgotten pasts, the artist now turned his gaze into the
more private, even intimate sanctum of the household, its objects transformed into
accusing sites of memory.

In Brick by Brick, an installation just outside the doors of the Cologne Art Fair
in November 1995, Attie projected images of simple household objects dating from
turn-of-the-century Germany onto the massive brick columns of the Rheinhalle.

Projected so that they seemed almost to be materializing from within the brick
columns, images of a Singer sewing machine, a late nineteenth-century commode,

a Bauhaus menorah, a Bauhaus dining room table, an overstuffed armchair, and four
other similarly aged objects confronted patrons of art cologne as they left the ex-
hibit hall. Though this particular crowd of collectors and connoisseurs would have
recognized the general period of these objects' origins, neither they nor the artist
could know the provenance of any given piece — gleaned by the artist from antique
stores as well as from Bauhaus and other catalogues. But this ambiguity was partly
the point, for it was into this area of uncertainty that the artist projected his preoc-
cupations, assigning not a precise provenance but a generic, possible provenance to
these and all pieces like them.
At the same time, this was a site-specific installation. For as Attie and his col-
laborator, Mathias Maile, made clear in a handbill passed out to visitors at the fair,
the Kolner Messegebaude (Cologne Fair Building) had its own dark, if multilayered
and unacknowledged past. Built in 1923, the Cologne Fair Building had hosted its
share of fairs, it was true, but after the Nazis came to power in 1933, it also served as

an examination center for German army draftees as well as a great hall for the ideo-
logical reeducation of German schoolteachers. After launching the war in 1939, the
Nazi government took control of the fair building and turned it first into a prisoner-
of-war camp and then, in 1940, into a gathering and deportation site for Sinti and
Roma. Still later it served as a transfer station for Jews about to be deported to the
east through the neighboring Deutz-Tief train station.
In fact, because the Nazis had taken over all such exhibition halls in Germany
by this time, the fate of the Cologne Fair Building was no more ignoble than that of
any other public hall in Germany. Rather, what had made this fair building special
in Attie's eyes were the ways another part of its history seemed to find some conti-
nuity in the art fair itself. For some reason, the Cologne Art Fair, arguably the most
prestigious of its kind in Germany today, opens every year on November ninth or
tenth, the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1 938. Even more significant for Attie, how-
ever, was the building's use during the war as a storehouse for confiscated furniture
and other household belongings of Jews who had been either forced to emigrate or
deported to concentration camps. As the hall's stores filled up, Nazi Party officials
would hold auctions open to party members whose households had been damaged
by Allied bombings. As a chilling illustration, Attie photocopied an announcement
for one such auction, Gothic script and all, as part of his handbill:
Auction
Attention, Bombing Victims!
On Monday, the 21st of December 1942 and following days, I will
hold an auction at the Cologne-Deutz Fair (South Hall) from 9:00

a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Bedroom, men's Bedroom, all kinds of wardrobes,
tables, down beds, couches, sofas, teawagon, upright clock, table

8
clock . . . .
The list of objects included all the furnishings typical of any middle- or upper middle-
class German Jewish home. The rest of the handbill described how beginning in 1942,
a slave labor camp was installed on the Cologne fairgrounds in the form of a so-called
worker education camp. And finally, at the end of 1942, a satellite camp of Buchen-
wald composed of "SS Construction Crew III" was established on the fairgrounds,
supplying some one thousand slave-laborers to the nearby Rhenish factories.
Thus greeted by this "counter-fair" on their way out of art cologne, patrons
were forced to reconsider this site as something more than an exhibition hall for con-

Shimon Attie,
on column m
foreground:
sewing
machine.
I Brick by
Brick,
Cologne,
^Jjjf D
a. ^
AM »< J
aP
iJYr- . -
T^\ 1995)
V&Ll ''••"'
fi'i
HHH| HHt _
v1<^«w•"^•••,,,'l,
^^^^ p -
\ n1m
Shimon Attic,
on column:
briefcase.
(Brick by
Brick, Cologne,
1995)
Attie 's Acts of Remembrance 81

temporary art. On display at the fair, but not for sale, Attie's installation redefined the
hall as nexus of history, commerce, and memory. In a way, the art fair's organizers
had foisted this link on Attie by scheduling its opening every year on the anniversary
of Kristallnacht. Once inspired, however, Attie pursued the question that might log-
ically follow "What happened to all the Jews of Germany?" That is, "What happened
to all their household belongings and personal effects?" Further implied questions
include not only "Where were you during the war?" but also "To whom did that table
belong before the war? Is it an ill-gotten gain, a Nazi-sanctioned piece of war booty?
**
Or was it passed down innocently from one generation to the next?" Instead of sug-
gesting answers, the artist let such questions float in the space of the art fair, between
his installation and the bustling art patrons. Contemporary German collectors were
now confronted uneasily with the possibility that these objects had even been dis-
tributed among their own households.
What makes such an installation so subversive is the way it plants the seeds
of doubt in every such piece: the more authentic it is, the more it might remind its
current owner of its possible provenance. Even perfectly "innocent" pieces might
now echo with the voices of the dead, and by their very design, such pieces begin to
accuse their owners. In effect, the provenance of antiques from this era makes them
not only valuable but historical. In Brick by Brick, the artist has thus stigmatized an
entire generation of household objects and, in so doing, has transformed each piece
from mere memento into an accusing memento mori.
The Neighbor Next Door: Amsterdam, December 1995
Like the people of other nations, the Dutch tend to remember their World
War II past as it congeals around a few well-chosen images: in their case, of course,
Anne Frank constitutes the central memorial icon. But as a remarkably self-critical
generation of new historians in Holland has already made clear, the Dutch self-
idealization in the image of Anne Frank has always been double-edged: she reminds
the Dutch both that they helped hide her family from the Nazis and that they be-
trayed her. As these historians are quick to point out, despite the national mythol-
ogy of the "sheltering Dutch," a higher percentage of its jews — over 80 percent — was
murdered during the Holocaust than any other nation's except for Poland's. 9
Indeed, the memorial canonization of Anne Frank in Holland is not a simple
matter of national self-aggrandizement but has much more to do with the deeply

mixed 1 >ut< h sell perception as traditional refuge on one hand and as a nation of by-
standers and collaborators on the other. As .i young girl, Anne Frank exemplifies the
blamelessness ol fews killed for no reason other than being lews; by extension, she
represents for the I >utch their own, uninvited violation by the Nazis. At the same time,
she reminds the 1 )utch that even though they harbored her, in the îm.\ they also be-
ll. iyed her as well as another hundred thousand 1 Hitch Jews. By reflecting back to the
Dutch their mixed record of resistance and neutrality, victimization and collabora-
tion, Anne Frank has effectively become an archetype for I [olland's war memory. 111
In keeping with Hollands capacity lor sell-critique, Attic's Amsterdam in-
stallation, The Neighbor Next Door, attempted to remind the Dutch of the essential
gulf between the historical record and their national memory of the Holocaust, the
essential double-sidedness of "the neighbor next door." At the same time, he hoped
to suggest that tor the estimated one hundred thousand illegal immigrants hiding in
Holland today, the myth or "the neighbor next door" lives on in decidedly mixed
fashion, as they find economic refuge in a land that needs but does not necessarily
want them. It now reflects their contemporary reality, as well, as they peek from be-
hind closed curtains or look over their shoulders on the way to or from illegal jobs.
For one week in the middle of December 1995, Attie mounted sixteen-
millimeter film projectors inside the windows of three different apartments along
Prinsengracht, the canal-street in central Amsterdam along which Anne Frank's fam-
ily and an estimated 155 other groups hid during World War II. From 5:00 p.m. to
1:00 a.m. each day, Attie beamed onto the street short film loops from footage shot
clandestinely from nearby windows by those in hiding during the Nazi occupation.
Even in darkness, the grainy film footage appeared shadowy and fleeting. In one ten-
second loop projected from Prinsengracht 572, the stiff, gray figures of a Nazi funeral
cortege filed into view on its way to bury a Dutch Nazi collaborator assassinated by
the resistance; at Prinsengracht 468, wet cobblestones flickered silently with the im-
ages of a military band decked out in the insignia of the Dutch Nazi Party, march-
ing in an endless six-second loop. Only the images of passing German soldiers giving
the"Heil, Hitler" salute flitting across the sidewalk in front of Prinsengracht 514 had
been from film shot by Nazi propagandists, now mocked by the robotic repetition
of the loop itself.
In these projections, Attie hoped to convey how the world looked from the
hiding place, as opposed to how the hiding place looked to the outside world through
free Dutch eyes. In addition, he tried to try to show how hiding was experienced by
those who hid: already a kind of internment, for some the first of many incarcera-

Shimon Attie, Passing Nazi Drum Corps at Prinsengracht 468. (The Neighbor Next Door,
Amsterdam, 1995)

nous on the way to concentration camps and death. I [ere the national image of shel-
tering was being turned inside out, the lens turned back on those for whom the
"neighbor next door" had become more .1 sell aggrandizing image than a reality. The
image of the sheltered was now displaced by moving images ol what the sheltered
saw: Dutch bystanders, collaborators, and Na/is. By reanimating the past of those
Supposedly rescued, Attic could reiterate the national myth even as he unlocked its
hold on the past.
The Walk of lame: Krakow, June-July 1996
In his Krakow project, The Walk of Fame, Attie suggests that art itself can
check the excesses of art, that instead of blurring the line further between history and
its later representations, art can redraw this line and that, through parody, it can dis-
courage a society from unwittingly displacing history as it happened with history as
it appears in the movies. He was inspired, he says, not by the ways Steven Spielberg's
film Schindler's List might have passed itself off as history but rather by the potential
confusion in tourists' minds wrought by an officially sanctioned tour in Krakow

called "Retracing 'Schindler's List.'""
In this tour, organized by Franciszek Palowski, a Polish journalist who had in-
terviewed Spielberg for Polish television and later wrote a book on the filming of
Schindler's List, tourists are invited to visit the sites of film-making in and around
Krakow in order to learn more of the actual history of Schindler's list and its telling
in cinema. As a guide, Palowski is careful to distinguish between the sites of history

and the sites where Spielberg chose to film this history. Nevertheless, Attie fears that
the mere possibility of such a tour throws "authentic historical sites, events and in-
dividuals into open competition with their celluloid copies in determining our un-
derstanding of history." 12 It is one thing to add the history of the film to the history
of events, another to displace the history of events with the history of the film.
Moreover, Attie worries that "as actual history becomes conflated with cine-
matic fiction, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between the two." 13
In fact, underlying Attie's misgivings here seems to be not just the confusion in mind
wrought by such a tour but the ways that such a tour is, in many ways, more appeal-
ing to tourists in the thrall of celebrity history than history itself. For when all is said

and done, tourists may indeed prefer visiting the sites of their cinematic experience
of the Holocaust to seeing the sites of others actual Holocaust experiences. After all,
their only "real" experience of the Holocaust is the "reel" experience of the movie.
Having survived the film, in effect, they return as vicarious pilgrims to the cinematic
sites, just as survivors of the camps return to the sites of their actual suffering. If the
movie becomes our history of the Holocaust, then the movie sets become the places
where "history is made." And once we are invited to visit the sites of filming as if they
were the places where "history is made," it is too short a step toward confusing the
history made in this film for history itself.
In some ways, this dilemma even parallels the impossible problem the direc-
tor himself faced as he prepared on-site filming of Schindler's List. When Spielberg
approached Polish authorities with the request to film scenes on their original sites
at Auschwitz and Birkenau, he was initially granted permission; after all, other films
such as Triumph of the Spirit and the television miniseries The Winds of War had been
filmed in situ at Auschwitz, with significant economic benefits for the local popula-
tion. The director seemed convinced at this point that a "true story" filmed at its his-
torical location would somehow be perceived as more true than if filmed off-site. But
in the years between these earlier films and Spielberg's project, an international coun-
cil had been appointed to protect memory at Auschwitz from just this kind of incur-
sion. Unbeknownst to Spielberg but well known to the new commission, fake gas
chambers and papier-mache chimneys had already been left behind at Auschwitz-
Birkenau by the other film crews, infecting the ruins of gas chamber complexes there
with a terrible fiction. When word got out that Spielberg had been granted permis-
sion to film at Auschwitz-Birkenau, council members protested vigorously, and the

council immediately rescinded permission. After delicate negotiations, Kalman Sul-
tanik intervened with national authorities on behalf of the International Auschwitz
Council, and Spielberg was invited to film nearby, though not on the site of the con-
centration camp. On film, of course, Spielberg's movie sets are at least as convincing
as the authentic site could ever have been without a major overhaul short of com-
plete reconstruction of the camp — which would have violated the integrity of the
memorial as it stands.
Because he is not a documentary filmmaker, Spielberg did not need to hew

to original sites of history for his fictional account any more than the novelist needs
to rely on notarized testimony for dialogue. The aim w as neverr
to film authentic
sites but to make the sites he filmed look authentic: this is what filmmakers do, and
Spielberg did it brilliantly. In addition to building his own concentration camp set

neai the real one, Spielberg found a plethora ol authentic-looking old squares and
buildings in which to shoot his Krakow ghetto scenes. As its residents know well and
its toui ists happily discover, Krakow s greal charm as .1 tourisl center stems from the
(act thai it has never been bombed or otherwise damaged in Poland's many wars
and occupations. Only new buildings made the authentic center of the Jewish
ghetto at Zgoda Square unlit lor shooting sequences that had actually taken place
there. These scenes were shot instead on S/eroka Street, the center of the former
lew ish district in Kazimierz.
We also learn from "Retracing 'Schindler's List'" that because the ghetto
scenes at Zgoda Square in the Podg6rze district were filmed in Kazimierz across the
river, Spielberg had to reverse the direction of the march of ghetto Jews, so that they
tlowed over the bridge into his filmic ghetto in Kazimierz and not out of Kazimierz
over the Vistula River into Podgorze, as they had originally. Also of cultural interest
here is the plot of land Spielberg chose for his gargantuan movie set of the Plaszow
concentration camp: the site of the former Jewish cemetery on Jerozolimska (Jeru-
salem) Street in Podgorze.
As late as April 1 995, Attie's plan for an installation in Krakow looked entirely
different. In a project then entitled Routes of Silence, the artist had hoped to mount
slide projectors on the trams in Krakow that still run through what had been the
Jewish ghetto there during the war, beaming images of the old ghetto back onto the
present sites. In addition, he had planned to affix light boxes along the route to show
"images from the ghetto, as well as images relating to Poland's postcommunist strug-
gle to be assimilated into the West and the challenges the country faces today with
both old and new forms of racism." 13 But on his arrival in Krakow, he found the sit-
uation on the ground to be much more interesting, and more complicated, than his
critique of Poland's wartime memory might have allowed. Though his original plan
had been supported by both the city of Krakow and the local Goethe Institute, once
the artist heard of "Retracing 'Schindler's List,'" his project evolved from a critique of
Poland's wartime memory into a critique of the dangers implicit in over-mediation
itself. Unable to bear the confusion of movie and historical sites, Attie abandoned his
own preconceived project and embarked on an alternative installation, one he hoped

would expose the fascination for the filmic at the expense of the historical. As a re-
sult, the "Walk of Fame" may be as much an overall critique of Holocaust-by-medi-

ation as it is of a specific displacement of historical by cinematic reality.
To this end, Attie installed twenty-four simulated five-point terrazzo stars,
copies of the famous stars lining Hollywood Boulevard's "Walk of Fame," on Szeroka

Shimon Attie, J. H.
Borenstein. (The Walk of

Fame, Krakow, 1996)
Street, where Spielberg

had constructed his ghet-
to movie-set: what Attie
calls "ground zero" for the

conflation of movie histo-
ry and historical fact. In-
stead of recalling the
movie stars enshrined so

famously on Hollywood
Boulevard, however, Attie
substituted the names of

Jews who had actually
been on Oscar Schindler's

list, abbreviating the first
names so as not to offend
the memory of actual vic-

tims. By remembering victims as if they were worth remembering solely because
they had now become Hollywood stars, Attie parodically repeated this flow of histo-
ry into celebrity, mocking it and thereby hoping to expose its insidiousness.
At the same time, Attie takes pains to explain that he did not direct this proj-
ect against the individuals who survived Schindler's list and the celebrity it has
brought some of them; nor did he make Spielberg's film a target of his counter-
memorial installation. Rather, in his words, "its intention was to highlight and criti-
cally reflect the larger problematic eclipsing of historical fact by cinematic fiction," by
which the unfurling movie's reel is mistaken for the real. 16
On display in Krakow
during the months of June and July 1995, these purple stars were embedded into the
square in front of the Old Synagogue and Jewish Museum, each with a small motion
picture camera and a name like H. Blumentrucht or J. H. Borenstein. Riven by cracks
that seemed continuous with the surrounding stones, they appeared old, worn, and
Attie's Acts of Remembrance

permanently pari oi the square. In-
stead ol the memorial icon ot a yellow
star, these survivors were commemo-

rated with the purple terrazzo stars of
I lollywood celebrities, .\n echo of that

moment at the end of Schindler's List
when the actual survivors appeared
with the stars who "played" them.

As an artist, Shimon Attie is all too
aware of his own dependence on the
art of others for his knowledge of the

1 lolocaust. As a Jewish American born
after the war, he knows the Holocaust
only by indirection, by the efforts of
survivors, historians, and artists to pass
down their knowledge to him. But although he acknowledges this necessarily vicari-
ous relationship to Holocaust history, he is still nettled by the possible consequences
of what might be called the overmediation of events. He fears, rightly, that a genera-
tion after the Holocaust could still come to mistake their hypermediated experiences
of the Holocaust for the Holocaust itself, that events will come to be displaced alto-
gether by their representations.
This is, he acknowledges, a conundrum. For because these representations of

the Holocaust are all that those removed from events will ever know of the genocide,
what is to keep art from usurping the authority of historical actuality? Moreover, if
artists and filmmakers insist on keeping the boundaries between their art and actual
events as fuzzy as possible, all toward the aesthetic (but not necessarily historical) end
of making their art seem as convincing and entertaining as possible, then what is to
save the next generation from losing the ability to discriminate between what they
know, how they know it, and what actually happened? Instead of a simple answer to
this, the next generation's defining preoccupation, Shimon Attie has offered a series
of installations that work through the dilemma itself, that examine the role we our-
selves play in the gaping space between a site and its past, between its history and our
memory of it.

CHAPTER FOUR
Memory, Countermemory,
and the End of the Monument
Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread,
and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock
"The sunken fountain is not the memorial at all. It is only history turned into a
pedestal, an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in
their own heath. For only there is the memorial to be found."
— Horst Hoheisel, "Rathaus Platz Winnie"
among the hundreds of submissions in the 1995 competition for a German

national "memorial to the murdered lews of Europe," one seemed an especially un-
canny embodiment of the impossible questions at the heart of Germany's memorial

process. Artist Horst Hoheisel, already well known for his negative-form monument
in Kassel, proposed a simple, if provocative antisolution to the memorial competi-
tion: blow up the Brandenburger Tor, grind its stone into dust, sprinkle the remains
over its former site, and cover the entire memorial area with granite plates. How bet-
ter to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument?
Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with the construc-
tion of yet another edifice, Hoheisel would mark one destruction with another de-
struction. Rather than filling in the void left by a murdered people with a positive
form, the artist would carve out an empty space in Berlin by which to recall a now
absent people. Rather than concretizing and thereby displacing the memory of Eu-
rope's murdered Jews, the artist would open a place in the landscape to be filled with-
the memory of those who come to remember Europe's murdered Jews. A landmark
90
EÊ3
Auschwitz Treblinka Majdanek Stutthof Sobibor Kulmhof Belcec
Horst Hoheisel, Blow Up the Brandenburger Tor. Proposal for the 1995 competition for "Berlin's
Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe."
celebrating Prussian might and crowned by a chariot-borne Quadriga, the Roman

goddess of peace, would be demolished to make room for the memory of Jewish vic-
tims of German might and peacelessness. In fact, perhaps no single emblem better
represents the conflicted, self-abnegating motives for memory in Germany today

than the vanishing monument.'
Of course, such a memorial undoing will never be sanctioned by the German
government, and this, too, is part of the artist's point. Hoheisel's proposed destruc-
tion of the Brandenburg Gate participates in the competition for a national Holo-
caust memorial, even as its radicalism precludes the possibility of its execution. At
least part of its polemic, therefore, is directed against actually building any winning
design, against ever finishing the monument at all. Here he seems to suggest that the
surest engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany may actually lie in its per-
petual 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. 2
Like other cultural and aesthetic forms in Europe and North America, the
92 Memory, Countermemory
monument in both idea and practice has undergone a radical transformation
ovei the course of the twentieth century. As intersection between public art and po
litical memory, the monument has necessarily reflected the aesthetic and political
revolutions, as well as the w ider crises of representation, following all ot the century's
major upheavals including both World Wars I and 11, the Vietnam War, the rise
,\nd tall ot communist regimes in the former Soviet Union dnd its Eastern European
satellites. In ever) «.as<.-, the monument reflects both its sociohistorical and its aes-
thetic context: artists working in eras ot cubism, expressionism, socialist realism,
earthworks, minimalism, or conceptual art remain answerable to the needs of both

ait .\nd official history. The result has been a metamorphosis of the monument from
the heroic, self-aggrandizing figurative icons of the late nineteenth century celebrat-
ing national ideals and triumphs to the antiheroic, often ironic, and self-effacing con-
ceptual installations that mark the national ambivalence and uncertainty of late
twentieth -century postmodernism.
Memorial for the

murdered Jews
of Europe
^The irandatburferTor s fon| a tx pound la dua.Jrx dua «i tx spread at the arte

of Ok mcmoral
Trx area w* toe covered wih grow pkrtes-
Aj rt~ merrtond iwo Hank rati art created, is double mds - and ihrs n. Ox actixt memonal-
-jXHSc—y of f.p-m-nf a* Hckxam tor to

D<B Srondenburger Tor wird zu Swuto zermohiri
J^L Der Stoub wed Oufdem Denkmaegekjnde trnreuL
OOS CetOndi wrnj rrrt CranrtfAltie^ toe^Jt
AH Denkjnol enmehen 2w* leere One. deren doopeke leere o..iZ^hakcrt. dot ergentkerte 0?-'
Hc-w Hoftta«t An-Caervctiis" Ser^ '

99* S,
Horst Hoheisel, Blow Up the Brandenburger Tor. Proposal for the 1995 competition for "Berlins
Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe."
Me m ory, Co u n te r m e m ory 93
In fact, the monument as both institution and concept had already come
under withering attack well before the turn of the century. "Away with the monu-
ments!" Friedrich Nietzsche declared in his blistering attack on a nineteenth-century
German historicism that oppressed the living with stultified versions of the past, what
Nietzsche called "monumental history." 3 To which, a chorus of artists and cultural
historians have since added their voices. "The notion of a modern monument is ver-
itably a contradiction in terms," Lewis Mumford wrote in the 1 930s. "If it is a monu-
ment it is not modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument." 4 Believing
that modern architecture invites the perpetuation of life itself, encourages renewal
and change, and scorns the illusion of permanence, Mumford wrote, "Stone gives a
false sense of continuity, a deceptive assurance of life."

5
Indeed, he went on to suggest
that traditionally it seems to have been the least effectual of regimes that chose to
compensate their paucity of achievement in self-aggrandizing stone and mortar.
More recently, the German historian Martin Broszat suggested that in their
references to history, monuments may not remember events so much as bury them
altogether beneath layers of national myth and explanation. As cultural reifications,
in this view, monuments reduce or, in Broszat's words, "coarsen" historical under-
standing as much as they generate it.
6
In another vein, art historian Rosalind Krauss
finds that the modernist period produces monuments unable to refer to anything be-
yond themselves as pure marker or base. After Krauss, critics have asked whether an
abstract, self-referential monument can ever commemorate events outside of itself
or whether it only motions endlessly to its own gesture to the past."
Still others have argued that rather than preserving public memory, the mon-
ument displaces it altogether, supplanting a community's memory-work with its
own material form. "The less memory is experienced from the inside," Pierre Nora
warns, "the more it exists through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs." 8 In
fact, Andreas Huyssen has even suggested that in a contemporary age of mass mem-
ory production and consumption, there seems to be an inverse proportion between
the memorialization of the past and its contemplation and study. 9
It is as if once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some de-
gree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember. In the eyes of modern critics
and artists, the traditional monument's essential stiffness and grandiose pretensions
to permanence thus doom it to an archaic, premodern status. Even worse, by insist-
ing that its meaning is as fixed as its place in the landscape, the monument seems
oblivious to the essential mutability in all cultural artifacts, the ways the significance
in .ill .11 1 evolves ovei time. In this way, monuments have long soughl to provide a
naturalizing locus for memory, in which .1 state's triumphs and martyrs, its ideals and
founding myths are cast as naturally true as the landscape in which they stand. These
are the monument's sustaining illusions, the principles of its seeming longevity and
power. Hut in fact, as several generations of artists — modem and postmodern alike
have made scathingly clear, neither the monument nor its meaning is everlasting.
Both a monument au<.\ its significance are constructed in particular times and places,
contingent on the political, historical, and aesthetic realities oi the moment.

The early modernist ambivalence toward the monument hardened into out-
right hostility in the wake of World War I. Both artists and some governments shared
a general distaste lor the ways the monument seemed formally to recapitulate the ar-
chaic values of a past world now discredited by the slaughter of the war. A new gen-
eration of cubists .\nd expressionists, in particular, rejected traditional mimetic and

heroic evocations of events, contending that any such remembrance would elevate
and mythologize events. In their view, yet another classically proportioned Prome-
theus would have falsely glorified and thereby redeemed the horrible suffering they
were called upon to mourn. The traditional aim of war monuments had been to val-
orize the suffering in such a way as to justify, even redeem, it historically. But for these
artists, such monuments would have been tantamount to betraying not only their ex-
perience of the Great War but also their new reasons for art's existence after the war:
to challenge the worlds realities, not affirm them.

As Albert Elsen has noted, modern and avant-garde sculptors between the
wars in Europe were thus rarely invited to commemorate either the victories or losses,
battles or war dead of World War I.
111
And if figurative statuary were demanded of
them, then only antiheroic figures would do, as exemplified in the pathetic heroes of
German sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbriick's Fallen Man and Seated Youth (both 1917). As
true to the artists' interwar vision as such work may have been, however, neither pub-
lic nor state seemed ready to abide memorial edifices built on foundations of doubt
instead of valor. The pathetic hero was thus condemned by emerging totalitarian
regimes in Germany and Russia as defeatist for seeming to embody all that was worth
forgetting — not remembering — in the war. Moreover, between the Nazi abhorrence
of abstract art — or what it called entartete Kunst (decadent art) — and the officially
mandated socialist realism of the Soviet Union, the traditional figurative monument
even enjoyed something of a revival in totalitarian societies. Indeed, only the figura-
tive statuarv of officiallv sanctioned artists, like Germany's Arno Breker, or stvles like
Memory, Counter memory 95

the Soviet Union's socialist realism, could be trusted to embody the Nazi ideals of
"Aryan race" or the Communist Party's vision of a heroic proletariat. In its consort
with two of this century's most egregiously totalitarian regimes, the monument's
credibility as public art was thus eroded further still.
Fifty-five years after the defeat of the Nazi regime, contemporary artists in
Germany still have difficulty separating the monument there from its fascist past.
German memory-artists are heirs to a double-edged postwar legacy: a deep distrust
of monumental forms in light of their systematic exploitation by the Nazis and a pro-
found desire to distinguish their generation from that of the killers through mem-
ory. 11
In their eyes, the didactic logic of monuments — their demagogical rigidity and
certainty of history — continues to recall too closely traits associated with fascism it-
self. How else would totalitarian regimes commemorate themselves except through
totalitarian art like the monument? Conversely, how better to celebrate the fall of to-
talitarian regimes than by celebrating the fall of their monuments? A monument
against fascism, therefore, would have to be monument against itself: against the tra-
ditionally didactic function of monuments, against their tendency to displace the
past they would have us contemplate — and finally, against the authoritarian propen-
sity in monumental spaces that reduces viewers to passive spectators.
As I have suggested in the Introduction, one of the most intriguing results of
Germany's memorial conundrum has been the advent of what I would call its "coun-
termonuments": memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the
monument. For a new generation of German artists, the possibility that memory of
events so grave might be reduced to exhibitions of public artistry or cheap pathos re-
mains intolerable. They contemptuously reject the traditional forms and reasons for
public memorial art, those spaces that either console viewers or redeem such tragic
events, or indulge in a facile kind of Wiedergutmachung or purport to mend the
memory memory into public conscious-

of a murdered people. Instead of searing
ness, they fear, conventional memorials seal memory off from awareness altogether;
instead of embodying memory, they find that memorials may only displace memory.
These artists fear rightly that to the extent that we encourage monuments to do our
memory-work for us, we become that much more forgetful. They believe, in effect,
that the initial impulse to memorialize events like the Holocaust may actually spring
from an opposite and equal desire to forget them.
In the pages that follow, I would like both to recall a couple of the counter-
monuments I have discussed at much greater length elsewhere and to add several
more recenl installations to the discussion. In this way, I mighl both refine and ad-
umbrate the concept oi countermonuments in c lermany, the ways they have begun
to constitute something akin to a "national form" thai pits itsell squarely against re-
cenl attempts to build a national "memorial to the murdered lews oi Europe" in the
center of the country's reunited capital, Berlin. As before, I find thai the ongoing de-
bate in Germany has been especially instructive in my own considerations of the
monument's future in this decidedly antiredemptory age.
Horst Hoheisel's Negative Forms and Memorial Spielerei
Some ten years before Horst Hoheisel proposed blowing up the Brandenburg
Gate in Berlin, the city of Kassel had invited artists to consider ways of rescuing one
of its own destroyed monuments — the "Aschrott Brunnen." This forty-foot-high

neo-Gothic pyramid fountain, surrounded by a reflecting pool set in the main square
in front of city hall, was built in 1908. It was designed by the city hall's architect, Karl
Roth, and funded by a local Jewish entrepreneur, Sigmund Aschrott. But as a gift
from a few to the city, it was condemned by the Nazis as the "Jews' Fountain" and so
was demolished during the night of 8-9 April 1939 by local Nazis, its pieces carted
away by city work crews over the next few days. Within weeks, all but the sandstone
base had been cleared away, leaving only a great, empty basin in the center of the
square. Two years later, 463 Kassel Jews were deported from the central train station
to Riga, followed in the next year by another 3,000, all murdered. In 1943 the city
filled in the fountain's basin with soil and planted it over in flowers; local burghers
then dubbed it "Aschrott's Grave."
During the growing prosperity of the 1960s, the town turned Aschrott's Grave
back into a fountain, sans pyramid. But by then, only a few of the city's old-timers
could recall that its name had ever been Aschrott's anything. When asked what had
happened to the original fountain, they replied that to their best recollection, it had
been destroyed by English bombers during the war. In response to this kind of fad-
ing memory, the Society for the Rescue of Historical Monuments proposed in 1984
that some form of the fountain and its history be restored — and that it recall all the
founders of the city, especially Sigmund Aschrott.
In his proposal for "restoration," Horst Hoheisel decided that neither a preser-
vation of its remnants nor its mere reconstruction would do. For Hoheisel, even the
Memory, Countermemory 97
Horst Hoheisel, artist's sketch of the
-\
Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial, Kassel,
/to?
1987.
fragment was a decorative lie,
suggesting itself as the remnant

of a destruction no one knew
much about. Its pure recon-
struction would have been no
less offensive: not only would
self-congratulatory overtones
of Wiedergutmachung betray
an irreparable violence, but the
artist feared that a recon-
structed fountain would only
encourage the public to forget
what had happened to the orig-
inal. In the best tradition of the
countermonument, therefore,
Hoheisel proposed a "negative-

form" monument to mark
what had once been the As-
„Platz-Wunde Aschrottbrunnen" chrott Fountain in Kassel's City
Hall Square.
On being awarded the proj-

ect, Hoheisel described both
the concept and the form underlying his negative-form monument:
I have designed the new fountain as a mirror image of the old one,
sunk beneath the old place in order to rescue the history of this place
as a wound and as an open question, to penetrate the consciousness
of the Kassel citizens so that such things never happen again.
That's why I rebuilt the fountain sculpture as a hollow con-
crete form after the old plans and for a few weeks displayed it as a
resurrected shape at City Hall Square before sinking it, mirror-like,
Horst Hoheisel, model for the Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial, Kassel, 1987.
1 2 meters deep into the ground water.

The pyramid will be turned into a funnel into whose dark-
ness water runs down. From the "architektonischen Spielerei," as
City Hall architect Karl Roth called his fountain, a hole emerges
which deep down in the water creates an image reflecting back the
12
entire shape of the fountain.
How does one remember an absence? In this case, by reproducing it. Quite literally,
the negative space of the absent monument now constitutes its phantom shape in the
ground. The very absence of the monument is now preserved in its precisely dupli-
cated negative space. In this way, the monument's reconstruction remains as illusory
as memory itself, a reflection on dark waters, a phantasmagoric play of light and

image. Taken a step further, Hoheisel's inverted pyramid might also combine with
the remembered shape of its predecessor to form the two interlocking triangles of the
Jewish star — present only in the memory of its absence.
In his conceptual formulations, Hoheisel invokes the play of other, darker as-
sociations as well, linking the monument to both the town's Jewish past and a tradi-
tional anti-Semitic libel. "The tip of the sculpture points like a thorn down into the
water" the artist writes. "Through coming into touch with the ground water, the his-
tory of the Aschrott Fountain continues not over but under the city." As an emblem
of the Holocaust, the history of the Aschrott Fountain becomes the subterranean his-
tory of the city. In HoheiseFs figure, the groundwater of German history may well be
poisoned — not by the Jews but by the Germans themselves in their murder of the
Jews. By sinking his inverted pyramid into the depths in this way, Hoheisel means to
tap this very history. "From the depth of the place," he says, "I have attempted to bring
the history of the Aschrott Fountain back up to the surface."
Of course, on a visit to City Hall Square in Kassel, none of this is immediately

evident. During construction, before being lowered upside down into the ground,
the starkly white negative-form sat upright in the square, a ghostly reminder of the
original, now absent monument. Where there had been an almost forgotten foun-
tain, there is now a bronze tablet with the fountain's image and an inscription de-
tailing what had been there and why it was lost. As we enter the square, we watch as
water fills narrow canals at our feet before rushing into a great underground hollow,
which grows louder and louder until we finally stand over the "Aschrott-Brunnen."
Only the sound of gushing water suggests the depth of an otherwise invisible me-
morial, an inverted palimpsest that demands the visitor's reflection. Through an iron
grate and thick glass windows we peer into the depths. "With the running water," Ho-
heisel suggests, "our thoughts can be drawn into the depths of history, and there per-
haps we will encounter feelings of loss, of a disturbed place, of lost form."
In fact, as the only standing figures on this flat square, our thoughts rooted
in the rushing fountain be-
neath our feet, we realize
that we have become the
memorial. "The sunken

fountain is not the memorial
at all," Hoheisel says. "It is
only history turned into a

pedestal, an invitation to
passersby who stand upon it
to search for the memorial

in their own heads. For only
Horst Hoheisel, negative-form, Aschrott-Brunnen Monument, there is the memorial to be
Kassel, 1987. found." Hoheisel has left

Neo-Nazis demonstrate at the Aschrott-Brunnen Monument, Kassel, 1997.

Horst Hoheisel, Denk-Stein-Sammlung
Memorial Project, Kassel, 1988-1995.
nothing but the visitors themselves
standing in repiembrance, left to
look inward^ for memory.

Neo-Nazi demonstrators pro-
testing an exhibition critical of the
Wehrmacht when it came to Kassel
in June 1998 were granted permis-

sion by the mayor to hold their protest in the Aschrott-Brunnen plaza, in front of
Kassel's city hall. Here they stood atop the original fountain's foundation stones
that had been salvaged by Hoheisel to mark the perimeter of the original fountain.
Skin-headed and tattooed, wearing black shirts and fatigues, the neo-Nazis waved
black flags and taunted a crowd of counter-protesters who had assembled outside
police barricades surrounding the neo-Nazis. In a press release, Hoheisel recounted
the history of the site, from the donation of the fountain to Kassel by Sigmund Asch-
rott, to its demolition at the hands of the Nazis in April 1939, to the memorial's ded-
ication in 1987, and finally to the neo-Nazis' demonstration there in June 1998. For
Hoheisel, the neo-Nazis' "reclamation" of the site, their triumphal striding atop the
ruins of the fountain that their predecessors had destroyed in 1939, seemed to bear
out his dark hope that this would become a negative center of gravity around which
all memory — wanted and unwanted — would now congeal.
By this time, Hoheisel had initiated several other memorial projects, includ-
ing another in Kassel. One more pedagogically inclined project turned to the next
generation. With permission from local public schools, the artist visited the class-
rooms of Kassel with a book, a stone, and a piece of paper. The book was a copy of
Namen unci Schicksale der Juden Kassels (The names and fates of Kassel's Jews), a
memorial book for Kassel's destroyed Jewish community. In his classroom visits,
Hoheisel told students the story of Kassel's vanished Jews, how they had once thrived
there, lived in the very houses where these schoolchildren now lived, how they had
sat at these same classroom desks. He then asked all the children who knew any Jews
to raise their hands.When no hands appeared, Hoheisel would read the story of one
of Kassel's deported Jews from his memory book. At the end of his reading, Hoheisel

i n\ ited each studenl to research the life ol one of Kassel's deported lews: where they
had lived and how, w ho were their families, how old they were, whal they had looked
like. I le asked them to visil formerly fewish neighborhoods and gel to know the Ger-
man neighbors of Kassel's deported lews.

Alter this, students were asked to write short narratives describing the lives
and deaths of their subjects, wrap these narratives around cobblestones, and deposit
them in one of the archival bins the artist had provided at every school. After several
do/en sikIi classroom visits, the bins had begun to overflow and new ones were fur-
nished. In time, all ol these bins were transported to Kassel's Hauptbahnhof, where
they were stacked on the rail platform whence Kassel's Jews were deported. It is now
a permanent installation, what the artist calls his Denk-Stein Sammlung (memorial
stone archive).
This memorial cairn — a witness-pile ol stones — marks both the site of de-
pot tat ion and the community's education about its murdered Jews, their absence
now marked by the evolving memorial. Combining narrative and stone in this way,
Horst Hoheisel, Denk-Stein-Sammlung Memorial Project, installed at train station, Kassel, 1988-1995.

Iff 1
-~
*rf fi ri*
T n
Temporary memorial at Buchenwald built by former inmates, May 1945.
the artist and students have thus adopted the most Jewish of memorial forms as their
own — thereby enlarging their memorial lexicon to include that of the absent peo-
ple they would now recall. After all,
only they are now left to write the epi-
taph of the missing lews, known and

emblematized primarily by the void
they have left behind.
Similarly, when invited by t he-
director of the Buchenwald Museum,

Volkhard Knigge, shortly after its
postreunification revisions to memori-

alize the first monument to liberation
erected by the camp's former inmates
Horst Hoheisel, "Warm memorial" to com-

memorate the former inmates' memorial at
Buchenwald, 1995.

in \pi il l
1
'
l >, I loheisel proposed not a resurrection ol the original monument but
a "living" alternative. In collaboration with architect Andreas Knit/, the artist de-
signed a concrete slab with the names of fifty-one national groups victimized here
and engraved with the initials K.L.B. (Konzentrationslager Buchenwald) that had
marked the prisoners' original wooden memorial obelisk. And as that obelisk had
been constructed out of the pieces of barracks torn down by their former inmates
thai is, enlivened by the prisoners' own hands — Hoheisel built into his memorial
slab of concrete a radiant heating system to bring it to a constant 98.6 degrees
Fahrenheit (36.3 degrees Celsius) that might suggest the body heat of those whose
memoi \ it would now enshrine. Visitors almost always kneel to touch the slab, some-
thing they would not do if it were cold stone, and they are touched in turn by the
human warmth embodied here. Dedicated in April 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary
of the prisoners' own memorial (which lasted only two months), this warm memo-
rial reminds visitors of the memory of actual victims that has preceded their own,
subsequent memory of this time. In winter, with snow covering the rest of the
ground, this slab is always clear, an all-season marker for the site of the prisoners'
original attempt to commemorate the crimes against them.
Horst Hoheisel, "Warm memorial" at Buchenwald, detail, 1995.

Horst Hoheisel and Henning Langenheim, "Arbeit macht frei" projection onto the Brandenburger
Tor, 27 January 1996.
Christian Boltanski, Micha Ulltnan, Rachel Whiteread
While taking a walk in Berlin's former Jewish Quarter, the artist Christian
Boltanski found himself drawn curiously to the occasional gaps and vacant lots be-
tween buildings. On inquiring, he found that the building at Grosse Hamburger-

strasse 15 and 16 had been destroyed by Allied bombings in 1945 and never rebuilt.
In a project he mounted for the exhibition Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit in October
1990 called Missing House, the artist thus set to work retracing all the lives of people
—
who had lived in this "missing house" between 1930 and 1945 both the Jewish Ger-
mans who had been deported and the non-Jewish Germans who had been given
their homes. 13
Boltanski found family photographs and letters, children's drawings, ra-
tioning tickets, and other fragments of these lives, photocopied them, and put them
all together with maps of the neighborhood in archival boxes. At this point, he had

nameplates hung on the white plastered wall of the building nexl door to identify the
now missing inhabitants, lews and non-Jews — leaving the lot empty. The Missing
House projeel became emblematic for Boltanski of the missing lews who had once
inhabited it; as its void in\ ited him to fill it with memory, he hoped it would incite
others to memory as well.
In two other installations, one realized and the other as yet only proposed,
artists Micha Oilman and Rachel Whiteread have also turned to both bookish themes
and negative spaces in order to represent the void left behind by the "people of the
book." To commemorate the infamous Nazi book-burning of 10 May 1 933, the city
of Berlin invited Micha I'llman, an Israeli-bom conceptual and installation artist,
to design a monument for Berlin's Bebelplatx. Today the cobblestone expanse of the
Bebelplatz is still empty of all forms except for the figures of people who stand there
and peer down through a ground-level window into the ghostly white, underground
room of empty bookshelves I'llman has installed. A steel tablet set into the stones
simply recalls that this was the site of some of the most notorious book-burnings and
quotes Heinrich Heine's famouslv prescient words, "Where books are burned, so one
day will people be burned as well." But the shelves are still empty, unreplenished, and
it is the absence of both people and books that is marked here in yet one more empty
memorial pocket.
Indeed, the English sculptor Rachel Whiteread has proposed casting the very
spaces between and around books as the memorial figure by which Austria's miss-
ing Jews would be recalled in Vienna's Judenplatz. In a competition initiated by Nazi-

hunter Simon Wiesenthal in 1996, a distinguished jury of experts appointed by the
city chose a brilliant, if abstract and controversial, design by the Turner Award-
winning British artist Rachel Whiteread. Her winning proposal for Vienna's official
Holocaust memorial — the positive cast of the space around books in an anonymous
library, the interior turned inside-out — thus extends her sculptural predilection for
solidifying the spaces over, under, and around everyday objects, even as it makes the
book itself her central memorial motif. But even here, it is not the book per se that
constitutes her now displaced object of memory but the literal space between the
book and us. For as others have already noted, Whiteread's work since 1988 has made
brilliantly palpable the notion that materiality can also be an index of absence:
whether it is the ghostly apparition of the filled-in space of a now demolished row
house in London {House launched Whiteread to international prominence) or the
proposed cast of the empty space between the book leaves and the wall in a full-size
library, Whiteread makes the absence of an original object her work's defining pre-
Memory, Countcrmemory 107

occupation. 14 Like other artists of
her generation, Rachel Whiteread
is concerned less with the Holo-
caust's images of destruction and
more with the terrible void this
destruction left behind.

Given this thematic edge in
her work, it is not surprising that

Whiteread was one of nine artists
and architects initially invited to
submit proposals for a Holocaust

memorial in Vienna. Other invi-
tees included the Russian instal-
lation artist Ilya Kabakov, Israeli
architect Zvi Hecker, and the

American architect Peter Eisen-
man. As proposed, Whiteread's

cast of a library turned inside-out
measures approximately 33 feet
by 23 feet, is 13 feet high, and re-
sembles a solid white cube. Its
outer surface would consist en-

tirely of the roughly textured
Above, below, and facing page: Micha Ullman, "Bibliotek" negative space next to the edges
memorial to the Nazi book-burnings, Bebelplatz, Berlin, 1996.
of book leaves. On the front wall
facing onto the square there
would be a double-wing door, also

cast inside out and inaccessible. In
its formalization of absence on
one hand and of books on the

other, it found an enthusiastic re-
ception among a jury looking for a
design that "would combine dig-

nity with reserve and spark an es-
thetic dialogue with the past in a
place that is replete with history." 15

Despite the jury's unanimous decision to award Whiteread's design first place and to
begin its realization immediately, the aesthetic dialogue it very successfully sparked in
this place so "replete with history" eventually paralyzed the entire memorial process.
For like many such sites in Vienna, the Judenplatz was layered with the invis-
ible memory of numerous anti-Semitic persecutions — a synagogue was torched
here in a pogrom in 1421, and hundreds of Jews died in the autos-da-fe that fol-
lowed. Though Whiteread's design had left room at the site for a window into the ar-
chaeological excavation of this buried past, the shopkeepers on the Judenplatz pre-
ferred that these digs into an ancient past also be left to stand for the more recent
murder of Austrian Jews as well. And although their anti-Whiteread petition of two
thousand names refers only to the lost parking and potential for lost revenue they
fear this "giant colossus" will cause, they may also have feared the loss of their own
Christian memory of this past. For to date, the sole memorial to this medieval mas-
sacre was to be found in a Catholic mural and inscription on a baroque facade over-
looking the site of the lost synagogue. Alongside an image of Christ being baptized in
the River Jordan, an inscription in Latin reads: "The flame of hate arose in 1421,
raged through the entire city, and punished the terrible crimes of the Hebrew dogs."

Rachel Whiteread, scale model of the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Vienna, 1997.
In the end, the reintroduction into this square of a specifically Jewish narrative may
have been just as undesirable for the local Viennese as the loss of parking places.
In fact, unlike Germany's near obsession with its Nazi past, Austria's relation
to its wartime past has remained decorously submerged, politely out of sight. Aus-
tria was a country that had (with the tacit encouragement of its American and So-
viet occupiers) practically founded itself on the self-serving myth that it was
Hitler's first victim. That some 50 percent of the Nazi S.S. was composed of Aus-
trians or that Hitler himself was Austrian-born was never denied. But these facts
also never found a place in Austria's carefully constructed postwar persona. In a city
that seemed to have little national reason for remembering the murder of its Jews,
the entire memorial project was soon engulfed by aesthetic and political Sturm und
Drang, and the vociferous arguments against the winning design brought the pro-
cess to a halt. Maligned and demoralized, Whiteread soon lost her stomach for the

Rachel Whiteread,
model for the
Judenplatz with
inserted Holocaust
Memorial,
Vienna, 1997.
fight and was resigned, she told me, to the likelihood that her memorial would
never be built.
But then suddenly, in early 1998, the city of Vienna announced that a com-
promise had been found that would allow Whiteread's memorial to be built after all.
By moving the great cube three feet within the plaza itself, the city found that there
would be room for both the excavations of the pogrom of 1421 and the new memo-
Metnory, Countermemory 111

rial to Vienna's more recently murdered Jews. Nonetheless, the debate in Austria has
remained curiously displaced and sublimated. Lost in the discussion were the words
one of the jurors and a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Robert Storrs,
had used to describe what made Whiteread's work so appropriate in the first place.
"Rather than a tomb or cenotaph," Storrs wrote,
Whiteread's work is the solid shape of an intangible absence — of a
gap in a nation's identity, and a hollow at a city's heart. Using an

aesthetic language that speaks simultaneously to tradition and to
the future, Whiteread in this way respectfully symbolizes a world
whose irrevocable disappearance can never be wholly grasped by

those who did not experience it, but whose most lasting monu-
ments are the books written by Austrian Jews before, during and in
the aftermath of the catastrophe brought down on them.
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Memorial to the Deported Jewish Citizens of the Bayerische Viertel,
Bayerische Platz, Berlin, 1993.

Renata Stih mid Frieder Schnock, "At the
Bayerische Platz, /en's may sit only on
yellow junk benches." /'</// oj the memo-

rial installation ai the Bayerische I'latz,
Berlin, 1993.
Rather than monumentalizing only

the moment of destruction itself,
Whiteread's design would recall that
which made the "people of the

book" a people: their shared rela-
tionship to the past through the
Juden diirfen am was shared relation-
book. For it this
Bayerischen Platz nur ship to a remembered past through
die gelb markierten the book that bound Jews together,
and it was the book that provided

Sitzbiinke benutzen.
the site for this relationship.
Though Whiteread is not Jewish,

she has — in good Jewish fashion —
cast not a human form but a sign of
humanity, gesturing silently to the acts of reading, writing, and memory that had
once constituted this people as a people. If it is really true that Vienna has chosen to
go ahead with Whiteread's allusive and rigorously intellectual design, then the city
and its Jewish community must both be congratulated: the Jewish community for
the courage and audacity of its aesthetic convictions, and the city for finally bring-
ing boldly to the surface its previously subterranean shame.
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock
As did the American artist Shimon Attie during his stay in Berlin, the Berlin
artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock find their city essentially haunted by its
own lying beauty, its most placid and charming neighborhoods seemingly oblivious
to the all-too-orderly destruction of its Jewish community during the war. Tree-lined
and with its nineteenth-century buildings relatively unscathed by Allied bombs

Renata Stih and Frieder
Schnock, Memorial to the
Deported Jewish Citizens
of the Bayerische Yiertel, Arischen und

Bayerische Plat:, Berlin, nichtarischen
1993. Kindern wird
das Spielen
miteinander
untersagt.
during the war, the Bayerische Viertel (Bavarian Quarter) of Berlin's Schoneberg dis-
trict is particularly peaceful these days and off the tourist track. It had also been
home to some sixteen thousand German Jews before the war, many of them profes-
sional and well-to-do, including at different times Albert Einstein and Hannah
Arendt. But with nary a sign of the war's destruction in evidence, nothing in the
neighborhood after the war pointed to the absence of its escaped, deported, and
murdered Jewish denizens.
Haunted precisely by this absence of signs, and skeptical of the traditional
memorial's tendency to gather what they thought should be pervasive memory into
a single spot, Stih and Schnock won a competition in 1993 for a memorial to the
neighborhood's murdered Jews with a proposal to mount eighty signposts on the
corners, streets, and sidewalks in and around the Bayerische Platz. Each would in-
clude a simple image of an everyday object on one side and a short text on the
other, excerpted from Germany's anti- Jewish laws of the 1930s and 1940s. On one
side of such a sign, pedestrians would see, for example, a hand-drawn sidewalk
hopscotch pattern, and on the other its accompanying text: "Arischen und
nichtarischen Kindern wird das Spielen miteinander untersagt" (1938; Aryan and
non-Aryan children are not allowed to play together). Or a simple red park bench
on a green lawn: "Juden diirfen am Bayerischen Platz nur die gelb markierten
Sitzbanke benutzen" ( 1 939; On the Bavarian Place, Jews may sit only on yellow park
benches). Or a pair of swimtrunks: "Berliner Bademanstalten und Schwimmbader
diirfen von Juden nicht betreten werden" (3.12.1938; Baths and swimming pools in
Berlin are closed to Jews). A black-and-white rotary telephone dial: "Telefonan-

s*. hlusse von I lulo 11 werden von der Posl gekundigt" (29.7. 1940; Telephone lines to
lew sh i households will be t ul oil ).'
With the approval ol the Berlin Senate, which had sponsored the memo-
; i.i I competition, the artists put their signs n p on lampposts throughout the quar-
tei w ithout announcement, provoking a Hurry of complaints and calls to the po-
lice that neo Nazis had invaded the neighborhood with anti-Semitic signs. Thus
reassured thai the public had taken notice, the artists pointed out that these same
laws had been posted and announced no less publicly at the time — but had pro-
1
voked no such response by Germans then. At least part of the artists point was
that the laws then were no less public than the memory ol them was now. Indeed,
one sign with the image ol a file even reminds local residents that "all files dealing
with anti-Semitic activities [were] to be destroyed" (16.2.1945); and another

image of interlocking Olympic rings recalls that "anti-Semitic signs in Berlin
|
were] temporarily removed tor the 1936 Olympic Games." That is, for the artists,
even the absence ol signs was an extension of the crime itself. Stih and Schnock
recognize here that the Nazi perse-
cution of the Jews was designed to
be, after all, a self-consuming Holo-
caust, a self-effacing crime.
this
now
way
The only
these images
"signs" of Jewish
once Jewish neighborhood are

the posted laws that paved the
for the Jews' deportation
murder. As part of the cityscape,

and texts would
life
and
"infil-
in
qpo
trate the daily lives of Berliners," Stih
has explained, no less than the pub-

licly posted laws curtailed the daily
lives of Jews between 1933 and 1945.
Die in Berlin aufgestellten
And by posting these signs sepa-
judenfeindlichen Schilder
rately, forcing pedestrians to happen
werden 1936 wahrend der
Olympischen Spiele
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock,
Memorial to the Deported Jewish Citizens voriibergehend entfernt.

of the Bayerische Viertel, Bayerische Platz,
Berlin, 1993.

Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock,
Memorial to the Deported Jewish

Teletonanscnlussc
von Juden werden Citizens of the Bayerische Viertel,
yTST^V
von der Post
^r^^Tk Baverische Plate, Berlin, 1993.
gekiindigt.
l
29.7. l U()
Benutzungsverbot
oftentlicher upon them one or two at a time,
•
Fernsprecher. ,
.
, , ,
2] p [94J
the artists can show that the laws
»»
incrementally "removed Jews from

the social realm," from the protec-
tion of law. These "places of re-
membrance" would remind local

Berliner Bade-
anstalten und citizens that the murder of the
Schwimmbader neighborhood's Jews did not hap-
diirfen von Juden pen overnight, or in one fell swoop,
nicht betreten
werden.
but over time — and with the tacit
acknowledgment of their neigh-

i 12.1938
bors. Where past citizens once nav-
igated their lives according to these
laws, present citizens would now

navigate their lives according to the memory of such laws.
In keeping with their vision of decentralized memory, of integrating memory

of the Holocaust into the rhythms of everyday life, Stih and Schnock proposed an
audacious "nonmonument" for the 1995 international competition for Germany's
national memorial to Europe's murdered Jews. Taking as their premise the essential
impossibility and undesirability of a "final memorial" to commemorate the Nazis'
"final solution" to the Jewish question, they submitted a design called Bus Stop — The
Non-Monument. Rather than filling the designated space of nearly five acres for the
national memorial between the Brandenburger Tor and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin,
they would keep it desolate as a reminder of the destruction brought upon Berlin by
the Nazis and turn it into an open-air bus terminal for coaches departing to and re-
turning from regularly scheduled visits to several dozen concentration camps and
other sites of destruction throughout Europe. "There is not one single bus stop in
central Berlin from which you can take buses to the places listed in this schedule," the
artists tell us in a foreword to their precis for the project. 18 Therefore, they call for a
single place whence visitors can board a bright red bus at a regularly scheduled time

Km .1 nonstop trip both to such well known sites as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and
Dachau and to the lesser known massacre sites in the cast, such as Vitebsk and
[rawniki. A central steel ami glass waiting hall flanking the 426 foot long boarding
platform would provide travelers with computer generated histories and bibliogra-
phies of all the sites listed at the terminal, a kind of memorial travel office that would
extol history and memory over the usual forgetfulness, the attempt at forced amne-
sia, thai drives leisure vacations. Buses would leave hourly for sites within Berlin and
dail) for sites outside the city. Not so much a "central memorial" as a "centrifugal"
memorial. Bus Stop would thus send visitors out in all directions into a European-
wide matrix ol memorial sites.
With twenty-eight buses making local Berlin runs every hour and another
sixty or so branching out daily for sites throughout Germany and Europe, this would
also be, quite literally, a mobile memorial that paints its matrix of routes with mem-
ory. By becoming such a part of everyday life in Berlin, these red buses emblazoned
with destinations like Buchenwald and Sobibor would, the artists hope, remind every-
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Bus Stop — The Non-Monument. Proposal for the 1995
competition for Berlin's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe."

one of the "thorough integration of the terror machinery [itself] within everyday life
in Germany from 1933 to 1945." 19 At night the rows of parked and waiting buses, with
their destinations illuminated, would become a kind of "light-sculpture" that dis-
solves at the break of day into a moving mass to reflect what Bernd Nicolai has called
"the busy banality of horror." 20
Possibly the most popularly acclaimed of all entries in the 1995 competition,
Bus Stop placed eleventh among the 528 submissions from around the world. The
competition's organizers, intent on concentrating memory of Europe's murdered
Jews into a single site in Berlin, felt that Bus Stop dispersed memory too far and
wide, implicitly spreading the blame for the murder onto the regimes of conquered
nations during the war. In response, the artists self-published a 128-page Fahrplan,
or timetable, of actual departure times of buses, trains, and planes in the public
transportation sector for all the sites in their original memorial plan. Unlike a con-
ventional timetable, however, Stih and Schnock added concise histories of the sites
themselves to accompany the hours of departure and return. The schedule to Lodz
tells us both how to get there and how many lews lived there before the war, how the
ghetto there was established, when it was liquidated, how the deported lews were
murdered, and who did the killing. Similar histories accompany schedules to
Lublin, Stutthof, Riga, Drancy, Babi Yar, and the other ninety or so destinations, in-
cluding dozens in Germany alone.
Like other countermemorials, Bus Stop would, in effect, return the burden of
memory to visitors themselves by forcing visitors into an active role. Though the bus
rides might recall the deportations themselves, these would be deportations not to
actual history but to memory itself. Indeed, the ride to and from the sites of de-
struction would constitute the memory-act, thereby reminding visitors that memory
can be a kind of transport through space in an ongoing present moment, as well as
a transport through time itself. In this way, the memorial remains a process, not an
answer, a place that provides time for memorial reflection, contemplation, and learn-
ing between departing and arriving.
For an American watching Germany's memorial culture come to terms with
the Holocaust, the conceptual torment implied by the countermonument holds im-
mense appeal. As provocative and difficult as these monuments may be, no other me-
morial form seems to embody so well both the German memorial dilemma and the
limitations of the traditional monument. The most important "space of memory"

for these artists has not been the space in the ground or above it but the space be-
tween the memorial and the viewer, between the viewer and his or her own memory:
118 Memory, Counter memory

tlie- place ol the memoi ial in the \ iewer's mind, heart, and conscience. To this end,
the) have attempted to embody the ambiguity and difficulty ol I [olocausl memori-
alization in Germany in conceptual, sculptural, and architectural forms that would
return the burden oi memory to those who come looking for it. Rather than creating
sell 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 ol disappearing, in-
visible, a\u\ other countermonuments, they have attempted to build into these spaces
the capacity lor changing memory, places where every new generation will find its
own significance in this past.
In the end, the countermonument reminds us that the best German memo-
rial to the fascist era and its victims may not be a single memorial at all — but sim-
ply the never-to-be-resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to
do it, in whose name, and to what end. That is, what are the consequences of such
memory? How do Germans respond to current persecutions of foreigners in their
midst in light of their memory of the Third Reich and its crimes? Instead of a fixed
sculptural or architectural icon for Holocaust memory in Germany, the debate itself
perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions — might now be enshrined.
The status of monuments in the twentieth century remains double-edged
and is fraught with an essential tension: outside of those nations with totalitarian
pasts, the public and governmental hunger for traditional, self-aggrandizing mon-
uments is matched only by the contemporary artists' skepticism of the monument.
As a result, even as monuments continue to be commissioned and designed by gov-
ernments and public agencies eager to assign singular meaning to complicated
events and people, artists increasingly plant in them the seeds of self-doubt and im-
permanence. The state's need for monuments is acknowledged, even as the tradi-
tional forms and functions of monuments are increasingly challenged. Monuments

at the end of the twentieth century are thus born resisting the very premises of their
birth. Thus, the monument has increasingly become the site of contested and com-
peting meanings, more likely the site of cultural conflict than one of shared national
values and ideals.

CHAPTER FIVE
Memory Against Itself
in Germany Today
Jochen Gerzs Countermonuments
"When it comes to fascism, Germans tend to be speechless. But here, you see, they have
been offered a blank slate on which to rent their feelings."
—Jochen Gerz, Art News
"What we did not want was an enormous pedestal with something on it presuming to
tell people what they ought to think."
—Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, Galeries Magazine
EXIT /Dachau
"faced with Germany's past, a number of people my age, even those too
young to remember events, or born after the war, have always been aware of not knowing
exactly how to behave," the artist Jochen Gerz has said. "They exercise a sort of sublime
repression of the past. my idea of repressing the work of art. Since Freud's teachings,
Hence
it is well known that things we have repressed continue to haunt us. My intention is to turn
this relation to the past into a public event." 1
Not only has the Berlin-born Gerz succeeded
in making Germany's fraught relations with its past a painfully public event. In half a dozen
memorial projects and installations between 1972 and 1998, he has also opened a new gen-
eration's eyes to the essential incapacity in conventional public institutions like the muse-
um or the monument to serve as wholly adequate sites for Germany's tortured memory of
120
Jochen Gerz, EXIT / Materialien zum Dachau-Projeckt. Installation in Bochum, 1974.
the Holocaust. For Gerz, "this relation" between the Germans and their past neces-
sarily includes the relation between Germans and their memorial sites. After Gerz's
work over the past twenty-five years, neither relation has been quite the same.
In fact, perhaps the first truly countermemorial installation in Germany was

mounted by Jochen Gerz for Sammlung Kunstmuseum in Bochum in 1972. In EXIT/
Materialien zum Dachau Projekt, Gerz built a long hall with twenty tables in two rows
often, each with a chair underneath and a dimly lit lightbulb dangling overhead. On
each table he anchored a photo album, handcrafted by the artist, with images he had
taken at the Dachau museum earlier that year. Without explicit directions, visitors to
the installation would seat themselves at the tables and begin to leaf through the pho-
tographs in the albums. Because the albums were bound in freshly cut wooden cov-
ers and the chairs themselves were newly fashioned of unsanded wood, splinters were
rife in both hands and seat.
Each album opened with a photograph of an exit sign from the museum,
and from invisible speakers overhead, visitors heard the recorded sounds of someone
running with plodding, feverish footsteps and out-of-breath panting. Accompanying
122 Memory Against Itself

these sounds were the rapid clacking of a typewriter, with its bell and sound of the
cai i iage return. In this continuous sound loop of running away, ol panting, and of
typing, visitors seemed to be hearing an ongoing escape from the place they had just
s.ii down to visit, as if they had begun their tour of Dachau by looking for a way out.
The albums continued with photographs of a sign with "Gedenkstatten Ord-

nung" memorial site regulations telling visitors how to behave in the museum
.\\u\ concentration camp rooms: no smoking, no dogs, no baby strollers, no litter, no
touching, no straying from the path; the museum is open from nine until five. Im-
ages of further signs from everywhere on the grounds of the former camp follow: do
not damage exhibitions, do not write on the walls; exhibits not recommended for
children under thirteen; and again, no smoking. Then follows a photograph of cush-
ioned benches in the museum with the imprints of visitors' buttocks left behind.
Then a train schedule, photographs of a fire alarm, a fire extinguisher, a telephone
with a blank space for a fire department number. Other signs over doorways read: no
entry, no exit. The lock on a toiiet door is turned part way and reads on either side
"besetzt" and "frei," occupied and free.
Toward the end of the album, the vicarious memory-tourist came upon im-
ages of the museum's guestbooks, wherein the responses from the museum's prior
visitors became part of later visitors' experiences. But even here, Gerz's photographs
showed that the terms of the visitors' responses were strictly enforced: there were
spaces only for the visitor's age, profession, and nationality — just as might have been
found on the concentration camp prisoners' own identity cards. "Do you find the
documentation in this museum instructive?" asks the questionnaire. "Yes or no."
"What do you consider negative/positive in this presentation?" "Do you have any sug-
gestions?" A photograph of a visitor meticulously answering the questions follows.
Though he includes a handful of photographs showing the larger grounds of
the concentration camp, the object of Gerz's tourist photographs from Dachau was
not the well-groomed roll-call area, the various memorial shrines, guard towers, or
barbed wire; nor as it memory of what happened
turns out was his object even the
at Dachau between 1933 and 1945. What Gerz would now remember to us about his
visit was his sense of the seemingly ubiquitious signs that dictated his own memorial
experience at Dachau. His was not memory of the past but the experience of the
present moment as explicitly controlled and shaped by the museum and it was this —
experience he was attempting to show in his installation.
Neither was this only about Gerz's own experience as a postwar tourist at
Dachau nor even about the "memory" he found there. Rather, Gerz wanted to show
Memory Against Itself 123

the uncanny resemblance between the language of "administering memory" at the
Dachau museum and the language that once administered the concentration camp
itself. It was as if the Nazis' efforts to control the lives of former inmates had become
both the latent content and the method of the museum's exhibition of the past. 2 As
his text for the project also makes clear, EXIT / Dachau is more than a critique of this
museum alone; it challenges the capacity of all museums to dictate the terms by
which we remember. Nor would he go so far as to overstate the parallel between the
maintenance of order in an operating concentration camp and its subsequent me-
morial. But in this project, Jochen Gerz was the first artist to critique the Holocaust
memorial museum as a formal, if ironic extension of the authoritarian regime it
would commemorate. 3
For Gerz, there was no escape from the rules governing memory. His aim was
to explore this liminal plane between us and the museum site as constituted in the
memorial's rules. Here he grasped earlier than any of his counterparts the signifi-
cance of our relationship to the site of memory for "our memory." The grounds for
this relationship were not just the declared regulations of the museum but, as Gerz
suggests, the undeclared regulations implicit in any memorial installation that nec-
essarily govern our experiences in their spaces. Through the repetitive photographs
of the outward signs regulating our experience, he gestures to the concentration
camp memorial's entire world of unstated though no less powerful rules for re-
membrance: its veneration of the object, of the hallowed ground in telling the story
of itself.
In fact, Gerz may even be suggesting that what we finally "learn" from such
museums may be less about history than how to comport ourselves in its vicinity. We
learn both the rules of the memorial and the facts of history, but in tandem, and in
ways that mutually shape each other. For better or for worse, Gerz seems to be saying,
we cannot know this history outside of the ways it is shaped for us in the museum. In
this installation, he hoped to draw attention to the ways our experience in the mu-
seum shapes the history we've come to remember, so that we may never mistake one
for the other, even as we cannot know one outside of the other. In the process, he is-
sued an implicit challenge to the museum to distinguish itself ever further from the
legacy it would now preserve.
During this same year, 1972, as Gerz was working through his relationship to
the past as mediated for him by official institutions like the museum, he began to ex-
plore art forms that might be immune to the museum altogether. Trained in lan-
guage, literature, and Sinology, Gerz was fascinated with the possibilities of art forms

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/oc/ien Gerz, "Memorial Site Rides" at the Dachau Memorial Museum, EXIT / Materialien zum
Dachau-Projeckt.

that could exist outside of their own materiality, a kind of action-art that would leave
no material traces. Here he explored ways to enact a visual form that echoed the
manner in which spoken words could leave behind meaning and memory of them-
selves but no other trace. In a video performance Crier jusqua Vepuisement (To cry
until exhaustion, 1972), for example, Gerz stood outdoors on a small outcropping of
rock in Blanc-Mesnil, just north of Paris, and screamed into the air as long and as
loud as he could. Two hundred feet away a video camera and microphone recorded
Gerz as he screamed "Hallo!" at the top of his lungs for tweiUy-five minutes until his
voice was worn to a barely audible whisper. He continued screaming, but no sound
could be heard on the video for the remainder of the video performance. The scream
continued, but now the only sound of it was a recording he had previously taped of
a similar scream, which had been playing in tandem with his live scream — now a
silent scream and a reproduction.

In two other photo installations from the same year, Gerz worked through re-
lated issues of aesthetic competence and ineffectuality in the face of the world's larger
realities. In To Warm the Earth, Gerz assembled ten photographs of himself sprawled
on large, empty patches of plowed earth, in which he appears to be hugging or hold-
ing the ground. But because these photographs are shot from a considerable distance,
the artist's body is little more than a black clump on a vast and desolate landscape. The
idea of this little figure thus warming the earth is both touching and even comically
absurd when we recall, as the art critic Roald Nasgaard aptly reminds us, how the Ger-
man title to this work (anfassen, erwarmen) conjures up "an anfasser or pot holder,
made here (in a rereading of the images) to grasp onto an earth that is too cold to han-
dle." 4 In yet another installation, Gerz was similarly defeated in his attempt to mime
his own photographic reproduction. Here he stood for two hours on a Parisian street
beside a life-sized photograph of his head and shoulders taken only two hours before
in the exact spot. Viewers stopped to compare the real with the photograph and in-
evitably found the real person — now exhausted and drooping — the inferior work.
In a similarly inspired performance in 1974, entitled Leben (Life), Gerz spent

seven hours writing the word Leben in chalk on the floor of the Bochum museum,
over and over again, until the scrawled word covered the entire gallery floor. On a
wall of the gallery opposite the room's entrance he mounted a printed text explain-
ing the significance of his work. When the "show" opened, viewers entered the room,
whose walls were empty except for a text across the hall. As visitors walked over the
floor to read the text, Gerz's chalk handwriting was eventually scuffed off the floor by
their shoes, erased in the visitors' pursuit of its meaning.

Along these lines, Ins contribution to the Documenta exhibition of 1977 in
Kassel took place tiol within the confines of the exhibition hall itself, or even in the
town of Kassel. In Die Transsib. Prospekt (The trans-Sib. prospect), ( lerz traveled ten
thousand miles on the Trans-Siberian Express, from Moscow to Khabarovsk and

back, with his carriage windows dosed and covered. For sixteen days, he traveled in
a sealed train car, oblivions to the passing countryside. He kept no record of the trip
,wu\ brought back no artifacts or other traces of the journey — except for sixteen
slates on which he had imprinted his feet, once on each day of the trip. The journey
would exist only in his mind and in the minds of those who came to Documenta,
where they would see only the sixteen footprinted slates.
Like other performance artists of the day, Gerz made his process the artwork
itself, building into it its own expiration. Because the process itself could not be ex-
hibited, its art remained outside the museum's reach. To "see" the work, viewers
would have to imagine it, thereby initiating their own art process. His work would
now exist in those who had seen it, not in institutions dedicated to "preserving"
and thereby reshaping — it. The moment the process ceased, so technically did the
artwork itself. The traces left behind in images, installations, and exhibitions would,
in their seemingly banal gestures, point out the insufficiency of the preservation
when compared to the act itself and the life of this act in the minds of those who may
have seen it transpire.
Gerz thus came to be widely regarded as one of Europe's most provocative

artists of "erasure" and self-abnegation, his primary objective being the exploration
of what he has called "the no-man's land between the real and its reproduction." 5 In
Gerz's poetry, this would be the moment just before or after language; in his photo-
graphs they are the spaces along the edges, what is just out of the image. Or as his in-
stallation of 1974 would have it, in which a microphone located in the center of the
gallery transmitted the sounds produced there to a loudspeaker in the same room,
"the memorial day for 29 May 1974 is the same day."
The Monument Vanishes: Harburg-Hamburg
Within a year of meeting the Israeli sculptor and performance artist Esther
Shalev on a trip he made to Israel in 1983, Jochen Gerz was one of six artists invited
to propose a design in Hamburg for a "Monument Against Fascism, War, and Vio-
lence — and for Peace and Human Rights." When Gerz first broached his invitation

Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, artists' sketch for the disappearing Harburg Monument
Against Fascism and for Peace, 1985.
to propose a design for this monument, Shalev replied by gesturing out her window
to Israel's own monument-dotted landscape, "What do we need with another mon-
ument? We have too many already. What we need is one that disappears." 6 Here she
agreed to work with Gerz toward finding a form that challenged the monument's tra-
ditional illusions of permanence, its authoritarian rigidity. The resulting collabora-
tion between Gerz and Shalev would thus combine a traditional Jewish skepticism of
material icons and a postwar German suspicion of monumental forms.
With these conditions in mind, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, now
married, designed their countermonument "Against Fascism, War, and Violence
and for Peace and Human Rights." The artists' first concern washow to commemo-
rate such worthy sentiments without ameliorating memory altogether. That is, how
would their monument put such memory in place without usurping the commu-
Facing page: The Harburg Monument Against War and Fascism and for Peace at its unveiling, 1 986.

nity's will to remember? Their second reservation was how to build an antifascist
monument without resorting to what they regarded as the fascist tendencies in all
monuments. "What we did not want," they declared, "was an enormous pedestal
with something on it presuming to tell people what they ought to think." 7 Theirs
would be a self-abnegating monument, literally self-effacing.
So when the city of Hamburg offered them a sun-dappled park setting in the
center of town, they rejected it in favor of what they termed a "normal, uglyish place."
Their countermonument would not be refuge in memory,, tucked away from the
hard edges of urban life, but rather one more eyesore among others on a blighted
cityscape. They chose the commercial center of Harburg, a somewhat dingy suburb
of Hamburg located thirty minutes by subway across the river and populated with a
mix of Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) and blue-collar German families. Set in
a pedestrian shopping mall, their countermonument would rise sullenly amid red
brick and glass shop windows: package-laden shoppers could like it or hate it, but
they could not avoid it.
Unveiled in Harburg in 1986, this forty-foot-high, three-foot-square pillar
was made of hollow aluminum plated with a thin layer of soft, dark lead. A tempo-
rary inscription near its base read — and thereby created constituencies in —
German, French, English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish:
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 re-
main 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.
A steel-pointed stylus with which to score the soft lead was attached at each corner by
a length of cable. As five-foot sections were covered with memorial graffiti, the mon-
ument was lowered into the ground, into a chamber as deep as the column was high.
The more actively visitors participated, the faster they covered each section with their
names, the sooner the monument disappeared. After several lowerings over the next
seven years, the monument itself vanished on 10 November 1993 with its last sinking.
Nothing is left but the top surface of the monument, now covered with a burial stone
inscribed to "Harburg's Monument Against Fascism." In effect, the vanishing monu-

ment has returned the burden oi memory to visitors: now all thai stands hero arc the
memory tourists, forced to rise and to remember for themselves/

With audacious simplicity, the Gerzes' countermonument thus flouted any
number of cherished memorial conventions: its aim was not to console but to provoke,
not to remain fixed bul to change, not to be everlasting but to disappear, not to be ig-
nored by its passersby but to demand interaction, not to remain pristine but to invite
its own violation and desanctification, not to accept graciously the burden of memory
but to throw it back at the town's feet. By defining itself in opposition to the traditional
memorial's task, the Gerzes' Harburg monument illustrated concisely the possibilities
and limitations of all memorials everywhere. In this way, it functioned as a "coun-
terindex" to the ways time, memory, and current history intersect at any memorial site.
How better to remember forever a vanished people than by the perpetually
unfinished, ever-vanishing monument? As if in mocking homage to Jochen Gerz's

national forebears who had
planned the Holocaust as a
self-consuming set of events

— that is, intended to de-
stroy all traces of itself, all
memory of its victims — the

Gerzes designed a self-con-
suming memorial that
would leave behind only the

rememberer and the mem-
ory of a memorial. As the
self-destroying sculpture of
Jean Tinguely and others

challenged the very notion
of sculpture, the vanishing
monument similarly chal-
lenged the idea of monu-

mentality and its implied
corollary, permanence. 9
Citizens add their names to
Harburg's disappearing monument,
1986.

Although self-effacing sculpture and monuments share a few of the same aes-
thetic and political motivations, each also has its own reasons for vanishing. Artists
like Tinguely created self-destroying sculpture in order to preempt the work's auto-
matic commodification by a voracious art market. At the same time, and by extension,
these artists hoped such works would thereby remain purely public and that, by van-
ishing, they would leave the public in a position to examine itself as part of the piece's
performance. "The viewer, in effect, [becomes] the subject of the work," as Douglas
Crimp has observed. Or, in Michael North's elaboration of this principle, "the public
becomes the sculpture." 10

The Gerzes' countermonument took this insight several steps further. "Art, in
its conspicuousness, in its recognizability, is an indication of failure," lochen Gerz has

said. "If it were truly consumed, no longer visible or conspicuous, if there were only
a few manifestations of art left, it would actually be where it belongs — that is, within
the people for whom it was created." 11

The countermonument was direct heir to
Gerz's thesis on art and being, his ambivalence toward art's materiality. For Gerz, it
seemed, once the art object stimulates in the viewer a particular complex of ideas,
Graffiti scrawl on Harburg's disappearing monument, 1989.

Graffiti scrawl on Marburg's disappearing monument, 1989.

emotions, and responses that then come to exist in the viewer independently of fur-
ther contact with the piece of art, it can wither away, its task accomplished.
By extension, once the monument moves its viewers to memory, it also be-
comes unnecessary and so may disappear. As a result, Gerz suggests, "We will one
day reach the point where anti-Fascist memorials will no longer be necessary, when
vigilance will be kept alive by the invisible pictures of remembrance." 12 "Invisible
pictures," in this case, would correspond to our internalized images of the memo-
rial itself, now locked into the mind's eye as a source of perpetual memory. All that
remains, then, is the memory of the monument, an after-image projected onto the
landscape by the rememberer. The best memorial, in the Gerzes' view, may be no
monument at all, but only the memory of an absent monument.
The Gerzes are highly regarded in Europe as poets and photographers and as
conceptual and performance artists. Much of their conceptual art conflates photo-
graphs and poetry, overlaying image with word. In their performances, they aspire
simultaneously to be "the painter, medium, paintbrush, and not just witness to a
work." 13 In their countermonument, the artists attempted a "performative piece" that
initiated a dynamic relationship among artists, work, and viewer, in which none
emerged singularly dominant. In its egalitarian conception, the countermonument
would not just commemorate the antifascist impulse but enact it, breaking down the
hierarchical relationship between art object and its audience. By inviting its own vi-
olation, the monument humbled itself in the eyes of beholders accustomed to main-
taining a respectful, decorous distance. It forced viewers to desanctify the memorial,
demystify it, and become its equal. The Harburg monument denaturalized what the
Gerzes felt was an artificial distance between artist and public generated by the holy
glorification of art. Ultimately, such a monument would undermine its own author-
ity by inviting and then incorporating the authority of passersby.
In fact, in this exchange among artist, art object, and viewer, the sense of a
single authority, a single signatory, dissolves altogether: that the work was never re-
ally self-possessing and autonomous is now made palpable to viewers. The artist pro-
vides the screen, passersby add their names and graffiti to it, which causes the artist
to sink the monument into the ground and open up space for a fresh exchange. It is
a progressive relationship that eventually consumes itself, leaving only the unobjec-
tified memory of such an exchange. In its abstract form, this monument claims not
to prescribe — dictate, the artists might say — a specific object of memory. Rather, it
more passively accommodates all memory and response, as the blank-sided obelisk

always has. It remains the obligation ofpassersby to enter into t he art: it makes artist-
rememberers and sell memorializers out of every signatory. By inviting viewers to

commemorate themselves, the countermonument reminds them that to some extent
.ill any monument can do is provide .1 trace of its makers, not of memory itself.
The Gerzes' monument was a visual pun intended: as the monument would
use up symbolically against fascism before disappearing, it calls upon us to rise up

literally in its stead. It reminds us that all monuments can ever do is rise up symbol-
ically against injustice, that the practical outcome of any artist's hard work is dissi-
pated in its symbolic gesture. The Gerzes suggest here that it is precisely this impo-
tence of the symbolic stand that they abhor in art, the invitation to vicarious
resistance, the sublimation of response in a fossilized object. In contrast, they hoped

that the countermonument would incite viewers, move them beyond vicarious re-
sponse to the actual, beyond symbolic gesture to action.
From the beginning, the artists had intended their work to torment — not
reassure — its neighbors. They have likened it, for example, to a great black knife in
the back of Germany, slowly being plunged in, each thrust solemnly commemo-
rated by the community, a self-mutilation, a kind of topographical hara-kiri. 14 The
countermonument objectifies for the artists not only the Germans' secret desire
that all these monuments just hurry up and disappear but also the urge to strike
back at such memory, to sever it from the national body like a wounded limb. In
particular, the Gerzes took mischievous, gleeful delight in the spectacle of a Ger-
man city's ritual burial of an antifascist monument it just spent $144,000 to
make — enough, in the words of Hamburg's disgruntled mayor, to repave ninety-
seven yards of Autobahn. Indeed, the fanfare and celebration of its unveiling in
1986 were repeated in all subsequent lowerings, each attended by eager city politi-
cians, invited dignitaries, and local media. That so many Germans would turn out
in such good faith to cheer the destruction of a monument against fascism exem-
plified, in the artists' eyes, the essential paradox in any people's attempt to com-
memorate its misdeeds.
At every sinking, the artists attempted to divine a little more of the local re-
action. "What kind of monument disappears?" some citizens wanted to know. "Is it
art when we write all over it?" asked teenagers. At one point, the Gerzes went from
shop to shop to gather impressions, which varied from satisfaction at the attention
the monument had generated in their commercial district to other, less encouraging
responses. "They ought to blow it up," said one. Another chimed in, "It's not so bad

The Harburg monument after its seventh lowering, 1992.

The Harburg monument disappears, 10 November 1993.

10. Oktober 1986 1. September 1987 23. Oktober 1988 6. September 1989 22. Februar 1990
Einweihung 1. Absenkung 2. Absenkung 3. Absenkung 4. Absenkung
Harburg's disappearing monument.
as far as chimneys go, but there ought to be some smoke coming out of it."
15
The
Gerzes found that even resentment is a form of memory.
In their original conception, the Gerzes had hoped for row upon row of neatly
inscribed names, a visual echo of the war memorials of another age. This black col-
umn of self-inscribed names might thus remind all visitors of their own mortality,
not to mention the monument's. Execution did not follow design, however, and even
the artists were taken aback by what they found after a couple of months: an illegi-
ble scribble of names scratched over names, all covered over in a spaghetti scrawl,
what Gerz likened to a painting by Mark Tobey. People had come at night to scrape
over all the names, even to pry the lead plating off its base. There were hearts with
"Jiirgen liebt Kirsten" written inside, Stars of David, and funny faces daubed in paint
and marker pen. Inevitably, swastikas began to appear. How better to remember what
happened than by the Nazis' own sign? After all, lochen insists, "a swastika is also a
signature." In fact, when city authorities warned of the possibility of vandalism, the
Gerzes had replied, "Why not give that phenomenon free rein and allow the monu-
ment to document the social temperament in that way?" 16
The town's citizens were not as philosophical, however, and began to con-
demn the monument as a trap for graffiti. It was almost as if the monument, covered
over in this scrawl, taunted visitors in its ugliness. But what repelled critics more was

4. Dezember 1990 27. September 1991 27. November 1992 10. November 1993
5. Absenkung 6. Absenkung 7. Absenkung letzte Absenkung
not clear. Was it the monument's unsightly form or the grotesque sentiments it cap-
tured and then reflected back to the community? As a social mirror, it became doubly
troubling in that it reminded the community of what happened then and, even
worse, how they responded now to the memory of this past. To those members of the
community who deplored the ease with which this work was violated, the local news-
paper answered succinctly: "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." 17 The
countermonument accomplished what all monuments must: it reflected back to the
people — and thus codified — their own memorial projections and preoccupations.
Today, all that remains of the Harburg monument against fascism and for
peace is an empty clearing marked by a tablet. The pillar itself is visible in a glass-
enclosed chamber below, and visitors mill around to read the memorial's texts,
which remain behind. They have, as the Gerzes had hoped, become the memorial
for which they searched. In this way, the memorial has not only returned the burden
of memory to those who come looking for it but has changed the way a generation
of artists and the public have come to regard the very idea of the memorial. This be-
came apparent not only in the somewhat monumental piles of articles written
about the memorial but in the dozens of "countermemorial" projects that became
the standard for subsequent Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany.

The Invisible Monument: Saarbrucken
In keeping with the bookish, iconoclastic side of Jewish tradition, the first
"memorials" to the Holocaust period came not in stone, glass, or steel — but in nar-
rative. The Yizker Bikher (memorial books) recalled both the lives and the destruction
of European Jewish communities according to the most ancient of Jewish memorial
media: the book. Indeed, as the preface to one of these books suggests, "Whenever we
pick up the book we will feel we are standing next to [the victims'] grave, because
m
even that the murderers denied them." 18 The shtetl scribes hoped that when read, the
Yizker Bikher would turn the site of reading into memorial space. In response to what
has been called "the missing gravestone syndrome," the first sites of memory created
19
by survivors were thus interior spaces, imagined gravesites.
In his next memorial installation at Saarbrucken, Jochen Gerz seems to have

recapitulated not only this missing gravestone syndrome but also the notion of the
memorial as an interior space. Celebrated in Germany for his hand in Harburg's van-
ishing monument, Gerz was appointed in April 1990 as a guest professor at the
School of Fine Arts in Saarbrucken. In a studio class he devoted to conceptual mon-

uments, Gerz invited his students to participate in a clandestine memory-project,
what he regarded as a kind of guerrilla memorial action. The class agreed enthusias-
tically, swore themselves to secrecy, and listened as Gerz described his plan: Under the
cover of night, eight students would steal into the great cobblestone square leading to
the Saarbriicker Schloss, former home of the Gestapo during Hitler's Reich. The cas-
tle and square, after all, had also been where the Nazis brought the Jews of Saar-
brucken on Kristallnacht in 1938 to publicly humiliate them; and it was from this
square that the town's remaining Jews had been deported to Gurs in southern France
on 22 October 1940.
Gerz continued: Carrying book bags laden with cobblestones removed from
other parts of the city, the students would spread themselves across the square, sit
in pairs, swill beer, and yell at each other in raucous voices, pretending to have a
party. All the while, in fact, they would stealthily pry loose some seventy cobble-
stones from the square and replace them with the like-sized stones they had
brought along, each embedded underneath with a nail so that they could be located
later with a metal detector. Within days, this part of the memorial-mission had
been accomplished as planned. 20
Meanwhile, other members of the class had been assigned to research the
names and locations of every former Jewish cemetery in Germany — more than two
I f w M
.1 » " _ 1 _ _ L
^1 ^ ,
Jochen Gerz, Place of the Invisible Memorial — 2,146 Stones Against Racism, Saarbriicken, 1997.

thousand of them — now abandoned, destroyed, or vanished. When their classmates
returned from their beer party, their bags heavy with cobblestones, all set to work en-
graving the names of missing Jewish cemeteries on the stones, one by one. The night
after they finished, the memory-guerrillas returned the stones to their original
places, each inscribed and dated. But in a twist wholly consistent with the Gerzes'
previous countermonument, the stones were replaced face down, leaving no trace of
the entire operation. The memorial would be invisible, itself only a memory, out of
sight and therefore, Gerz hoped, in mind. „
Yet as Gerz also realized, because the memorial was no longer visible, pub-
lic memory would depend on knowledge of the memorial-action becoming public.
Toward this end, Gerz wrote Oskar Lafontaine, minister-president of the Saarland
and vice president of the German Social Democratic Party, apprising him of the
deed and asking him for parliamentary assistance to continue the operation. La-
fontaine responded with 10,000 German marks from a special arts fund and a
warning that the entire project was patently illegal. The public, however, had now
become part of the memorial. For once the newspapers got wind of the project, a
tremendous furor broke out over the reported vandalization of the square; edito-
rials asked whether yet another monument like this was necessary; some even
wondered whether the whole thing had been a conceptual hoax designed merely to
provoke a memorial storm.

As visitors flocked to the square looking for the seventy stones out of more
than eight thousand, they, too, began to wonder "where they stood" vis-a-vis the me-
morial: Were they standing
on it? In it? Was it really
,-- „-*;**»' v.. there at all? On searching
for memory, Gerz hoped,

they would realize that the
memory was already in
them. This would be an in-

terior memorial: as the only
Jochen Gerz, Place of the
Invisible Memorial — 2,146

Stones Against Racism, detail
of stone.

Jochen Gerz, Place of the Invisible Memorial — 2,146 Stones Against Racism, Saarbriicken, 1997.

standing forms in the square, the visitors would become the memorials for which
they searched.
Where the politicians stood was less equivocal. As Jochen Gerz rose to address
the Saarbrucken Stadtverband to explain his project, the entire Christian Democra-
tic Union contingent stood up and walked out. The rest of the parliament remained
and voted the memorial into public existence. Indeed, they even voted to rename
the plaza "Square of the Invisible Monument," its name becoming the only visible
sign of the memorial itself. Whether the operation had ever really taken place, the
power of suggestion had planted the memorial where it would do the most good:
not in the center of town but in the center of the public's mind. In effect, Jochen
Gerz's 2,146 Stones Against Racism returns the burden of memory to those who
come looking for it.
In the catalogue Gerz compiled for this invisible memorial, the artist deep-
ened his project further by including an implicit challenge to his own reliance on ab-
sence as thematic motif for the memory Germany's missing lews. In her catalogue
essay, cultural historian Irit Rogoff suggests that in this project, as well as in subse-
quent installations, Gerz's object of commemoration here is not history at all but the
visitor's insatiable desire to repair and fill in the now-absent event with their knowl-
edge of it. 21 In another essay, Rogoff elaborates: "If the task of commemoration is in
part one of attaining redemption then its language is one of resolution. There is an
entire vocabulary which stands in for our desire for such resolution: to heal, to make
amends, to work through, to commemorate, to pay respects, to lay to rest." 22 But at
the same time, she wonders whether the contemporary obsession with absence also
reflects the not-so-benign desire on the part of Germans to assign a reductive unity
to Jewish victims that did not exist when they were alive. As the Jews had been as-
cribed monolithically evil characteristics by their killers, Rogoff wonders now

whether contemporary German mourners have begun to substitute one monolithic
understanding for another. In neither case are victims recalled in their multiple, var-
iegated, and individual human lives — but only as blocks for the projections of the
Germans' limited grasp of their victims.
Questions Are the Monument in Bremen, Biron, and Berlin
Based largely on his work in Harburg and Saarbrucken, lochen Gerz was
awarded the Roland Prize for Art in the Public Realm in November 1990. With this

award came a commission to realize a projecl of the artist's choosing somewhere in
the public spaces of Bremen. Gerz gratefully accepted the prize, but then, instead of
submitting a proposal for a new public art work in Bremen, he created a question-
naire that he then (.ailed a public sculpture. "Imagine the traditional situation," Gerz
explained m the first ot six public seminars held on the occasion of his prize.
The senate says: "We want you to do a public work." In the Renais-
sance, the princes knew where a socle for a sculpture should be

placed. Today the politician comes with the taxpayers' money. I
asked the cultural senator about his wishes concerning a sculpture.

After thinking intensively, he felt ill at ease and said he couldn't
speak for the others. This shows that today one can't pose such
questions any more. Three years later I asked the people themselves
what they wanted. It's not a question of developing a form, but of

telling ourselves what our standpoint is.
23
Over the next five years, Gerz initiated a series of questionnaires to different
groups of Bremen citizens, including the entire mailing lists of the two largest con-
temporary art museums in Bremen and a local gallery, students from the art acad-
emy, a local factory, readers of the regional edition of the daily newspaper, taz, and
the students and faculty at the University of Bremen. All told, 232 out of 50,000 in-
vited citizens responded first to three general questions: What topic should the work
address? Do you believe that your ideas can be realized in a work of art? Would you
like to participate in the artwork? The artist then presided over a series of six public
seminars in which he thematized and evaluated the answers of each of the six re-
sponding groups to these questions, according to what he felt were the respondents'
preoccupying issues — ecology, racism, politics, social criticism, and art. The public
work, in this case, would truly be the interested public's work. Those who took time
to respond — that is, to visit — these questions, to attend the public seminars and
share in the answers of others would both constitute the work's public and, in Gerz's
view, the work itself.
Because the seminars were conducted in question-and-answer format (par-

ticipants and the artist asking each other questions), they became extensions of the
original questionnaire, an ongoing dialogue between artist and public. With the ask-
ing and the answering, the inner changes of mind, and the understanding that would
come with hearing others' answers, the process remained animate as long as it was

not reduced to a single space in the city, Gerz suggested. No material object could ad-
equately substitute for the process or represent it afterward. Nevertheless, if one had
to imagine a public space that would not be the "end of the road and whose goal is
not to possess an object," one example might be The Bridge. 24 "It stands alone," he
said. "It has elements of: 'from-to . .
.
', 'before-after', or 'between.' Beneath it is the
flowing water. Again and again there is the quality of being unfinished, the quality
of being en route." Therefore, he announced, if citizens wanted some public "sign"

of the process itself, one that would not put an end to the process of questioning just
what should constitute "public art," he would place it on a bridge, a text that would
read:
When you look out on the water, you can see yourself and at the
same time you are the image that leaves you, like a bird its trem-
bling bush. Perhaps forever. The Bremen Questionnaire is a sculp-
ture developed from the images of all those who imagined it. All of
them are the authors. Thus, something came to be which should be

many things, since all the answers were different. They show the
fear of dictatorship, the desire to protect the earth, and anger about
the language of politics. Many are suspicious of the arts, too. "We
have invented empty spaces, only to fill them up . . .
."
The Bremen
Questionnaire is dedicated to its authors, and to everyone who
stops here and sees something that doesn't exist. 25
Today the text and names of its "authors" are inscribed into a triangular section jut-
ting out of the pedestrian walkway on the Burgermeister-Schmidt Bridge in Bremen.
Water flows beneath, and traffic moves noisily nearby. Against this literal flowing
motion beneath and above it, the text is implacably still. It is a signpost pointing to-
ward the questions still being asked and answered by the citizens of Bremen, but in
its stasis it shows why it could not be the public work in and of itself.
Even as the public "sculpture of the Bremen Questionnaire" was unfolding,

the ancient village of Biron in France's Dordogne, was inviting Gerz to design a re-
placement for the town's central monument to its war dead. Having lived for most of
his life in Paris, Gerz and his work were well known to the adviser for the visual arts
of Aquitaine, who recommended the artist to the town for its project. But after re-
searching this village of 133 inhabitants, its medieval architecture, its chateau, and

stone escarpments, ( lerz surprised the town's officials by proposing to restore the for-
mer obelisk to the town's war dead in its original stone and color. In ( ier/.ian fashion,
however, he would not stop with the inanimate obelisk. To its stone lace, he would
now add enamel squares with the engraved answers to what he called the "secret
question" he would put to each and every one of the town's inhabitants: "For what
would you risk vour life?" 26
In March 1996, with the assistance of students from the Art College of Bor-
deaux, Gerz interviewed each of the town's citizens individually and recorded their
answers, which he then had inscribed anonymously on 127 enamel plates. These red
plates were mounted on the obelisk, its pedestal, and the surrounding stone base,
and the monument was dedicated in July 1 996. Yet because this was, in Gerz's words,
to be "The Living Monument of Biron," he has also designated a local citizen to ask
this "secret question" in confidential interviews with all future adults of the town
when they turn eighteen. These answers, too, will be added to the obelisk over time,
so that the "memory" of past dead becomes an ongoing, unfinishable work in
progress. In putting such a question at the heart of the monument and then allow-
ing new answers to change the monument's surface over time, this memorial
process challenges the very certainty of both the obelisk's form and the reasons for
remembering in the first place. Every generation will thus renew the memorial in
the image of its own preoccupations, grasping the deaths of forebears in its own,
imagined reasons for dying.
Born in Berlin in 1940, Jochen Gerz has said that one of his own earliest
memories stems from the day in 1944 when his family home was hit by a bomb. Lit-
erally struck dumb by the sight of his home destroyed, "he watched the fir-trees in
the garden gently topple

— 'They fell so slowly and burned like candles. Everything
was so quiet.'" 27 Reportedly, he lost his voice entirely for the next year and spoke
again only on his fifth birthday. When, fifty-three years later, Gerz became one of
twenty-five artists invited to propose a design for Germany's national "memorial for
murdered Jews of Europe" in Berlin, he responded by codifying the question that

seems to have been on his lips since he was four: "Warum?" Why?
Given his preference for contingent and open-ended questions over the
monumentally definitive and stultifying answer, the question at the heart of Gerz's
proposed design for Berlin cannot come as a surprise. "The question 'Why did it
happen?' is central to the Memorial Monument," Gerz has written, "since it embod-
ies the point of departure for reflection and life after the Shoah." 28 Like his memo-

rial proposals in Biron and Bremen, this design does not pretend to embody mem-
ory itself so much as it does the "point of departure" for memory in those who come
to visit it. His design would accomplish this by dividing the massive five-acre site
into two parts: three-quarters of the square would be paved in stones engraved with
visitors' answers to the question posed atop thirty-nine evenly spaced, brushed steel
light-poles, approximately fifty-two feet high, in fiber-optic cable in the thirty-nine
languages of the Jewish victims from throughout Europe: "\Varum?" The other
quarter of the memorial site would be devoted to a building Gerz calls "the Ear,"
which would pose the same question aloud and invite visitors to respond in writing
and to each other in conversation, discussion, and debate. In this way, Gerz says, the
building "prepares visitors for their role as 'authors' and points them toward their
own contributions." 29
Gerz estimates that there would be room in the site for some 165,000 replies,
each cut one and a half inches deep by a computerized writing device into the stone.
The script of the answers (each averag-
ing around 120 letter-characters)
would be so small that subsequent vis-
itors would have to bend over to read it.
The inscription process itself would

take place in situ, as a "physical event
a form of atonement or 'working

through,' " in Gerz's words, which would
remain always unfinished and ongoing.
On the opening of the memorial, he
says, it w ould be important

r
to note the
blank slate of memory waiting to be
filled in. As the entire space is eventually
filled in, new space would be created by
replacing the earliest responses with new

ones. Memory and the answers it gener-
ates would be as ephemeral as the pass-
ing generations themselves.
Jochen Gerz, The Secret Question: The

Living Monument of Biron, 7996.

I oi ( rerz's proposal, "the Ear" building was designed by the Iranian architeel
Nasi ine Seraji and would include throe large rooms, one each for memory, answers,
and silence. As administered by a foundation established by the Bundestag, the first
loom, Memory, would serve as the first European repository for Steven Spielberg's
Shoah Oral 1 listorv Foundation, where visitors would view and hear the video tes-
timonies of Holocaust survivors gathered by the foundation. In the second room,

Answers, visitors would meet with each other to attempt answers to the question,
"Why did it happen?" Here resident scholars of the Holocaust would volunteer to
serve as facilitators for such answers, and archives holding the thousands of answers
ottered by other visitors would be available on shelves for reading and yet further dis-
cussion, from the room of Answers, visitors would go into a circular room at the
center of "the far," where it would be so dark that visitors would be unable to gauge
the room's dimensions or to know who else was in the room. Except for a bench
around the room's circumference, the room would be empty. Gradually visitors
would be able to make out a round spot of sky above, as filtered through a translu-
cent window in the ceiling. The only sound would be a work by American composer
La Monte Young, "eternal e," which consists of a single tone that can be heard by the
human ear only in faint waves. "Listeners [would] not know if what they are hear-
ing is an existing composition or unique music they are imagining and composing
themselves," Gerz has explained. In effect, he concludes, "The third room is a mirror
in which one sees nothing — neither the testimonials of others, nor one's own recol-
lections. It is a space of meditation. Imageless. Arfs contribution after Auschwitz." 30

Like Gerz's other memorial proposals, his design for Berlin's "memorial for
Europe's murdered Jews" aims to make room for memory not within the landscape
so much as within visitors themselves. But unlike the elegant, if laconic simplicity of
his previous countermonumental forms, this proposal's formal execution seemed to

embody too literally the project's extremely complicated and multiple conceptual
aims, all of them seemingly brought into physical relief at once. Conceptually, each
part of this design speaks volumes about what memorials can and cannot accom-
plish: its question returns the burden of memory-work to its visitors; its engraved
stones make visitors' responses part of the installation and mark the multiplicity of
memory and memory into singular

understanding, thereby refusing to collectivize
meaning; its plaza evolves over time to reflect changing memory and preoccupations,
thus keeping memory animate and alive. In all of its elements, this plan replicates
precisely those parts of his other works that make them so important and engaging.

This said, however, the Findungskommission appointed to choose a winning
design, of which I was part, also concluded that the formal design seemed to have
outsmarted itself, beginning with the question "Why?" Echoed from pylon to pylon
in all the languages of the victims, "Why?" seemed here to be answered perpetually
by further asking "Why?" The question seemed unending in and of itself, an invita-
tion to mystification, not just asked here, but codified as unanswerable. Whereas
"What happened?" and "How did it happen?" can be answered historically, "Why?"
seemed to invite metaphysical, philosophical, even religions speculation. And al-
though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such speculation, the only answers
to "Why?" built into European, Christian religious traditions tend to be self-justi-
fying, even redemptory. "Why?" "Because it was God's way." Or, "Because of hu-
mankind's innate evil." In If This Is Man, Primo Levi asks a guard at Auschwitz why
he has just struck an inmate friend of his for no apparent reason. The guard's an-
swer strikes Levi as paradigmatic: "Hier ist kein warum." Here there is no why. It is
an inappropriate question to ask — of the guard then or of ourselves now, Levi im-
plies, because it also invites us to make judgments based on our moral universe out-
side the camps. When asked on the historical level, such a question can be answered
only by the perpetrators themselves, whose answer must also be self-justifying. Only
those who perpetrated the crime can answer "why" they did it, and in these answers
we receive the Nazis' rationale for the crime itself, in which Jews remain submerged
in the Nazis' worldview — as subhuman, parasitic contaminators of German racial
purity and culture. Why did the Nazis kill the Jews? Only the Nazis can tell. The rest
of us should not be put in a position to provide a rationale for the Nazis. And even
if this is part of Gerz's aim, the implied silence after such a question may also begin
sound like the silence of the victims themselves, made to answer somehow for their
own murder.
Beyond the mystifying question, the Findungskommission also resisted the
formal execution of the memorial itself. The steel pylons with the fiber-optic light
and "Warum" in thirty-nine languages were meant to challenge the more traditional
(cold and authoritarian) stone and mortar. But here we found an unintentional but
clear visual reference to a trade pavilion with flagpoles, each with a national language
instead of colors at the top. Even the "earlike" document house, where visitors would
answer the question among themselves, seemed too literal a reference to the ear. In-
deed, where the brilliance of Gerz's other works seemed to come precisely in their
succinct abstraction, here the concrete references — even when unintended — seemed
to reduce the concepts underlying them to mere space, material, and object.

Uthough the memorial's commissioners named Gerz's proposal as one of
four finalists, and sympathy for its conceptual aims was uniformly high, organizers fi-
d.iIK concluded thai its brilliant concept was not matched by formal execution of de-
sign. This memorial, perhaps the most important to Gerz of all his projects, would re-
main unbuilt. By the end of the competition, however, it was also clear that in his
previous work, fochen Gerz had single-handedly defined the counter-memorial,

whose vci \ precepts had been codified in the Berlin memorial's precis. In fact, it could
also be said that without ( lerz's earlier brilliant critiques of the memorial — as found
in the Dachau project, at Harburg, and at Saarbriicken — this memorial competition
in Berlin could not have been conceived as it was. Only in its open invitation to chal-
lenge the memorial's traditional redemptory and consoling aims was this project's
premise acceptable to a new generation of artists in the first place. For this reason
alone, Jochen Gerz might always be regarded as co-creator of Germany's national me-
morial for Europe's murdered Jews — whether he actually designed it or not.

CHAPTER SIX
Daniel Libeskind's Jewish

Museum in Berlin
The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture
" [According to Schelling], the uncanny [is] something which ought to have remained
hidden but has come to light."
— Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny"
how does a city "house" the memory of a people no longer at "home" there?
How does a city like Berlin invite a people like the Jews back into its official past after
having driven them so murderously from it? Such questions may suggest their own,
uncanny answers: A "Jewish Museum" in the capital city of a nation that not so long
ago voided itself of Jews, making them alien strangers in a land they had considered
"home," will not by definition be Heimlich but must be regarded as unheimlich — or,
as our translation would have it, uncanny. The dilemma facing the designer of such
a museum thus becomes: How then to embody this sense of unheimlichkeit, or uncan-
niness, in a medium like architecture, which has its own long tradition of heimlich-
keit, or homeliness? Moreover, can the construction of a contemporary architecture
remain entirely distinct from, even oblivious to, the history it shelters? Is its spatial
existence ever really independent of its contents?
In their initial conception of what they then regarded as a Jewish Museum

"extension" to the Berlin Museum, city planners hoped to recognize both the role
Jews had once played as co-creators of Berlin's history and culture and that the city
was fundamentally haunted by its Jewish absence. At the same time, the very notion
of an "autonomous" Jewish Museum struck them as problematic: the museum want-
ed to show the importance and far-reaching effect of Jewish culture on the city's
152
1
\
history, to give it the prominence it deserved. But many also feared dividing German
from Jewish history, inadvertently recapitulating the Nazis' segregation of Jewish
culture from German. This would have been to reimpose a distinct line between the
history and cultures of two people — Germans and Jews — whose fates had been
inextricably mingled for centuries in Berlin. From the beginning, planners realized
that this would be no mere reintroduction of Jewish memory into Berlin's civic
landscape but an excavation of long-suppressed memory.

Freud may have described such a phenomenon best: 'iThis uncanny is in real-
ity nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the
mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.
. . . The uncanny [is] something which ought to have remained hidden but has come
to light." 1
Thus would Berlin's Jewish Museum generate its own sense of a disquiet-
ing return, the sudden revelation of a previously buried past. Indeed, if the very idea
of the uncanny arises, as Freud suggests, from the transformation of something that
once seemed familiar and homely into something strange and "unhomely," then how
better to describe the larger plight of Jewish memory in Germany today? Moreover,
if "unhomeliness" for Freud was, as Anthony Vidler suggests, "the fundamental
propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized,
derealized, as if in a dream," then how better to describe contemporary Germany's re-
lationship with its Jewish past? At least part of the uncanniness in such a project
2
stems from the sense that at any moment the "familiar alien" will burst forth, even
when it never does, thus leaving one always ill at ease, even a little frightened with
anticipation — hence the constant, free-floating anxiety that seems to accompany
every act of Jewish memorialization in Germany today.
After Anthony Vidler's magnificent reading of the "architectural uncanny," I
would also approach what I am calling an "uncanny memorial architecture" as "a
metaphor for a fundamentally unlivable modern condition." 3

But rather than look-
ing for uncanny memory per se, or uncanny memorials or architecture, we might
(after Vidler) look only for those uncanny qualities in memorial architecture. In fact,
what literary critic Robin Lydenberg aptly sees in "uncanny narrative" might be also
applied here to a particular kind of uncanny memorial architecture: the stabilizing
function of architecture, by which the familiar is made to appear part of a naturally

ordered landscape, will be subverted by the antithetical effects of the unfamiliar. 4 It
is a memorial architecture that invites us into its seemingly hospitable environs only
to estrange itself from us immediately on entering.
By extension, the memorial uncanny might be regarded as that which is nec-
154 Libeskind's Jewish Museum

essai il) antiredemptive. It memory
is tli.it ol historical events which never domesti-
cates sir li events, never makes us at home with them, never brings them into the re-
assm ing house oi redemptoi v meaning. It is to leave such events unredeemable yet
still memorable, unjustifiable vet still graspable in their causes and effects.
In designing a museum tor such memory, the architect is charged with hous-
ing memory that is neither at home with itself nor necessarily housable at all. It is
memory redolent with images of the formerly familiar but that now seems to defa-
miliarize and estrange the present moment and the site of its former home. Whether
found in Shimon Attic's estrangement of contemporary sites with the images of their
past or Renata St ih and Frieder Schnock's reintroduction of anti-Jewish laws into
formerly Jewish neighborhoods emptied of Jews by these very laws, such memory
marks the fraught relationship between present-day Germany and its Jewish past.
In the pages that follow, I would like to tell the story of architect Daniel Libes-
kind's extraordinary response to the nearly paralyzing dilemma Berlin faces in trying
to reintegrate its lost Jewish past. Because this story is necessarily part of a larger his-
tory of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, I begin with a brief history of this museum's
genesis in prewar Berlin in order to situate the museum's place in the mind of Libes-
kind himself. From here I follow with the city planners' more contemporary con-
ceptualization of the museum and its impossible questions and then conclude with
Libeskind's nearly impossible-to-build architectural response. The aim here will
not be merely to explain Libeskind's startling design but to show how as a process it
articulates the dilemma Germany faces whenever it attempts to formalize the self-
inflicted void at its center — the void of its lost and murdered Jews.
The Jewish Museum and the Berlin Museum
As is often the case with community museums, the origins of the Jewish Mu-
seum in Berlin were inauspicious, even quaint. A Dresden jeweler by the name of Al-
bert Wolf (1841-1907) bequeathed a small art collection (consisting mostly of coins,
medallions, and portraits) to the Jewish community in Berlin. In the years that fol-
lowed, the community's sefiior librarian, Moritz Stern, continued to develop the col-
lection, showing it between 1917 and 1930 in three exhibition rooms located in the
massive synagogue complex at 31 Oranienburger Strasse as the "Art Collection of the
Jewish Community in Berlin." Meanwhile, encouraged by this gift and the warm re-
ception of a series of exhibitions on "Jewish art" that showed in London and Berlin
Libeskind's Jewish Museum 155

in 1908, a private collector from Berlin, Salli Kirschstein, initiated efforts to found a
Society for the Friends of the Jewish Museum.

When Karl Schwarz took over the collection in 1928, it numbered some 20
paintings and 227 ceremonial objects. A year later, Schwarz and Kirschstein finally
founded the Jewish Museum Society, and Schwarz oversaw an acquisitions campaign
that increased the collection's holding to 80 paintings and 348 ceremonial objects. At
this point, the proclaimed goal of the society was "to propagate interest in Jewish art
and culture, and with the help of funding and gifts from tlj£ circle of members, to
transform the art collection into a Jewish Museum." From the beginning, Berlin's
5
Jewish Museum thus conceived of itself as a place where Jewish art and culture, from
the beginnings of Jewish history to the art of the present day, would be exhibited. In
the words of an earlier chronicler, Hermann Simon, "Every cultural manifestation
of Judaism would be given equal consideration," and collections would not be de-
fined according to religious criteria only. This would become a permanent home for
the "living presentation of Jewish art and cultural history."' 1
Indeed, it was with catastrophic timing that Berlin's first Jewish Museum
opened in January 1933, one week before Adolph Hitler was installed as chancellor.
Housed in refurbished exhibition halls at the Oranienburger Strasse complex already
home to the synagogue there, as well as to the Jewish community center and library,
Berlin's first Jewish Museum opened quite deliberately in the face of the Nazi rise to
power with an exhibition of work by artists of the Berlin Seccesionists, led by the
German Jewish artist Max Liebermann. 7 It is almost as if the museum had hoped to
establish the institutional fact of an inextricably linked German-Jewish culture, each
a permutation of the other, as a kind of challenge to the Nazis' assumption of an es-
sential hostility between German and Jewish cultures.
Yet even here, the very notion of what constituted a "Jewish Museum" would
be a matter of contention for the community: Would the museum show art on Jew-
ish religious themes by both Jewish and non-Jewish artists? Or would it show any-
thing by Jewish artists? The question of what constituted "Jewish art" had been
broached. Indeed, from its origins onward, questions of "Jewishness,""Germanness,"
and even "Europeanness" in art exhibited by the museum began to undercut the case
for something called a "Jewish Museum" in Berlin. So when the museum opened
with a show of Max Liebermann's work in 1933, the very idea of a taxonomy of reli-
gious communities and their art seemed an affront to the most assimilated of Berlin's
Jews. The Jewish art historian and director of the Berlin Library of Arts, Curt Glaser,
attacked both the idea of a "Jewish Museum" in Berlin and the presumption that

I iebei mann's work w .is. In dint oi his fewish birth only, somehow essentially Jewish
even though there was nothing thematieally Jewish in the work itself. Such a show,
(laser wrote at the time, "leads to a split, which is totally undesirable and from an aca-
demic point ol view m no w.iv justifiable. I.iebermann, for example, is a European.

1 le is a German, a Berlin artist. The fact that he belongs to a Jewish family is totally
irrelevant with regards to the form and essence of his art." 8

Thus was an integra-
tion^ model for the Jewish Museum in Berlin first proposed and first challenged
within days of the Museum's official opening. 4

In spite of constant pressure by the Nazis over the next five years, the Jewish
Museum mounted several more exhibitions of German Jewish artists and their mi-
lieu. But with the advent of the Nuremberg laws defining "the Jew" as essentially
"un-German" the Nazis suddenly forbade all but Jews to visit the museum, and all
but Jewish artists to exhibit there. With this sleight of legislative hand, the Nazis thus
transformed the institutional "fact" of an inextricably linked German-Jewish cul-

ture into a segregated ghetto of art and culture by Jews for Jews. Moreover, as "Jew-
ish art," all that was shown there was officially classified as entartete, or decadent.
Just as the Nazis would eventually collect Jewish artifacts to exhibit in a planned
museum "to the extinct Jewish race," they turned the Jewish Museum into a mu-
seum for entartete Kunst.
Whether assimilated to Nazi law or not, like the other Jewish institutions in
its complex on Oranienburger Strasse and across the Reich, the Jewish Museum was
first damaged, then plundered during the pogrom on Kristallnacht, 10 November
1938. Its new director, Franz Landsberger, was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen
before eventually emigrating to England and the United States. Nazi authorities dis-
mantled the museum and confiscated its collection of art and artifacts. Some four
hundred paintings from the collection were eventually found in the cellars of the for-
mer Ministry for Culture of the Reich on Schluterstrasse after the war. According to
the museum's chroniclers, Martina Weinland and Kurt Winkler, the cache of paint-
ings was seized by the JRSO (Jewish Relief Organization) and handed over to the
Bezalel National Museum in Jerusalem, which later became the Israel Museum. 10
Meanwhile, Berlin's Markische Museum, which had been established in 1876
to tell the story of the city's rise from a provincial hub to the capital of a reunified
German Reich in 1876, continued to thrive. Like the exhibitions of any official insti-
tution, those at the Markische Museum reflected the kinds of self-understanding
dominant in any given era — from the Weimar period to the Nazi Reich, from post-
war Berlin to the Communist takeover of the east. But when the Berlin Wall was

erected in August 1 96 1 West Berliners suddenly found themselves cut off from the
,
Markische Museum, now located behind the wall in the east. Hoping to preserve the
memory of a single, unified Berlin as bulwark against its permanent division and un-
willing to cede control of the city's "official history" to the party apparatchiks of the
east, a citizens' committee proposed a Berlin Museum for the western sector, which
the Berlin Senate approved and founded in 1962.
Thus founded in direct response to the violent rending of the city by the
Berlin Wall, the Berlin Museum moved from one improvised home to another in
the western sector of the city. Only in 1969 did it find a permanent home under the
roof of what had been the "Colliegenhaus" — a baroque administrative building de-
signed and built by Philipp Gerlach for the "Soldier King" Friedrich Wilhelm I in
1735 — located on Lindenstrasse in what had once been the center of Southern
Friedrichstadt. Gutted and nearly destroyed during Allied bombing raids during the
war, the Colliegenhaus had been carefully restored during the 1960s and would now
provide some 27,000 square feet of exhibition space for the new Berlin Museum.
The aim of the museum would be to represent and document both the cultural and
historical legacies of the city— through an ever-growing of maps, collection art, ar-
tifacts, plans, models, and urban designs — show the long evolution of
all to Berlin
from a regional Prussian outpost to capital of the German Reich between 1876 and
1945. But due to a chronic lack of space, a large part of its holdings — including its
departments of theatrical history and Judaica, among others — had been more or
less permanently consigned to the museological purgatory of storage and scattered
in depots throughout the city.
Even as the Berlin Museum searched for a permanent home during the 1960s,
Heinz Galinski, then head of West Berlin's Jewish community, publicly declared that
the city was also obligated to build a Jewish Museum to replace the one destroyed by
the Nazis in 1938. All but the main building of the Oranienburger Strasse synagogue
complex had been damaged beyond repair during the war and demolished in 1958,
so the museum could not be rebuilt in its original site. Moreover, because that com-
plex had been located in the eastern sector of the city, it would be as inaccessible to
the west as the Markische Museum. According to social historian Robin Ostow,
Galinski told the Berlin Stadtverwaltungthat he didn't want a mere replication of the
ghetto at the higher level of a cultural institution. Rather, he wanted the history of
Berlin's Jews to be exhibited in the Berlin Museum as part of the city's history. Here 11
the laudable, if nearly impossible to execute "integrationist model" of Jewish and
Berlin history once again found its voice.

With this mandate added to its own, the Berlin Museum began to collect ma-
in i. ils and artifacts on Jewish history lor what its curators hoped would be an au-
tonomous Jewish department within the Berlin Museum. In 1971, two years after
opening in the Colliegenhaus on Lindenstrasse, the Berlin Museum mounted its first
exhibition devoted to Jewish life in Berlin, a gigantic show entitled "Contribution
and late: 300 Years of the Jewish Community in Berlin, 1671-1971." Though it fo-
cused primarily on famous lewish Berliners from the 1920s and seemed to embody
an intense nostalgia for the "heile Welt" (holy world) of pre-Nazi Germany, accord-
ing to Robin Ostow, this exhibit also inspired public discussion around the need for
an autonomous Jewish Museum within the Berlin Museum.

Four years later, in 1975, the Berlin Senate established a Jewish "department"
within the Berlin Museum. In consultation with Heinz Galinski, the Senate an-
nounced that "close association with the Berlin Museum in the shape of one of its
departments protects the Jewish Museum from isolation and conveys an interwoven
relationship with the whole [of] Berlin cultural history." 12 At this point, the Society
for a Jewish Museum was established with Galinski as its chair, its express mandate
to promote the Jewish Museum "as a department of the Berlin Museum." But by this
time, Frankfurt had already built an independent Jewish Museum, and a Berlin cit-
izens' group calling itself Friends of the Jewish Museum continued to agitate for a
separate building for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. And once again, the debate was
joined around an irresolvable paradox, articulated here in a 1985 op-ed article in Die
Welt: "Nowhere else was the image of the successful German-Jewish symbiosis re-
garded with more conviction than in pre-1933 Berlin; yet Berlin was also the chief
starting point for the years of terror, 1933 to 1945. The history of Berlin will always
be interwoven with the history of the Berlin Jews." 13 The writer of this article con-
cludes that because an autonomous Jewish Museum could never compensate for the
terrible loss of Berlin's Jewish community, the "establishment of a Jewish museum in

14
the Berlin of today is neither meaningful nor necessary." His solution, like the Sen-
ate's and Galinski's, would be to locate the remaining Jewish collections in the Berlin
Museum proper, to reintegrate them into Berlin's story of itself.
Between 1982 and 1987, the debate around the Jewish Museum assumed two
parallel tracks: one over whether to locate the museum outside the Berlin Museum,
the other over where it would be sited z/it were located outside the Berlin Museum.
Various groups proposed and opposed a number of venues, including the Moritz-
platz and Hollmannstrasse; others, like the Ephraim Palais, became politically and
logistically untenable. In 1986, while various sites for the Jewish Museum were being

debated, even the Prinz-Albrecht Palais was suggested to the Society for a Jewish Mu-
seum, to which the society responded indignantly: "Should this of all palaces become
a symbol of Berlin Judaism? The culture of the murdered in the house of the mur-
derers? No more needs to be said." 15
Indeed, no more was said on locating the Jewish
Museum in the former Berlin home of the Nazi Party.
In November 1986, the Jewish Museum Department of the Berlin Museum
was moved temporarily to the Martin Gropius Bau, where it could exhibit a portion
of its holdings. The status of its new home was best described by Volker Hassemer,
senator for culture, at its opening. "The new display rooms [at the Gropius Bau] are
a milestone in the gradual process to reconstruct and extend the Jewish department
of the Berlin Museum," he said, before continuing,
They remain, nonetheless — and this must be stated quite frankly
to the public — a temporary solution on the path to the ideal solu-
tion desired by us all. That is, a Jewish department as a recogniza-
ble component of the Berlin Museum. . . . We must make it quite
clear that the creators and the products of this culture were not
something "exotic," not something alienated from this city and its
cultural life, but that they were and still are a part of its history. . .
In view of this obligation . . . , I am convinced it is both correct and

justified not to develop the Jewish department of the Berlin Mu-
seum as the core of an independent Jewish museum in Berlin, but
as an independent department within the Berlin Museum. 16
This view was corroborated by Hans-Peter Herz, Chair of the Society for a Jewish
Museum, who also stated plainly, "We do not want a special museum for the Berlin
Jews, but a Jewish department within the Berlin Museum." 17
In 1988, the Senate agreed to approve financing for a "Jewish Museum De-
partment" that would remain administratively under the roof of the Berlin Museum
but would have its own, autonomous building. A prestigious international compe-
tition was called in December 1988 for a building design that would both "extend"
the Berlin Museum and give the "Jewish Museum Department" its own space. But
because this was also a time when city planners were extremely sensitive to the de-
structive divisiveness of the Berlin Wall itself, which the Berlin Museum had been
founded to overcome, they remained wary of any kind of spatial demarcation be-
tween the Museum and its "Jewish Museum Department" — hence, the unwieldy
name with which they hoped to finesse the connection between the two: "Extension
ol the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum Department."

According to planners, the Jewish wing would be both autonomous and in-
tegrative, the difficulty being to link a museum o! civic history with the altogether
ink nil treatment oi that city's Jews. The questions such a museum raises are as
How to do this in a form that would not

daunting as they are potentially paralyzing:
suggest reconciliation and continuity? How to reunite Berlin and its Jewish part
without suggesting a seamless rapprochement? How to show Jewish history and cul-
ture as part of German history without subsuming altogether? How to show Jew-it
ish culture as part of and separate from German culture without recirculating all the
old canards of "a people apart"?
Rather than skirt these impossible questions, the planners confronted them
unflinchingly in an extraordinary conceptual brief for the competition that put the
questions at the heart of the design process. According to the text by Rolf Bothe (then
director of the Berlin Museum) and Vera Bendt (then director of the Jewish Depart-
ment of the Berlin Museum), a Jewish museum in Berlin would have to comprise
three primary areas of consideration: ( 1 ) the Jewish religion, customs, and ritual ob-
jects; (2) history of the Jewish community in Germany, its rise and terrible destruc-
tion at the hands of the Nazis; and (3) the lives and works of Jews who left their mark
18
on the face and the history of Berlin over the centuries. But in elaborating these
areas, the authors of the conceptual brief also challenged potential designers to ac-
knowledge the terrible void that made this museum necessary. If part of the aim here
had been the reinscription of Jewish memory and the memory of the Jews' murder
into Berlin's otherwise indifferent civic culture, another part would be to reveal the
absence in postwar German culture that demanded this reinscription.
Most notably, in describing the history of Berlin's Jewish community, the au-
thors made clear that not only were the city's history and Jews' history inseparable
but that nothing (not even this museum) could redeem the expulsion and murder of
Berlin's Jews
— "a fate whose terrible significance should not be lost through any
form of atonement or even through the otherwise effective healing power of time.
Nothing in Berlins history ever changed the city more than the persecution, expulsion,
and murder of its own Jewish citizens. This change worked inwardly, affecting the very
19
heart of the city.'" In thus suggesting that the murder of Berlin's Jews was the single
greatest influence on the shape of this city, the planners also seem to imply that the
new Jewish extension of the Berlin Museum may even constitute the hidden center
of Berlin's civic culture, a focal point for Berlin's historical self-understanding.

r — z-— : rpri
2
vf iig-
Daniel Libeskind, architect's first-floor plan sketch, The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum,
1988.
As the wall had instantly transformed Berlin into a divided city, a visible re-
minder of both World War II and the newer Cold War between eastern and western
Europe, the other great shaper of Berlin's cultural landscape was now evident only by
its absence. The planners' description of the ways the Jews have left their mark on the
face of Berlin history reinforced the centrality of this museum for understanding
Berlin's history. "The history of the Jews of Berlin is so closely tied up with the his-
tory of the city that it is virtually impossible to separate the two; i.e., an autonomous
Jewish Museum is necessary but almost inconceivable without the history of Berlin,
in the same way as, conversely, a Berlin Museum of urban history would lose all
meaning if it did not take its Jewish citizens into consideration." 20 With this in mind,
the aim of the museum would be to show that Jewish history is part of and separate
from German history, a balancing act demanding almost impossible discretion,
diplomacy, and tact.
Daniel Libeskind's Uncanny Design
Guided by this conceptual brief, city planners issued an open invitation to all
architects of the Federal Republic of Germany in December 1988. In addition, they

invited anothei twelve an hitec ts from outside ( lermany, among them the American
architect Daniel I ibeskind, then living in Milan. Born in Lodz in 1946 to the sur-
vivors oi a Polish-Jewish family almost decimated in the Holocaust, I. ibeskind had
long wrestled with main of the brief's questions, finding them nearly insoluble at
the architectural level. Trained first as a virtuoso keyboardist who came to the
United States with violinist Vit/hak I'erlman in I960 on an American-Israeli Cul-

tural Foundation Fellowship, 1 ibeskind gave up music when, in his words, there was
no more technique to learn. From there he turned to architecture and its seemingly
inexhaustible reserve of technique. He studied at Cooper Union in New York under
the tutelage of John Hejduk and Peter Kisenman, two of the founders and practi-
tioners of'deconstructivist architecture." Thus, in his design for a Jewish Museum in
Berlin, Libeskind proposed not so much a solution to the planners' conceptual co-
nundrum as he did its architectural articulation. The drawings he submitted to the
committee in mid-1989 have come to be regarded as masterpieces of process art as
well as architectural design.
Of the 165 designs submitted from around the world for the competition that
closed in June 1 989, Daniel Libeskind's struck the jury as the most brilliant and com-
plex, possibly as unbuildable. It was awarded first prize and thereby became the first
work of Libeskind's to be commissioned. 21

Where the other finalists had concerned
themselves primarily with the technical feat of reconciling this building to its sur-
roundings in a way that met the building authority's criteria and with establishing a
separate but equal parity between the Berlin Museum and its Jewish Museum De-
partment, Libeskind had devoted himself to the spatial enactment of a philosophical
problem. As architectural critic Kurt Forster had once described another design in
this vein, this would be "all process rather than product." 22 And as an example of
process architecture, according to Libeskind, this building "is always on the verge of
Becoming — no longer suggestive of a final solution." 23 In its series of complex tra-
jectories, irregular linear structures, fragments, and displacements, this building is
also on the verge of unbecoming — a breaking down of architectural assumptions,

conventions, and expectations.
His drawings for the museum thus look more like the sketches of the mu-
seum's ruins, a house whose wings have been scrambled and reshaped by the jolt of
genocide. It is a devastated site that would now enshrine its broken forms. In this
work, Libeskind asks, If architecture can be representative of historical meaning, can

it also represent unmeaning and the search for meaning? The result is an extended
building broken in several places. The straight void-line running through the plan

violates every space through which it passes, turning otherwise uniform rooms and
halls into misshapen anomalies, some too small to hold anything, others so oblique
as to estrange anything housed within them. The original design also included in-
clining walls, at angles too sharp for hanging exhibitions.
From Libeskind's earliest conceptual brief onward, the essential drama of

mutually exclusive aims and irreconcilable means was given full, unapologetic play.
For him, the impossible questions mattered the most: How to give voice to an absent
Jewish culture without presuming to speak for it? How to bridge an open wound
without mending it? How to house under a single roof a panoply of essential oppo-
sitions and contradictions? 24 He thus allowed his drawings to work through the es-
sential paradoxes at the heart of his project: how to give a void form without filling
it in? How to give architectural form to the formless and to challenge the very at-
tempt to house such memory?

Before beginning, Libeskind replaced the very name of the project
— "Ex-
tension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum Department" — with his own
more poetic rendition, "Between the Lines." "I call it [Between the Lines] because it
is a project about two lines of thinking, organization, and relationship," Libeskind
says. "One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other is a tortuous
line, but continuing indefinitely. These two lines develop architecturally and pro-
grammatically through
a limited but definite
dialogue. They also fall
apart, become disen-
gaged, and are seen as

separated. In this way,
they expose a void that

runs through this mu-
seum and through ar-
Daniel Libeskind, scale
model of The Jewish

Museum Extension to the
Berlin Museum on a back-
drop of Berlin Holocaust
victims' names, 1988.

c hitecture, a discontinuous void." Through a twisting and jagged lightening bolt of
.1 building, I ibeskind has run a Straight-CUl void, slicing through it and even extend-
ing outside oi it: .in empty, unused space bisecting the entire building. According to
I ibeskind, "The new extension is conceived as an emblem where the not visible has
made itself apparent as a void, an invisible. . . . The idea is very simple: to build the
museum around a void that runs through it, a void that is to be experienced by the
public."
'"
As he makes clear, this void is indeed the building's structural rib, its main
axis, a central bearing wall that bears only its absence.
I ibeskind does not want to suggest that this void was imposed on Berlin from
outside; it was, he implies, one created in Berlin from within. It was not the bomb-
ing of Berlin that created the void, but the vacuum and inner collapse of moral will
that allowed Berlin to void itself o\ Jews. According to Libeskind, this void will also
represent a space empty of Jews that echoes an inner space empty of the love and val-
ues that might have saved Berlin's Jews. At the same time, according to Vera Bendt,
27
his /ig/ag line can suggest the broken backbone of Berlin society.
Indeed, it is not the building itself that constitutes his architecture but the
spaces inside the building, the voids and absence embodied by empty spaces: that
which is constituted by those spaces between the lines of his drawings. By building
voids into the heart of his design, Libeskind thus highlights the spaces between walls
as the primary element of his architecture. The walls themselves are important only
insofar as they lend shape to these spaces and define their borders. It is the void "be-
tween the lines" that Libeskind seeks to capture here, a void so real, so palpable, and
so elemental to Jewish history in Berlin as to be its focal point after the Holocaust
a negative center of gravity around which Jewish memory now assembles. 28
As becomes clear, this design is also descended from a stage in Libeskind's
work characterized by Peter Eisenman as the "not-architectural" — specifically as
represented in his earlier series of drawings, Chamber Works ( 1983). 29 For the sake of
an actual museum, it is almost as if Libeskind has allowed his not-architectural draw-
ings to evolve into buildability, as a last stage of not-architecture, that stage before it
becomes architecture. This design contains all of the signs of not-architecture — just
before it edges into the buildable. As such, of course, his design blurs the lines be-
tween drawing, sculpture, afld architecture.
In this context, Eisenman also describes Libeskind's early efforts at Cooper

Union as attempts "to set elements free from their function in both tectonic and for-
mal senses — from the causality of function and form." 30 Indeed, as we see from a
glance at his earlier series entitled Micromegas, Libeskind's preoccupation with ab-

sences, voids, and silences predates by several years his design for the Jewish Mu-
seum. In this series of drawings from 1978, Libeskind attempts to sever the connec-
tion altogether between form and function. If until then architecture had taught that
torm was function, he hoped to show that form could be much more than merely
functional — by being much less. Here he has exploded geometrical shapes into their
components, rearranging them in ways to show affinities and dissimilarities between
their parts and other shapes.
Unable to disregard the musical compositions of An tou Weber, Arnold Schoen-
berg, and John Cage already so deeply embedded in his consciousness, Libeskind had
also embarked on a series called Chamber Works in 1983, subtitled Meditations on a
Theme from Heraclitus. Music, art, architecture, and history all formed the interstices
of these compositions. In these drawings, a complex of lines gives way to empty

space, which comes into view as the subject of these drawings, which are meant only
to circumscribe spaces, to show spaces as contained by lines. In Chamber Works, the
last in these experimental series, Eisenman finds that Libeskind leaves only traces of
the journey of his process behind. Though as traces these, too, seem almost to evap-
orate, so that by the end of this series there is a gradual collapse of structure back into
the elemental line, thin and drawn out, more space than ink, which is almost gone.
In his 1988 work Line of Fire, Libeskind takes this single line, folds, and breaks it
and thereby transforms it from not-architecture to the buildable.
As Kurt Forster points out, Libeskind's 1989 design for the Jewish Museum
descends not only from Line ofFirebut from a myriad of sources — poetic, artistic,
musical, and architectural: from Paul Klee's enigmatic sketches of Berlin as a site of
"Destruction and Hope" to architect Jakob G. Tscernikow's studies of multiple fold
and intercalated shapes in his Foundations of Modern Architecture (1930) to Paul
Celan's "Gesprach im Gerbirg" (1959). In its compressed and zigzagging folds, as
Forster shows, Libeskind's design echoes both exercises and disruptions of archi-
tecture and art from before the war. Forster thus highlights the striking parallels be-
tween Paul Klee's post-World War I sketches and Libeskind's own idiosyncratic
site-location map of Berlin. 31

Before designing the physical building, Libeskind began by situating the mu-
seum in what might be called his own metaphysical map of Berlin, constituted not so
much by urban topography as it was by the former residences of its composers, writ-
ers, and poets — that is, the cultural matrix of their lives in Berlin. In Libeskind's
words, "Great figures in the drama of Berlin who have acted as bearers of a great hope
and anguish are traced into the lineaments of this museum Tragic premonition

•'"-Z ,T"°
Daniel Libeskind, architect's sketch of a distorted Star of David overlaid onto a map of Berlin,
based on the addresses of Berlin's great cultural figures, 1988.
(Kleist), sublimated assimilation (Varnhagen), inadequate ideology (Benjamin),

mad science (Hoffmann), displaced understanding (Schleiermacher), inaudible
music (Schoenberg), last words (Celan): these constitute the critical dimensions
which this work as discourse seeks to transgress." 32 All were transgressors of the re-
ceived order, and out of these transgressions, culture was born. In Libeskind's view,
the only true extension of the culture Berlin's Jews helped to generate would also
have to transgress it.
In his preliminary sketch of the city, therefore, Libeskind traces what he calls
Berlin's cultural Jewish topography, "an invisible matrix or anamnesis of connections

in relationship" between Germans and Jews. "I felt that certain people and particu-
lar certain writers, scientists, composers, artists and poets formed the link between
Jewish tradition and German culture," Libeskind has said. "So I found this connec-
tion and I plotted an irrational matrix which was in the form of a system of squared

Daniel Libeskind, realistic zinc model of The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum, 1989.
triangles which would yield some reference to the emblematics of a compressed and
distorted star: the yellow star that was so frequently worn on this very site." 33 He then
searched out the addresses of where these writers lived and eventually connected the
streets of Rachel Varnhagen to Friedrich Schleiermacher, or of Paul Celan to Mies
van der Rohe — all toward plotting a particular urban and cultural constellation of
what he calls "Universal History." In this way, Libeskind would thus anchor his build-
ing in Berlin's cultural topography, a palimpsest for contemporary Berlin's landscape.
Little of which, it must be said, was readily apparent to jurors on their first en-
counter with Libeskind's proposal. Indeed, as one juror admitted, this was not a case
of "love at first sight." The group had to work hard to decipher Libeskind's complex
series of multilayered drawings: a daunting maze of lines broken and reconnected,
interpenetrations, self-enclosed wedges, superimposed overlaps. But as the jurors
did, the difficulty of the project itself began to come into view along with its articu-

lation in 1 ibeskind's brief. On peeling away each layer from the one under it, jurors
found thai the project's deeper concept came into startling relief". It was almost as if
the true dilemma at the heart of their project was not apparent to them until revealed
in 1 ibeskind's design. The further they probed, the richer and more complex the de-
sign's significance became until only it seemed to embody — in all of its difficulty
the essential challenge of the project itself.
At the same time, there was some concern among jurors that in the face of
such a stupendously monumental piece of architecture, one that wears its signifi-
cance and symbolic import openly and unashamedly, the contents of the museum
would wither in comparison. As a work of art in its own right, worried the museum's
The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum.

director, Rolf Bothe, "The museum building might seem to make its contents sub-
ordinate and insignificant." 34
Indeed, given the early design, which included walls
slanted at angles too oblique for mounting and corners too tight for installations, this
museum seemed to forbid showing much else beside itself: it would be its own con-
tent. Others worried that such a radical design would in the end generate just too
much resistance among traditional preservationists and urban planners. Was it wise,
they wondered, to choose a design that might not actually get built?
But Klaus Humpert found that by not making an attempt at urban repair and
ignoring the street lines and leaving the baroque building untouched, Libeskind's de-
sign answered the problem precisely by leaving it unresolved. In effect, he found the
building authority's mandate of urban repair at odds with his mandate to show the
link and the separation, the ruptured link. The result is an unrepaired urban land-
scape, an irreparable harm represented as just that: irreparable. Even the juror with
the greatest stake in the IBA's mandate of urban repair, architect Josef Paul Kleihues,
found the design irresistibly appropriate to this particular task. It is one thing to re-
store the architectural integrity of the city and another to enforce architectural in-
tegrity on a site dedicated to the memory of integrity's rupture. Architectural integrity
in this case would mean exposing the impossibility of an architectural recuperation of
a city's moral integrity.
In a very real sense, Libeskind revealed to the jurors what this process and
problematic really were about. Where they had conceived "The Jewish Museum" as
an "extension" to the Berlin Museum, Libeskind literally showed them the interpen-
etration between Berlin history and the history of the Jews in Berlin. The president
of Berlin's Jewish community, Heinz Galinski, for example, had envisioned a kind of
"museum within a museum," something that suggested a neat demarcation in which

neither history would seem to have much to do with the other. "The Jewish Museum
should focus inwardly on Berlin history, yet outwardly appear as a independent unit,"
Galinski wrote. "Libeskind has submitted a design that proposes a totally different
solution. Libeskind's idea of the contextual and architectonic interpenetration of

Berlin history with the history of the Jews in Berlin is so unique that I felt compelled
to give this design my complete approval although this meant relinquishing ideas I
had previously held." He requested that it be built without delay. For in his words,
"No future visitor will be able to look around the Jewish Museum without taking in
the history of Berlin; nor will anyone be able to visit the Berlin Museum without ex-
periencing the history of Berlin's Jewish citizens in the past and the present." 35
Only the mayor of Kreuzberg, the district of Berlin in which the museum

would be built, continued to resist the design. In his words, "A design was expected
that would relate to the proportions of the existing building, lit in inconspicuously
into the green ribbon and leave space lor the mundane needs of the local people lor
green spaces and playgrounds." 36 lor both the mayor and the borough's official ar-
chitect, Libeskind's provocative vision seemed to be at direct odds with their desire
to preserve the green spaces aiul playgrounds there. This was to be a pleasant place
for the people to come relax and it seems, to forget their troubles, both present and
past, but in the end, even city-architect Franziska Kichstadt-Bohlig agreed that per-
haps it was time to "face up to the interpenetration of German and Jewish history
after having repressed it for forty years." 37
Other doubts centered on Libeskind himself. Falkk Jaeger, an architectural

critic and guest of the commission who sat in on deliberations, reminded the jurors
that to this point, Libeskind had never actually built anything, even though he had
won several prestigious design competitions. In Jaeger's eyes, Libeskind was not so
much a practicing architect as he was an architectural philosopher and poet. His
buildings, according to Jaeger, were extremely complex structures consisting equally
of "beams, axes, fragments, imagination and fantasies, which can usually never be
built." At the same time, Jaeger continued, "this building-sculpture, which seems to lie
beside the existing building like a petrified flash of lightening, cannot be called de-
constructivist." Which is to say, it was eminently buildable, even as it would retain
signs of fragments and voids. It is a working through, a form of mourning that reaches
its climax "in the experience of a melancholy which has been made material." In this
way, the critic believes this to be a Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) that need not ful-
fill any other function to justify its existence. Whatever is finally housed here, no mat-
ter what it is, Jaeger concludes, will thus never be conventional, never boring. 38
Inside the Museum: Voids and Broken Narrative
After accepting Libeskind's museum design in the summer of 1989, the Berlin
Senate allotted some 87 million German marks (nearly 50 million U.S. dollars) for its
construction. In 1990, Libeskind submitted a cost analysis for his design (170 million
marks) that nearly doubled the government's allotted budget. But even his revised
budget of 1 15 million marks was deemed politically unthinkable at a time when the
breaching of the Berlin wall had forced all to begin focusing on the looming, unimag-
inable costs of reunification. All government building plans were put on hold as

Exterior view of the untempered zinc facade of The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin
Museum during construction, 1997.
Berlin and Germany came to grips with its shocking new political topography — no
dividing wall between east and west but a country divided nevertheless between the
prosperous and the desperate.

In fact, on 4 July 1991, the government summarily announced that planning
for the Jewish Museum was being suspended, only to have it reinstated in Septem-
ber by the Berlin Senate. Despite continuing calls for the museum's suspension, the
Senate voted unanimously in October to build the museum, however altered it may
be by the new realities on the ground — both economic and topographical. It is sig-
nificant perhaps that in the minds of civic leaders, Berlin's reunification could not
proceed until the city had begun to be reunited with its missing Jewish past.
To trim the museum's costs, city planners ordered the angles of its walls to be
straightened, among dozens of other changes, which helped keep it within its newly
allotted budget of 117 million marks. In addition, a hall intended for outside the
main building was absorbed into the ground floor, several of the outer "voids" were

themselves voided, and the complex plan for the lower floor was vastly simplified so
tli.it it would come into line with the main building. At first, the architect resisted
those changes that seemed to neutralize the difficulty of his design, especially those
thai removed the museum's estranging properties, hater, however, Libeskind offered
a different, more philosophical explanation for what would be necessary changes.

\\ hat was designed while the Berlin wall was standing would now be built in a newly
reunified city. "As soon as Berlin was unified, I straightened all the walls" Libeskind
has written. "My enemies told me was no

I longer a deconstructivist,that I had chick-
ened out, because I had straightened the walls. But I did it because I felt the project
was no longer protected by the kind of schizophrenia developed out of the bilateral
nature of the city." 39 . . ."The museum has to stand and open itself in a different way
in a united and wall-less city." 40
In fact, as Bernhard Schneider forcefully reminds us, no one who enters the
building will experience it as a zigzag or as a jagged bolt of lightning. These are only
its drawn resemblances as seen from above and will have virtually nothing to do with
Interior view of exhibition space at The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum during
construction, 1997.

the volumes of space located inside. 41 The building's radical design is barely appar-
ent as one approaches it from the street. Though its untempered zinc plating is star-
tlingly bright in its metallic sheen, when viewed from the entrance of the Berlin
Museum on Lindenstrasse, the new building, opened to the public in 1999, also
strikes one as a proportionately modest neighbor to the older baroque facade next
door. Indeed, over time, the untempered zinc will weather into the same sky-blue
shade as the untempered zinc window frames on the Berlin Museum next door. The
echo of materials and hue between these buildings is thus suhjle but distinct, the only
apparent link between them at first sight. 4 - 2
Libeskind's museum is also lower and narrower than the Berlin Museum, and
its zinc-plated facade seems relatively self-effacing next to the ochre hues of its
baroque neighbor. Though outwardly untouched, the stolid facade of the Berlin Mu-
seum itself is now recontextualized in its new setting adjacent the Jewish Museum. For
as designed by Libeskind, the connection between the Berlin Museum and Jewish Mu-
seum Extension remains subterranean, a remembered nexus that is also no longer vis-
ible in the landscape, but buried in memory. The Berlin Museum and Jewish Museum
are thus "bound together in depth," as Libeskind says. "The existing building is tied
to the extension underground, preserving the contradictory autonomy of both on the

surface, while binding the two together in depth. Under-Over-Ground Museum. Like
Berlin and its Jews, the common burden — this insupportable, immeasurable, un-
shareable burden — is outlined in the exchanges between two architectures and forms
which are not reciprocal: cannot be exchanged for each other." 43
"The entrance to the new building is very deep, more than ten meters under
the foundations of the Baroque building," Libeskind tells us. "From the entrance, one
is faced with three roads: the road leading to the Holocaust tower which . . . has no
entrance except from the underground level; the road leading to the garden; and the
road leading to the main circulation stair and the void. The entire plane of the mu-
seum is tilted toward the void of the superstructure. The building is as complex as the
history of Berlin." 44 As we enter the museum, in fact, the very plane of the ground
on which we stand seems to slope slightly. It is an illusion created in part by the di-
agonal slant of narrow, turretlike windows, cut at thirty-five-degree angles across the
ground-line itself. For on the "ground floor" we are actually standing just below
ground level, which is literally visible through the window at about eye level. Only
the earth line in the half-buried window establishes a stable horizon, a plumb line of
dirt. Because the upper-floor windows are similarly angled, our view of Berlin is
skewed, its skyline broken into disorienting slices of sky and buildings.

I Ik- exhibition halls themselves arc spacious but so irregular in their shapes,
cut through by enclosed voids and concrete trusses, that one never gains a sense of
continuous passage."] have introduced the idea of the void as a physical interference
with chronology," Libeskind has said. "It is the one element of continuity throughout
the complex form of the building. It is 27 meters high and runs the entire length of
the building over 150 meters. It is a straight line whose impenetrability forms the
central axis. The void is traversed by bridges which connect the various parts of the
museum to each other."'" In 1
fact, a total of six voids cut through the museum on both
horizontal and vertical planes. Of these six voids, the first two are accessible to visi-
tors entering from the sacred and religious exhibition spaces. According to the ar-
chitect's specifications, nothing is to be mounted on the walls of these first two voids,
which may contain only free-standing vitrines or pedestals.
The third and fourth voids cut through the building at angles that traverse
several floors, but these are otherwise inaccessible. Occasionally, a window opens
into these voids, and they may be viewed from some thirty bridges cutting through
them at different angles; but otherwise, they are to remain sealed off and so com-
pletely "unusable space" jutting throughout the structure and outside it. The fifth
and sixth voids run vertically the height of the building. Of these, the fifth void mir-
rors the geometry of the sixth void, an external space enclosed by a tower: this is the
Holocaust void, a negative space created by the Holocaust, an architectural model for
absence. This concrete structure itself has no name, Libeskind says, because its sub-
ject is not its walls but the space enveloped by them, what is "between the lines."
Though connected museum by an underground passageway, it appears to rise

to the
autonomously outside the museum walls and has no doors leading into it from out-
side. It is lighted only indirectly by natural light that comes through an acutely
slanted window up high in the structure, barely visible from inside.
The spaces inside the museum are to be construed as "open narratives," Libes-
kind says, "which in their architecture seek to provide the museum-goer with new in-
sights into the collection, and in particular, the relation and significance of the Jew-
ish Department to the Museum as a whole." 46 Instead of merely housing the
collection, in other words, this building seeks to estrange it from viewers' preconcep-
tions. Such walls and oblique angles, he hopes, will defamiliarize the all-too-familiar
ritual objects and historical chronologies, and cause museumgoers to see into these
relations between the Jewish and German departments as if for the first time.
The interior of the building is thus interrupted by smaller, individual struc-

tures, shells housing the voids running throughout the structure, each painted

Interior view of the Holocaust void at The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum, 1997.
Facing page: Interior view of bridges and voids at The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin
Museum, 1997.

graphite black. They completely alter any sense of continuity or narrative flow and
suggest instead architectural, spatial, and thematic gaps in the presentation of Jewish
history in Berlin. The absence of Berlin's Jews, as embodied by these voids, is meant
to haunt any retrospective presentation of their past here. Moreover, curators of both
permanent and temporary exhibitions will be reminded not to use these voids as
"natural" boundaries or walls in their exhibition, or as markers within their exhibi-
tion narratives. Instead, they are to design exhibitions that integrate these voids into
any story being told, so that when mounted, the exhibitionjiarrative is interrupted
wherever a void happens to intersect it. The walls of the voids facing the exhibition
walls will thus remain untouched, unusable, outside healing and suturing narrative.
Indeed, the void is a direct result of this battle between form and function.
Useless space is the guiding criterion here, according to the architect. "The void is
there because you cross it and yet cannot get to it; but had the void been there with-
out one's awareness of it then it would cease to be a void — it would simply not be
there You're crossing a space which, unlike a normal galleria, does not lead you to
a collection; a passage which doesn't lead you to show you the goods of the museum.
There is a passage but it doesn't get you anywhere; it doesn't show the museum as an
attractive entity in that sense. It appears, however, as you walk through it, that you
understand more about what is not being shown by what you have seen as not being
able to be shown." 47
Nor has this void passed unchallenged as a philosophical construct. In an essay

on Libeskind's design, Jacques Derrida poses an "anxious question [that has] to do
with the relation between this determined void, totally invested with history, mean-
ingfulness, and experience, and place itself, place as a nonanthropological, nontheo-
logical possibility for this void to take place." 48 That is, Derrida wonders whether the
void itself, once in place, doesn't lose its capacity as a kind of black hole or vacuum into
which all stable meaning is sucked. In fact, as Derrida quite correctly observes, there
are two kinds of void here: "One is the general spacing of the structure in discontinu-
ity. The other is this very determinedly sealed space with nobody can experience or
enter into." 49 One refers literally to the absence left behind by a murdered people, an
absence that must be marked and that shapes (however negatively) the culture and so-
ciety that brought it about. The other kind of void is that sealed-off place, which no-
body can know. It is present but unknowable; it is like deep memory that gives shape
and meaning to the surrounding present but remains hidden in and of itself.
Libeskind hopes, moreover, to create spaces wherein the apparent meaning
in objects is always doubled, to include countermeanings, as well. "The function of

the bi idges in terms of exhibits is to double everything in the museum. Everything
in Berlin has double meaning." 50 On one side would be Max Liebermann's paint-
ings, 1 ibeskind says, and on the other liebermann's wife's desperate letters to the
chief of the Gestapo pleading tor her life in Auschwitz. On one side are Walter Ben-
jamin's wonderful guidebooks to Berlin; on the other side is the suicide note he
wrote in Spam while trying to escape the Nazis. All meanings, however contradic-
tor) >uk\ paradoxical, will be made palpable here in Libeskind's architecture; like un-
canniness itself, such artifacts and works when thus contextualized will always con-
tain their opposites.
Implied in any museum's collection is that what you see is all there is to see,
all that there ever was. By placing architectural "voids" throughout the museum,
Libeskind has tried to puncture this museological illusion. What you see here, he
seems to saw is actually only a mask for all that is missing, for the great absence of life
that now makes a presentation of these artifacts a necessity. The voids make palpa-
ble a sense that much more is missing here than can ever be shown. As Vera Bendt has
aptly noted, the destruction itself caused the collection here shown to come into
being. Otherwise, these objects would all be part of living, breathing homes
unavailable as museum objects. This is then an aggressively antiredemptory design,
built literally around an absence of meaning in history, an absence of the people who
would have given meaning to their history.
The only way out of the new building is through the Garden of Exile. "This
road of exile and emigration leads to a very special garden which I call the E.T.A.
Hoffmann Garden," Libeskind has said. "Hoffmann was the romantic writer of in-
credible tales, and I dedicated this garden to him because he was a lawyer working
in a building adjacent to the site." 51
The Garden of Exile consists of forty-nine con-
crete columns filled with earth, each twenty-three feet high, four by five feet square,
spaced three feet apart. Forty-eight of these columns are filled with earth from
Berlin, their number referring to the year of Israel's independence, 1948; the forty-
ninth column stands for Berlin and is filled with earth from Jerusalem. They are
planted with willow oaks that will spread over the garden of columns into a great,
green canopy. Although the columns stand at ninety-degree angles to the ground
plate, the ground plate is tilted in two angles, so that one stumbles about as if in the
dark, at sea without sea legs. We are sheltered in exile yet still somehow thrown off
balance by it and disoriented at the same time.

At one point, before eventually rejecting it, Freud cites Jentsch's contention
that "the central factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness [is] intellec-

tual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does
not know one's way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the
less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects
and events in it."

52 If we allow our sense of uncanniness to include this sense of un-
certainty after all, we might then ask how a building accomplishes this disorienta-
tion. In Libeskind's case, he has simply built into it any number of voided spaces, so
that visitors are never where they think they are. Neither are these voids wholly di-
dactic. They are not meant to instruct, per se but to throw previously received in-
struction into question. Their aim is not to reassure or console but to haunt visitors
— uncanny — sensation of
with the unpleasant calling into consciousness that which
has been previously — even happily — repressed. The voids are reminders of the
abyss into which this culture once sank and from which it never really emerges.
If modern architecture has embodied the attempt to erase the traces of his-
tory from its forms, postmodern architecture like Libeskind's would make the traces
of history its infrastructure, the voids of lost civilizations literally part of the build-
ing's foundation, now haunted bv historv, even emblematic of it. The architecture of
Exterior view of the Holocaust void, left, and the offmann Garden, right, at The Jewish
Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum, 1997.

Exterior view of The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum during construction, 1997.
Libeskitid's Jewish Museum 181

what Libeskind calls "decomposition" derives its power not from a sense of unity but
from what Anthony Vidler has called the "intimation of the fragmentary, the morse -
lated, the broken." 53 Rather than suggesting wholeness and mending, salvation or
redemption, such forms represent the breach itself, the ongoing need for tikkun
ha'olam (mending the world) and its impossibility.
As historian Reinhart Koselleck has brilliantly intimated, even the notion of

history as a "singular collective" — that is, an overarching and singularly meaningful
History — is a relatively modern concept. 54 Alois M. Miiller ha^ elaborated, "Until the
18th century the word had been a plural form in German, comprising the various
histories which accounted for all that had happened in the world. History as a sin-
gular noun had a loftier intent. In future, not only individual minor historical
episodes were to be told. History suddenly acquired the duty to comprehend reality
as a continuous whole and to portray the entire history of humankind as a path to
freedom and independence. History was no longer to be 'just' the embodiment of

many histories. History as a unity sought to make them comprehensible." 55 And as
Miiller also makes quite clear, this project of historical unification had distinctly re-
demptive, even salvational aims, the kind of history that its tellers hoped would lead
to a "better world."
Libeskind's project, by contrast, promises no such relief. His is not, as Miiller
reminds us, a "revelatory monument to the 'good' in history, but to a historical crime
perpetrated in the name of history." 56
By resisting continuous, homogeneous history-
housing, Libeskind never allows memory of this time to congeal into singular, salva-
tional meaning. His is partly integrationist, and partly disintegrationist, architecture.
His is a project that allows for the attempt at integration as an ongoing, if impossible
project, even as it formalizes disintegration as its architectural motif. Libeskind would

deunify such history, atomize it, allow its seams to show, plant doubt in any single ver-
sion, even his own. All toward suggesting an antiredemptory housing of history, one
that expresses what Miiller has called a systematic doubt, a lack of certainty in any at-
tempt that makes it all process, never result.
Kurt W. Forster suggests that Libeskind's design literally bears the "double
burden of representing both actual buildings and mental structures, and which
57
therefore [has] to submit to being measured by both standards." As a mental struc-
ture, it literally organizes the past it would house and support. Here we begin to an-
swer the questions we opened with: we see that architecture cannot remain entirely
distinct from, even oblivious to, the history it shelters; its spatial configuration is
never really independent of its contents. Neither can we evaluate such architecture

outside oi the ways n makes (and unmakes) meaning in the present moment. "Beau-
tiful architecture without Beauty" is how Daniel Libeskind ends an essay called
"Countersigns" Ins coda to a collection of drawings, essays, and models. 38 Beautiful

architecture without Beauty: the point is that beauty, like meaning and form, may
have outlasted itself as a useful category when discussing architecture like this.
From the beginning, this project seemed to be defined as that which would be
nearly impossible to complete. Planners initiated a nearly impossible project, se-
lected a nearly unbuildable design, and have now succeeded in building a public ed-
ifice that embodies the paralyzing questions of contemporary German culture. The
result leaves all questions intact, all doubts and difficulties in place. This museum ex-
tension is an architectural interrogation of the culture and civilization that built it,
an almost unheard-of achievement.

But with its thirty connecting bridges, 75,000 square feet of permanent exhi-
bition space, 4,800 square feet of temporary exhibition space, and 43,000 square feet
of storage, office, and auditorium spaces, the Jewish Museum will have roughly three
times the space of the Berlin Museum next door. Some have suggested that the Berlin
Museum be allowed to spill into most of the newly available space, leaving the Jew-
ish Museum department on the bottom floor only; others have suggested that the
building in itself be designated the national "memorial to Europe's murdered Jews." 59

In any case, all the attention this design has received, both laudatory and skeptical,
will generate a final historical irony. Where the city planners had hoped to return
Jewish memory to the house of Berlin history, it now seems certain that Berlin his-
tory will have to find its place in the larger haunted house of Jewish memory. The
Jewish wing of the Berlin Museum will now be the prism through which the rest of
the world will come to know Berlin's past.
If "estrangement from the world is a moment of art," as Adorno would have

it, after Freud, then we might say that the uncanniness of a museum like Libeskind's
crystallizes this moment of art. 60 But if the "uncanny is uncanny only because it is se-
cretly all too familiar, which is why it is repressed," as Freud himself would have it,
then perhaps no better term describes the condition of a contemporary German cul-
ture coming to terms with the self-inflicted void at its center — a terrible void that is
at once all too secretly familiar and unrecognizable, a void that at once defines a na-
tional identity, even as it threatens to cause such identity to implode.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Germany's Holocaust
Memorial Problem — and Mine
"It is not up to you to complete the work, yet you are not free to abstain from it."
— Rabbi Tarfon, Pirkei Avot
once, not so long ago, g e r m a ny had what it called a "Jewish Problem." Then
it had a paralyzing Holocaust memorial problem, a double-edged conundrum: How
would a nation of former perpetrators mourn its victims? How would a divided
nation reunite itself on the bedrock memory of its crimes? In June 1999, after ten
years of tortured debate, the German Bundestag voted to build a national "Memor-
ial for the Murdered Jews of Europe" on a prime, five-acre piece of real estate between
the Brandenburger Tor and Potsdamer Platz, a stone's throw from Hitler's bunker.
In their vote, the Bundestag also accepted the design — a waving field of pillars — by
American architect Peter Eisenman, which had been recommended by a five-member
Findungskommission, for which I served as spokesman.
Proposed originally by a citizens' group headed by television talk-show per-

sonality and journalist Lea Rosh and World War II historian Eberhard Jackel, the me-
morial soon took on a fraught and highly politicized life of its own. Although I had
initially opposed a single, central Holocaust memorial in Germany for the ways it
might be used to compensate such irredeemable loss, or even put the past behind a
newly reunified Germany, over time I began to grow skeptical of my own skepticism.
Eventually, I was invited to serve on the commission charged with choosing an ap-
propriate design for Germany's national memorial to Europe's murdered Jews, the
only foreigner and Jew on the panel. In this final chapter, I would like to tell the story
of Germany's national Holocaust memorial and my own role in it, my evolution from
a highly skeptical critic on the outside of the process to one of the arbiters on the in-
side. I find that as the line between my role as critic and arbiter began to collapse, the
184
issues at the heart of the Germany's memorial conundrum came into ever sharper,
more painful relief.
The seeds of Germany's national Holocaust memorial were probably sown

during President Ronald Reagan's disastrous wreath-laying visit, at Chancellor Hel-
mut Kohl's invitation, to the military cemetery in Bitburg, where the tombstones of
Waffen S.S. soldiers lay side by side those of Wehrmacht conscripts. Like other na-
tions, Kohl believed, Germany should also have ready-made memorial sites where
foreign dignitaries could pay their respects to their hosts' w,ar dead and fallen heroes.
This was a time-honored tradition and, Kohl seemed to feel, a crucial step toward
Germany's normalization, its return to a respected place among nations. The prob-
lem, of course, was that unlike other nations, a memorial honoring both Germany's
war dead and its heroes would in essence be a self-contradicting memorial. Those
now considered its "heroes" had been regarded as treacherous enemies of the state
during the war, whereas its fallen soldiers had been killed in Hitler's campaign to
conquer Europe and murder its Jews. As the Green Party had put it, "State guests
from abroad who want to honor the dead by laying a wreath . . . will understand that
in the Federal Republic of Germany the erection of a national monument will run
aground because of the danger of equating the deaths of perpetrators and victims of
National Socialist crimes against humanity." 1
Stung by the near-universal opprobrium generated by his ill-fated attempt to

follow the protocol of other states, Kohl decided to take matters into his own hands.
With the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, he found what he believed was an ideal site
for this protocol. The Neue Wache, or the "new guard," was a templelike, domed neo-
classical building on Unter den Linden, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1818
as the Prussian Royal Guardhouse. Located just beyond the wall in the eastern sector
of the city, it had served both the Nazis and the communists as a "national memorial"
and wreath-laying site during their respective regimes in Berlin. With the reunifica-
tion of Berlin, Kohl believed it could be a central monument to all the victims of war
and tyranny and thus provide a common site for the unification of a people, as well,
a reconciliation of victims and perpetrators, east and west, all united now in their ha-
tred of tyranny and war. Reportedly, a miniature of Kathe Kollwitz's modern pieta
of a mother holding a dead son had always been a favorite object on his desk, so he
proposed it as the central figure to be placed in the sanctuary of the Neue Wache.
When critics protested the impropriety of remembering Jewish victims alongside
their perpetrators — both in the quintessentially Christian image of sacrifice — Kohl
186 Germany's Holocaust Memorial Problem

responded simply thai Kollwitz's was a universal figure of mourning appropriate to
all who would mourn their war losses at the Neue Wache. Nevertheless, he allowed
for bronze tablets specifically commemorating the Jewish, homosexual, and Gypsy
\ ictims of the Na/is to he installed underneath the Doric portico just before dedi-
cating this, ( ,ci main's national Memorial to the Victims of Tyranny and War. Since
its dedication in 1993, the Neue Wache has remained more a curiosity for tourists
than a shrine tor ( ici mans, whose ambivalence to such mixed memory is reflected
m their muted indifference to it.

:
All of which only exacerbated and energized the ongoing debate surrounding
a separate "Memorial lor the Murdered Jews of Europe," which Lea Rosh and Eber-
hard Jacket had proposed jointly in 1988. Along with a private citizens' initiative they
had organized, Rosh and Jacket at first hoped to place their memorial on the
Gestapo-Gelande, a scarred wasteland and former site of the Gestapo headquarters
in a no-man's-land near the wall in the center of Berlin. But the "Gestapo-terrain"
had long been enmeshed in a complicated debate over its own future and how to
commemorate all the victims of the Gestapo in a single place. 3 With the fall of the
wall in 1989, however, the project gained the backing of both the federal government
and the Berlin Senate, which recognized that such a memorial might serve as a strate-
gic counterweight to the Neue Wache. Shortly after, the government designated an al-
ternative site for the memorial, also at the heart of the Nazi regime's former seat of
power. Bordered on one side by the "Todesstreifen," or "death-strip," at the foot of the
Berlin wall, and on the other by the Tiergarten, the former site of the "Ministerial
Gardens" was still a no-man's-land in its own right, slightly profaned by its proxim-
ity to Hitler's bunker and the Reichs Chancellery. But as almost five acres at the heart
of a reunified capital, it would also become one of Berlin's most sought-after pieces
of real estate — and was thus regarded as a magnanimous, if monumental, gesture

to the memory of Europe's murdered Jews.
In 1994, about a year after the dedication of the Neue Wache, a prestigious in-
ternational competition was called for designs for Germany's national "Memorial for
the Murdered Jews of Europe," and some 528 designs were submitted from around
the world. The designs ran the gamut of taste and aesthetic sensibilities, from the
beautiful to the grotesque, from high modern to low kitsch, from the architectural to
the conceptual. There was, for example, Horst Hoheisel's aforementioned proposal
to blow up the Brandenburger Tor, as well as Dani Karavan's proposed field of yellow
flowers in the shape of a Star of David. As described earlier, Renata Stih and Frieder
Germany's Holocaust Memorial Problem 187

Kdthe Kollwitz, Pieta — Mother with Dead Son, 1937-1938, installed in the Neue Wache, 1993.

Schnock proposed a series oi bus stops whence coaches would take visitors to the
sites oi actual destruction throughout Berlin, ( lermany, and Europe. Other designs
included numerous variations on gardens of stone, broken hearts, and rent Stars of
1 )a\ id. Round, square, and triangular obelisks were proposed, as well as a gigantic vat
( 130 feet tall ), ad empty vessel lor the blood of the murdered. One artist proposed a
Ferris wheel composed ol cattle tars instead of carriages, rotating between "the car-
nivalesque and the genocidal." 4

The jury was composed of some fifteen members, experts and laypeople, ap-
pointed by the three sponsoring agencies now involved — the Bundestag, the Berlin
Senate, and the original citizens' group. Though the deliberations had been shielded
from public view, many of the jurors subsequently told of rancorous, biting debate,
with little meeting of the minds. The citizens' group resented the intellectuals and ex-
perts on the jury, with what they regarded as their elitist taste for conceptual and
minimalist design. "This is not a playground for artists and their self-absorbed fan-
tasies," Lea Rosh is reported to have reminded her colleagues on the jury. Meanwhile,
the intellectuals sniffed at the lay jurors' middlebrow eye for kitsch and monumen-
tal figuration, their philistine emotionalism; and the Bundestag's appointees glanced
anxiously at their watches as the right political moment seemed to be ticking away.
In March 1995, organizers announced the jury's decision: first prize would be
shared by two teams who had submitted similarly inspired designs — one led by
Berlin architect Christine Jackob-Marks and the other by a New York artist living in
Cologne, Simon Ungers. Of these two, only that proposed by Jackob-Marks would be
built, however, possibly with elements incorporated from the other, and an addi-
tional eight projects would be recognized as finalists in the competition. Jackob-
Marks's winning design consisted of a gargantuan, twenty-three-foot thick concrete

gravestone, in the shape of a three-hundred-foot square, tilted at an angle running
from six feet high at one end to twenty-five feet high at the other. It was to be en-
graved with the recoverable names of 4.5 million murdered Jews, and in the Jewish
tradition of leaving small stones at a gravesite to mark the mourner's visit, it was to
have some eighteen boulders from Masada in Israel scattered over its surface.
Its literal-minded and misguided symbolism seemed to have paralyzed a jury
as unable to resist it as to love it. Eighteen is the Hebrew number representing chai,
or life, so the number of stones seemed right. But according to the early Jewish his-
torian Josephus, Masada was the last stronghold against the Romans at the end of the
Jewish revolt of 66-73 c.e. and also the site of a collective suicide of Jews that pre-
vented the Romans from taking them as slaves. A German national Holocaust me-

Christine jackoh-Marks, Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Winner of the voided 1995
competition for a Berlin Holocaust memorial.
morial with Jewish self-sacrifice as part of its theme? Within hours of the winner's
announcement, the monument's mixed memorial message of Jewish naming tradi-
tion and self-sacrifice generated an avalanche of artistic, intellectual, and editorial
criticism decrying this "tilted gravestone" as too big, too heavy-handed, too divisive,
and finally just too German. Even the leader of Germany's Jewish community, Ignatz
Bubis, hated it and told Chancellor Kohl that the winning design was simply unac-
ceptable. Kohl threw up his hands in exasperation, pronounced the design as "too big

and undignified," and obligingly rescinded the government's support for the winner
oi the Holocaust memorial competition. Germany's "Memorial for the Murdered
fews ol Europe" seemed to have been sunk by its own monumental weight — and
once again, Germany was left pondering its memorial options.
Between the announcement of the winner and its subsequent rejection, the
organizers showed .ill 528 designs in a grand memorial exhibition at Berlin's Stad-
tratshaus. Good, 1 wrote at the time, better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial
competitions and exhibitions in Germany than any single "final solution" to Ger-
main's memorial problem. Ibis way, I reasoned, instead of a fixed icon for Holocaust
memory in ( ici many, the debate itself — perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing
conditions — might now be enshrined. Of course, this was also a position that only
an academic bystander could afford to take, someone whose primary interest lay in
perpetuating the process.

At the same time, dozens of articles and op-ed pieces appeared in the daily
press, most castigating the winning design, and many others lamenting the whole
sorry spectacle of Germany's memorial self-flagellation. Der Spiegel columnist Hen-
ryk Broder, as acerbic as ever, suggested that the exhibition of 528 designs best be re-
garded as a "quarry [where] anthropologists, psychologists, and behaviorists could
examine the condition of a confused nation wanting to create a monument to its vic-
tims in order to purify itself." 5
An entire volume was produced in a matter of weeks
comprising the objections of some three dozen critics, artists, and intellectuals, with
my own words emblazoned epigrammatically on the back cover: "If the aim is to re-
member for perpetuity that this great nation once murdered nearly six million
human beings solely for having been Jews, then this monument must remain un-
completed and unbuilt, an unfinishable memorial process." 6
My Holocaust Memorial Problem

After yet another year of stormy debate over whether a new competition
should be called, whether a new site should be found, or whether the winners should
be invited to refine their proposals further still, the memorial's organizers again took
the high road. They called for a series of public colloquia on the memorial to be held
in January, March, and April 1997, which they hoped would break the memorial
deadlock and ensure that the memorial be built before the Holocaust receded further
into the history of a former century. Toward this end, they invited a number of dis-

tinguished artists, historians, critics, and curators to address the most difficult issues
and to suggest how the present designs might best be modified. I was among those
invited to speak at the last colloquium, in April 1997, and was asked to explore the
memorial iconography of other nations' Holocaust memorials in order to put the

Germans' process into international perspective.
The first two colloquia, in January and March 1 997, roused considerable pub-
lic interest, but as the exchanges between organizers of the memorial and invited
speakers grew more acrimonious, a gloomy sense of despair settled over the pro-
ceedings. The organizers, led by Lea Rosh, insisted that the "five aims" of the project
remain inviolable: ( 1 ) this would be a memorial only to Europe's murdered Jews; (2)
ground would be broken for it on 27 January 1999, Germany's newly designated

"Holocaust Remembrance Day" marked to coincide with the liberation of Auschwitz
in 1945; (3) its location would be the five-acre site of the Ministerial Gardens, be-
tween the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz; (4) the nine finalists' teams from
the 1995 competition would be invited to revise their designs and concepts after in-
corporating suggestions and criticism from the present colloquia; and (5) the win-
ning design would be chosen from the revised designs of the original nine finalists. 7
Not only did the designs continue to come under withering attack by the in-
vited experts but the aims of the project itself were now called strongly into question.
Among other speakers at the first colloquium, historian Jiirgen Kocka suggested that
although there was an obvious need for a memorial to Europe's murdered Jews, the
need for a memorial to encompass the memory of the Nazis' other victims was just
as clear. Other speakers, such as Michael Stiirmer, then questioned the site itself,
whether its gargantuan dimensions somehow invited precisely the kind of monu-
mentality that had already been rejected. Other critics focused more narrowly on the
first colloquium's theme: "Why There Should Be a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin,"
concluding that with the authentic sites of destruction and memory scattered
throughout Berlin, there shouldn't be a central memorial at all.
These vociferous challenges to the memorial were met by a seemingly stony

indifference by the speaker of the Berlin Senate, Peter Radunski, who had been ap-
pointed to convene the proceedings. Because these criticisms had no place on the
agenda, he said, they need not be addressed here. Lea Rosh's response was less meas-
ured. She opened the third colloquium with a bitter attack on what she called the
"leftist intellectual establishment" responsible for undermining both the process and
by extension memory of Europe's murdered Jews. The aim here was how to go for-

ward, ->Ik' said, nol to debate the memorial's raison d'etre, which was already estab-
lished. 1 lei angry words, in turn, simply antagonized the critics and hardened the
positions of the memorial's opponents, who included many of Germany's elite his-
toi ians, writers, and cultural critics, including Reinhart Koselleck, Julius Schoeps,
Solomon Korn, Stefanie Endlich, ( Ihristian Meier, and eventually Giinter Grass and
Peter Schneider.
By the time I spoke at the third colloquium in mid-April, both the organiz-
ers and a large public audience at the Stadtratshaus in Berlin had grown visibly and
audibly agitated by the spectacle of their tortured memorial deliberations. Over and
over again, the other speakers — senators, art historians, and artists — bemoaned the
abject failure of their competition. All of which was compounded by their acute em-
barrassment over the incivility of it all, the petty bickering, the name-calling, the
quagmire of politics into which the process seemed to be sinking. Bad enough we
murdered the Jews of Europe, one senator whispered to me, worse that we can't agree
on how to commemorate them.

When my turn to speak came, I discarded my carefully prepared lecture,
which had already been translated and printed in the morning papers that day any-
way. I began instead by trying to reassure the audience: decorum is never a part of the
memorial-building process, not even for a Holocaust memorial. "You may have
failed to produce a monument," I said, "but if you count the sheer number of design-
hours that 528 teams of artists and architects have already devoted to the memorial,
it's clear that your process has already generated more individual memory- work than
a finished monument will inspire in its first ten years." I proceeded to tell the stories
of other, equally fraught memorial processes in Israel and the United States, the fu-
rious debate in Israel's Knesset surrounding the day of remembrance there, the me-
morial paralysis in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., that had eventu-
ally resulted in several competing memorials, all of them contested. I could almost
hear the collective sigh of relief.
In fact, here I admitted that until that moment, I had been one of the skeptics.
Rather than looking for a centralized monument, I was perfectly satisfied with the
national memorial debate itself. Better, I had thought, to take all these millions of
Deutsch marks and use them to preserve the great variety of Holocaust memorials
already dotting the German landscape. Because no single site can speak for all the
victims, much less for both victims and perpetrators, the state should be reminding
its citizens to visit the many and diverse memorial and pedagogical sites that already

exist: from the excellent learning center at the Wannsee Conference House to the en-
lightened exhibitions at the Topography of Terror at the former Gestapo headquar-
ters, both in Berlin; from the brooding and ever-evolving memorial landscape at
Buchenwald to the meticulously groomed grounds and fine museum at Dachau;

from the hundreds of memorial tablets throughout Germany marking the sites of
deportation to the dozens of now-empty sites of former synagogues — and all the
spaces for contemplation in between.
Here I also admitted that with this position, I had made many friends in Ger-
many and was making a fine career out of skepticism. Most colleagues shared my fear
that Chancellor Kohl's government wanted a "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of
Europe" as a great burial slab for the twentieth century, a hermetically sealed vault for
the ghosts of Germany's past. Instead of inciting memory of murdered Jews, we sus-
pected, it would be a place where Germans would come dutifully to unshoulder their
memorial burden, so that they could move freely and unencumbered into the twenty-
first century. A finished monument would, in effect, finish memory itself.

On one hand, I said, we must acknowledge the public need and political ne-
cessity for a German national Holocaust memorial; at the same time, we must rec-
ognize the difficulty of answering this need in a single space. If the aim of a national
Holocaust memorial in Berlin is to draw a bottom line under this era so that a re-
unified Germany can move unencumbered into the future, then let us make this
clear. But if the aim is to remember for perpetuity that this great nation once mur-
dered nearly six million human beings solely for having been lews, then this monu-
ment must also embody the intractable questions at the heart of German Holocaust
memory rather than claiming to answer them. Otherwise, I feared that whatever
form the monument takes near the Potsdamer Platz would not mark the memory of
Europe's murdered lews so much as bury it altogether. 8
These were persuasive arguments against the monument, and I am still am-
bivalent about the role a central Holocaust monument will play in Berlin. But at the
same time, I said, I have also had to recognize that this was a position of luxury that
perhaps only an academic bystander could afford, someone whose primary interest
was in perpetuating the process. As instructive as the memorial debate had been,
however, it had neither warned nor chastened a new generation of xenophobic neo-
Nazis — part of whose identity depends on forgetting the crimes of their forebears.
And although the memorial debate has generated plenty of shame in Germans, it is
largely the shame they feel for an unseemly argument — not for the mass murder

once committed in their name. In good academic fashion, we had become preoccu-
pied uiih the fascinating issues at the heart of the memorial process and increasingly
indifferent to what was supposed to be remembered: the mass murder of Jews and
the void it left behind.
The self-righteous And self-congratulatory tenor of our position had also
begun to make me uneasy. Our unimpeachably skeptical approach to the certainty of
monuments was now beginning to sound just a little too certain of itself. My German
comrades in skepticism called themselves "the secessionists," a slightly self- flattering
gesture to the turn-of-the-century movement of artists, many of whom would be

Jewish victims of the Nazis. What had begun as an intellectually rigorous and ethi-
cally pure interrogation of the Berlin memorial was taking on the shape of a circu-
lar, centripetally driven, self-enclosed argument. It began to look like so much hand-
wringing and fence-sitting, even an entertaining kind of spectator sport. "But can
such an imperfect process possibly result in a good memorial?" parliamentarian
Peter Conradi asked me at one point. I replied with an American aphorism that was
altogether unfamiliar to his German ears: "Yes," I said, "for perfect is always the enemy
of good." To this day, I'm not sure he understood my point.
And here, I realized, my personal stake in the memorial had begun to change.
The day after I returned from that third colloquium in April, Speaker of the Berlin
Senate Peter Radunski, called to ask if I would join a Findungskommission of five
members appointed to find a suitable memorial design. Who were the other four, I
asked. He replied with the names of the directors of the German Historical Museum
in Berlin (Christoph Stolzl) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bonn (Dieter
Ronte), as well as one of Germany's preeminent twentieth-century art historians

(Werner Hoffmann) and one of Berlin's most widely respected and experienced ar-
biters of postwar architecture (Josef Paul Kleihues) — all authorities he believed to be
above reproach. We would be given free rein to extend the process as we saw fit, to in-
vite further artists, and to make an authoritative recommendation to the chancellor
and the memorial's organizers. I was to be the only true expert on Holocaust me-
morials, he said. And, as I then realized, I would be the only foreigner and Jew.
Before answering, I had to ask myself a series of simple but cutting questions:
Did I want Germany to return its capital to Berlin without publicly and visibly ac-
knowledging what had happened the last time Germany was governed from Berlin?
With its gargantuan, even megalomaniacal restoration plans and the flood of big-
industry money pouring into the new capital in quantities beyond Albert Speer's

wildest dreams, could there really be no space left for public memory of the victims
of Berlin's last regime? How, indeed, could I set foot in a new German capital built
on the presumption of inadvertent historical amnesia that new buildings always
breed? As Adorno had corrected his well-intentioned but facile now hackneyed)
(and
"Nach Auschwitz . .
."
dictum, maybe it was also time for me to come down from my
perch of holy dialectics and take a position.
But as one of the newly appointed arbiters of German Holocaust memory, I
would also find myself in a strange and uncomfortable predicament. The skeptics'
whispered asides echoed my own apprehensions: a mere decoration, this American
Jew, a sop to authority and so-called expertise. I asked myself: Was I invited as an aca-
demic authority on memorials or as a token American and foreigner? Is it my expert-

ise they want, or are they looking for a Jewish blessing on whatever design is finally
chosen? If I can be credited for helping arbitrate official German memory, can I also
be held liable for another bad design? In fact, just where is the line between my role
as arbiter of German memory and my part in a fraught political process far beyond
my own grasp?
And yet, wondered, how is Germany to make momentous decisions like this
I
without the Jewish sensibility so mercilessly expunged from its national conscious-
ness? When Germany murdered half of its Jewish population and sent the rest into
exile, and then set about exterminating another 5.5 million European Jews, it delib-
erately — and I'm afraid permanently — cut the Jewish lobe of its culture from its
brain, so to speak. As a result, Germany suffers from a self-inflicted Jewish aphasia.
Good, sensible Jewish leaders like Ignatz Bubis counsel wisdom and discretion. But
even that is not a cure for this aphasia. A well-meaning German like Lea Rosh takes
a Jewish name and initiates a monument. Neither is this a cure. No, the missing Jew-
ish part of German culture remained a palpable and gaping wound in the German
psyche — and it must appear as such in Berlin's otherwise reunified cityscape.
The problem was that in voiding itself of Jews, Germany had forever voided
itself of the capacity for a normal, healthy response to Jews and their ideas. Instead,
it was all a tortured bending over backwards, biting one's tongue, wondering what
"they" really thought of Germans. It is a terrible, yet unavoidable consequence of
the Holocaust itself, this Jewish aphasia, a legacy of mass murder. Thus, I began to
grasp just this need for a foreigner and a Jew on the Findungskommission. With-
out a Jewish eye to save it from egregiously misguided judgments (like the winner of
the first competition), anything was possible. This might be as practical a matter as
it was political.

So when asked to serve on this Findungskommission for Berlin's "Memorial
Idi the Murdered lews <>i Europe," I agreed, but only on the condition that we write
.1 prec ise conceptual plan for the memorial. Perhaps the greatest weakness in the first
competition had been its hopelessly vague conceptual description of the memorial,
leaving artists to founder in an impossible sea of formal, conceptual, and political

ambiguities. In contrast, we would be clear, for example, that this memorial will not
displace the nations other memorial sites, and that a memorial to Hurope's murdered
lews would not speak lor the Nazis' other victims but may, in fact, necessitate fur-
ther memorials to them. Nor should this memorial hide the impossible questions
driving ( icrmany's memorial debate. It should instead reflect the terms of the debate,
the insufficiency of memorials, the contemporary generation's skeptical view of of-
ficial memory and its self-aggrandizing ways. After all, I had been arguing for years
that a new generation of artists and architects in Germany — including Christian

Boltanski, Norbert Radermacher, Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ulmann, Stih and Schnock,
Jochen Gerz, and Daniel Libeskind — had turned their skepticism of the monumen-
tal into a radical countermonumentality. In challenging and flouting every one of the
monument's conventions, their memorials have reflected an essentially German am-
bivalence toward self-indictment, where the void was made palpable yet remained
unredeemed. If the government insisted on a memorial in Berlin for "Europe's mur-
dered Jews," then couldn't it, too, embody this same countermonumental critique?
Rather than prescribing a form, therefore, we described a concept of memo-

rialization that took into account: a clear definition of the Holocaust and its signif-
icance; Nazi Germany's role as perpetrator; current reunified Germany's role as
rememberer; the contemporary generation's relationship to Holocaust memory; and

the aesthetic debate swirling around the memorial itself. Instead of providing an-
swers, we asked questions: What are the national reasons for remembrance? Are they
redemptory, part of a mourning process, pedagogical, self- aggrandizing, or inspira-
tion against contemporary xenophobia? To what national and social ends will this
memorial be built? Just how compensatory a gesture will it be? How antiredemptory
can it be? Will it be a place for Jews to mourn lost Jews, a place for Germans to mourn
lost Jews, or a place for Jews to remember what Germans once did to them? These
questions must be made pait of the memorial process, I suggested, so let them be
asked by the artists in their designs, even if they cannot finally be answered.
Here I also reminded organizers that this would not be an aesthetic debate over
how to depict horror. The Holocaust, after all, was not merely the annihilation of near-
ly 6 million Jews, among them 1.5 million children, but also the extirpation of a thou-

sand-year old civilization from the heart of Europe. Any conception of the Holocaust
that reduces it to the horror of destruction alone ignores the stupendous loss and void
left behind. The tragedy of the Holocaust is not merely that people died so terribly but
that so much was irreplaceably lost. An appropriate memorial design will acknowledge
the void left behind and not concentrate on the memory of terror and destruction
alone. What was lost needs to be remembered here as much as how it was lost.
In addition, I suggested that organizers must be prepared to accept the fact
that this memorial was being designed in 1997, more thao fifty years after the end
of World War II. It will necessarily reflect the contemporary sensibility of artists,
which includes much skepticism over the very appropriateness of memorials, their
traditional function as redemptory sites of mourning, national instruction, and self-
aggrandizement. To this end, I asked organizers to encourage a certain humility

among designers, a respect for the difficulty of such a memorial. It is not surprising
that a memorial such as Jackob-Marks's was initially chosen: it represented very well
a generation that felt oppressed by Holocaust memory, which would in turn oppress
succeeding generations with such memory. But something subtler, more modest, and
succinct might suggest a balance between being oppressed by memory and being in-
spired by it, a tension between being permanently marked by memory and being dis-
abled by it. As other nations have remembered the Holocaust according to their
founding myths and ideals, their experiences as liberators, victims, or fighters, Ger-
many will also remember according to its own complex and self- abnegating motives,
whether we like them or not. Let Germany's official memorial reflect its suitably tor-
tured relationship to the genocide of Europe's Jews, I said.
Before proceeding, we had to address two further concerns shared both by us,
as members of the Findungskommission, and the memorial's opponents: Should it
be a contemplative site only, or pedagogically inclined as well? By extension, would
this memorial serve as a center of gravity for the dozens of memorials and pedagog-
ical centers located at the actual sites of destruction, or would it somehow displace
them and even usurp their memorial authority? Because we did not see Holocaust
memory in Germany as a zero-sum project, we concluded that there was indeed

room in Berlin's new landscape for both commemorative spaces and pedagogically
oriented memorial institutions. In fact, Berlin and its environs were already rich with
excellent museums and permanent exhibitions on the Holocaust — from the Wannsee
Villa to the Topography of Terror, from the new Jewish Museum on Lindenstrasse
and the proposed Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism to the critical and in-
sightful exhibitions at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

I he question \\ .is never whethei there would be only a memorial or a mu-
seum. Bui rather: In addition to these existing pedagogical houses of memory, was
there room for .1 commemorative space meant for memorial contemplation and na-
tional ceremonies? Again, we concluded that in Berlin's constellation of memorial
sites, there was indeed room lor a central memorial node in this landscape, one that
would inspire public contemplation of the past even as it encouraged the public to
visit and learn the specifics of this past in the many other museums nearby and
throughout the country.
In fact, though still suspicious of the monument as a form, I began to see how
important it would be to add a space to Germany's restored capital deliberately de-
signed to remember the mass murder of Europe's Jews. This would not be a space for
memory designed by the killers themselves, as the concentration camp sites in-
evitably are, but one designed specifically as a memorial site, one denoting the cur-
rent generation's deliberate attempt to remember. Of course, the government must
continue to support the dozens of other memorial and pedagogical sites around the
country. But these are, after all, already there. To build a memorial apart from these
sites of destruction, however, is not merely the passive recognition and preservation
of the past. It is a deliberate act of remembrance, a strong statement that memory
mutt be created for the next generation, not simply preserved.
Eventually, this question was also addressed at some length by Jiirgen Haber-
mas in an article appearing in Die Zeit. Here he wrote that it is precisely because his-
torical institutions change and "can tacitly be turned into something else, once the
climate shifts," that Germany has a crucial need for a permanent monument in ad-
dition to the many fine interpretive centers already in place. In Habermas's words,
"The monument should be a sign that the memory of the Holocaust remains a
constitutive feature of the ethico-political self-understanding of the citizens of the
Federal Republic." 9
Finally, I would have to reserve the right to dissent publicly over any final de-
sign that I could not stand by. I would agree to serve on such a Findungskommission
even as I still held strong doubts that a resolution was possible. I would suspend
judgment on whether such a resolution was desirable until the end. If in the end we
arrived at nothing we could justify to the organizers, then my early skepticism would
have been justified. But if we did find something in a collaborative effort with artists
and architects, it would be our responsibility to explain our choice to the public. For
if we could not justify it formally, conceptually, and ethically, then how could we ex-
pect the public to accept it? 10

Berlins "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe"
How to proceed? In what we would call an extension of the original process

and not its replacement, we agreed to invite the nine finalists of the 1 995 competition
in addition to a dozen or so other world-class artists and architects to submit new de-
signs. Over the next few weeks — via trans-Atlantic phone, telefax, and e-mail — we
hammered out a list of twenty-five who would be invited to
artists and architects
submit a sketch and conceptual abstract. Each of us had been asked to name five or
six possible invitees, after which we agreed on those names who had overlapped on
all our lists. Among those who had initially accepted our invitations were Peter Eisen-
man, Jochen Gerz, Rebecca Horn, Dani Karavan, Daniel Libeskind, James Turrell,
and Rachel Whiteread. Christian Boltanski replied that he already had his memorial
in Missing House. After initially accepting our invitation, Rachel Whiteread with-
drew, explaining that with her Vienna monument still in flux, she just didn't have the
stomach for a similarly fraught contest in Berlin. We never heard again from James
Turrell. In June, we submitted both our plan and list to organizers in a closed-door
session chaired by the speaker of the Berlin Senate and attended by a deputy from
Chancellor Kohl's office. They accepted it, congratulated us, and then publicly an-
nounced that the members of our Findungskommission would be choosing a new
design from this list of artists by November 1997 and that ground would be broken
in January 1999 — to coincide with both the official return of Germany's capital to
Berlin and Germany's Holocaust remembrance days.
None of which quelled the raging controversy. The German newspapers were
still rife with dissent: Who elected this search committee, anyway? Why these artists?
Why this site? Why not another open competition? I also wondered whether such a
precis would justify going forward with the search. In the end, our precis was vindi-
cated by the great strength of the submissions we received in October 1997. Of the
artists we invited, including some of the most radically skeptical, nearly all agreed to
participate. Their designs ranged across the spectrum of contemporary aesthetic sen-
sibilities — from the conceptual to the figurative, from minimalist to landscape art,
from constructivist to deconstructivist architecture. Over the course of three days in
October, the five of us held private, two-hour seminars in front of each design board,
reading aloud the designers' rationale, weighing concept against execution, the lia-
bilities and promise in each proposal.

In the first of the nineteen submitted designs we studied, Reinhard Matz and
Rudolf Herz proposed taking a about a half-mile stretch of autobahn just south of

Kassel and paving it over in cobblestones, slowing traffic down to a traitorously slow
fwentj five miles an hour, and marking this stretch as a "memorial for Europe's mur-
dered lews." Too had, we concluded, that it wasn't in Berlin; maybe the state of Hesse
would approve it for the autobahn below Kassel. Then we turned to the sharp-edged
and gigantic geometric forms submitted by Simon Ungers, Arno Dietch and Anna
Simon I )iet ch, and ( icrhard Merx. To our eyes, each suggested a self-certainty of form
we had deemed incompatible with the project; if this were to be a self-interrogating
memorial, altogether uncertain of its form, the monumental cubes, regular angles,
and formal stability in these designs would not suffice. Still others, like Christine
fackob-Marks's new design, an abstracted map of Europe marked with a stele for
every Jewish community wiped out during the Holocaust, struck us as entirely inof-
fensive — altogether inanimate and therefore benign.

In the end, we compiled a list of what we regarded as the eight strongest de-
signs and invited the artists to present their work to us and the organizers in No-
vember 1997. For half an hour each, the artists reflected on their designs and we
asked questions. Occasionally, the questions, however tactfully posed, proved devas-
tating. In the case of Markus Liipertz's conciliatory figure of the biblical matriarch
Rachel, it was clear that he wanted to bridge Jewish and Christian sensibilities, to il-
lustrate the common source of both traditions. But, we asked, had he considered the
possibility that in her disfigured nakedness, this twenty-foot-tall statue of Rachel-
imeinu (Rachel, our mother) perched atop a grassy hillock would have been forbid-
den viewing to the huge number of Hasidic Jews murdered? There could, of course,
be no answer. The artist's intentions were wholly honorable, but born in a land with-
out Jews, he could not know what would be offensive to Jewish sensitivities. We were
also anxious to hear Rebecca Horn's description of her design, an extremely subtle
and gently kinetic work in keeping with her overall oeuvre. But because it included
ash (intended here only to represent inanimacy) encased behind a glass cylindrical
wall descending into the ground, the possible confusion over its source and mean-
ing made this particular work untenable in our eyes.
Dani Karavan had resubmitted his yellow flower garden in the shape of a Jew-
ish star, and it held much appeal for the ways it would change seasonally, demand
tending, and even fade into a haunting palimpsest of the star during the winter. At
the same time, we wondered whether Europe's murdered Jews would want to be re-
membered by "the badge of shame" assigned them by their tormentors — even as we

liked the notion that the German landscape itself would now have to wear this star as
its own national badge of shame. Zvi Hecker's "pages of the book" appealed to all in

RolfStorz and Hans Jorg Worhle, Empty Memorial Plaza. Proposal for Berlin's "Memorial for the
Murdered Jews of Europe," 1997.
its underdetermined reference to a murdered "people of the book," but in its mix of
pages, gates, benches, trees, and Hebrew lettering, its formal parts seemed to com-
plicate the succinctness of its concept.
Finally, even though the designs by Daniel Libeskind and Jochen Gerz had
been on all of our final lists of four, the strength of their designs did not seem equal
to their brilliant conceptions. Libeskind's great broken wall — what he called Stone-
Breath — certainly evoked a spectacular vision of irreparability, irredeemable voids,
and a scarred landscape; but insofar as this seemed to be an extension of the void he
had built into his Jewish Museum design, it also appeared to be an extension of the
Jewish Museum itself, which already had a Holocaust void built into it. And for all
the brilliant interactive potential in Jochen Gerz's Warum? plaza of stainless-steel pil-
lars, we resisted the possible mystification of the Holocaust in such a question, even
as we couldn't help but see echoes of a trade fair and flagpoles in its layout.
In thus weighing the power of concept against formal execution in this final

group oi designs, the members ol the Findungskommission unanimously agreed
that the two proposals by ( lesine Weinmiller and Peter Eisenman-Richard Serra far
transcended the others in their balance of brilliant concept and powerful execution.
Though equally works of terrible beauty, complexity, and deep intelligence, the de-
signs by Weinmiller and Eisenman-Serra derived their power from very different
sources. The choice here was not between measures of brilliance in these two works
but between two very different orders of memorial sensibilities: Wei n miller's was the
genius of quietude, understatement, and almost magical allusiveness; the collabora-
tion of Eisenman and Sena resulted in an audacious, surprising, and dangerously

imagined form. One was by a young German woman of the generation now obli-
gated to shoulder the memory and shame of events for which she was not to blame;
the other was by two well-known Americans, architect and artist, one of whose Jew-
ish family left Germany two generations ago. Together, we felt, these two designs
would offer the public, government, and organizers of the memorial an actual and
Rudolf Herz and Reinhard Matz, Cobblestone Autobahn Kilometer. Proposal for Berlins
"Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe," 1997.

stark choice. Their cases were equally strong, but in the end one would have to gather
the force of consensus over the other.
In Gesine Weinmiller's three-sided plaza, visitors would descend into mem-

ory and wend their way through eighteen wall-segments composed of giant sand-
stone blocks scattered in a seemingly random pattern in the square. The walls sur-
rounding the area on three sides created a rising horizon as one came further into
their compass, slowly blocking out the surrounding buildings and traffic noise. This
space would be both part of the city and removed from And only gradually would
it.
m
the significance of these forms and spaces begin to dawn on visitors: the eighteen
sections of stone wall recall life in Hebrew gematria (chai); the descent into mem-
ory space countered the possible exaltation of such memory and suggested a void
carved out of the earth, a wound; the stacking of large stone blocks recalled the first
monument in Genesis, a Saadutha, or witness-pile of stones, a memorial cairn; the
rough texture and cut of the stones visually echoed the stones of the Western Wall in
Jerusalem, the ruin of the Temple's destruction; their rough fit would show the
seams of their construction; the pebbles on which visitors tread would slow their
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Gerhard Merz, Open-topped Mausoleum, Hole in Ground. Proposal for Berlins "Memorial for
the Murdered Jews of Europe" 1997.

Dani Karavan, Jewish Star Garden of Yellow Flowers. Proposal for Berlin's "Memorial for tin
Murdered Jews of Europe," 1997.
pace and mark their visit in sound as well as in the visible traces their steps would
leave behind.
Then there was a striking, yet altogether subtle perspectival illusion created
from the vantage point in one corner above the plaza: the seemingly random
arrangement of scattered wall segments would suddenly compose themselves into a
Star of David and then fall apart as one moved beyond this point. The memory of
Jews murdered would be constituted momentarily in the mind's eye before decom-
posing again, the lost Jews of Europe reconstituted only in the memorial activity of
visitors here. Built into this design was also space for historical text on the great wall
at the bottom of the decline into memory. Such a text would not presume to name all
the victims of the crime but would name the crime itself. Built into this space was the
capacity for a record of Holocaust history and for the changing face of its memory.
In its original conception, the proposal by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra
also suggested a startling alternative to the very idea of the Holocaust memorial. Like
Weinmiller's, theirs was a pointedly antiredemptory design: it found no compensa-

Zvi Hecker, Pages of the Book. Proposal for Berlin's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe,"
1997.
tion for the Holocaust in art or architecture. In its waving field of four thousand pil-
lars, it at once echoed a cemetery, even as it implied that such emblems of individ-
ual mourning were inadequate to the task of remembering mass murder. Toward this
end, it took the vertical forms of its pillars — sized from ground level to 16 feet high,
spaced three feet apart — and turned their collected mass into a horizontal plane.
Rather than pretending to answer Germany's memorial problem in a single, reassur-

ing form, this design proposed multiple, collected forms arranged so that visitors
have to find their own path to thememory of Europe's murdered Jews. As such, this
memorial provided not an answer to memory but an ongoing process, a continuing
question without a certain solution.
Part of what Eisenman called its Unheimlkhkeit, or uncanniness, derived pre-
cisely from the sense of danger generated in such a field, the demand that we now
find our own way into and out of such memory. And because the scale of this instal-
lation would be almost irreproducible on film shot from the ground, it demanded
that visitors enter the memorial space and not try to know it vicariously through

their snapshots. Whal would be remembered here arc not photographic images but
the visitors' expei iences and what they remembered in situ. As might have been ex-
|u\ ted m a piece partly designed by Richard Serra, this design also implied a certain
physical danger in such memory, a danger meant to remain implicit but so close to
being actualized in its scale and forms as to suggest something more than a mere fig-
ure of threatening memory.

To the designs by Weinmiller and Eisenman-Serra recommended by the Find-
ttngskommission, the memorial's organizers added the proposals by Jochen Gerz (dis-
«. usscd at length in Chapter 5) and Daniel Libeskind. At the time, we strongly recom-
mended that these names not be added to the final list, since it might create the
appearance of competing lists of finalists. But for reasons that were never clear to the
Findungskommission, Lea Rosh insisted that Gerz's Warum? proposal be added, and
Speaker Peter Radunski insisted that Libeskind's broken wall be added as well. The ap-
lc
pearance of an "A" list and a B" list was indeed created, but not much was made of it,
Daniel Libeskind, Stone-Breath. Proposal for Berlin's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe," 1997.

as large audiences turned out to hear the public presentations of proposals by each of
these final four teams of artists and architects. Before long, consensus (though far from
unanimous) gathered around the design by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra. It was
reported that Chancellor Kohl also strongly favored the design by Eisenman and Serra
and even invited the team to Bonn to hear them explain their proposal to him.
At this point, I wondered whether Weinmiller's design had been eliminated
from consideration on the basis of its subtlety or for what the press had called its
kitschy "Aha-effect." Or maybe Eisenman and Serra had keen chosen for the same
reason I had been asked to serve as the Findungskommission's spokesman: so mis-
trustful were the Germans of their own judgment that they could not assign such re-
sponsibility — at either the artistic or evaluative level — to themselves alone. In any
case, during their visit with the chancellor in January 1998, Eisenman and Serra were
asked to consider a handful of design changes that would make the memorial ac-
ceptable to organizers. As an architect who saw accommodation to his clients' wishes
as part of his job, Eisenman agreed to adapt the design to the needs of the project.
As an artist, however, Richard Serra steadfastly refused to contemplate any changes
Jochen Gerz, Warum? Proposal for Berlin's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe" 1997.

Gesine Weinmiller, Eighteen Scattered Sandstone Wall Segments. Proposal for Berlin's "Memorial
for the Murdered Jews of Europe" 1997.
in the design whatsoever. As a result, he withdrew from the project, suggesting that
once changed, the project would in effect no longer be his.
Although we were sorry to see Richard Serra withdraw from the project, we
understood the artist's prerogative to resist recommended changes in what he re-
garded as a finished work. Here, in fact, the artist's and the architect's modes of op-
eration may always diverge: where the architect generally sees an accommodation to
the clients' requests as part of the job, the artist is more apt to see suggested changes,
however slight, as a threat to the work's internal logic and integrity. This conflict, too,
is normal in the course of collaborations between artists and architects.
In spite of our enthusiastic recommendation of Eisenman and Serra's pro-
posal, in the sheer number of its pillars and its overall scale in proportion to the
allotted space, the original design left less room for visitors and commemorative
activities than we had wanted. Some of us also found a potential for more than fig-
urative danger in the memorial site: at sixteen feet high, the tallest pillars might have
hidden some visitors from view, thereby creating the sense of a labyrinthine maze, an

effect desired by neither designers nor commissioners. The potential for a purely vis-
ceral experience that might occlude a more contemplative memorial visit was greater
than some of us would have preferred.
Among the modifications we therefore requested of Peter Eisenman, now act-
ing on his own, was a slight downscaling of both the size of individual pillars and
their number. In June 1998, 1 spent a day in Peter Eisenman's New York City studio
to hear his rationale and to see the changes he had made, a day before he sent his
newly designed model off to Berlin for safe-keeping. Shortly after, I could report to
the other commissioners not only that Eisenman had expertly incorporated our sug-
gestions into the design but that they worked, in unexpected ways, to strengthen the
entire formalization of the concept. Here I also found that I had, in effect, collapsed
my roles as arbiter, critic, and advocate — all toward finding the language that the
chancellor himself might use in justifying his decision to a still-skeptical public.
Eisenman's revised design reduced both the number of pillars (from forty-
two hundred to about three thousand) and their height, so that they would now
range from one and a half feet tall to about ten feet tall or so in one section of the
field. Where the "monumental" has traditionally used its size to humiliate or cow
viewers into submission, this memorial in its humanly proportioned forms would
put people on an even footing with memory. Visitors and the role they play as they
wade knee-, or chest-, or shoulder-deep into this waving field of stones will not be di-
minished by the monumental but will be made integral parts of the memorial, now
invited into a memorial dialogue of equals. Visitors will not be defeated by their me-
morial obligation here nor dwarfed by the memory-forms themselves, but rather en-
joined by them to come face to face with memory.
Able to see over and around these pillars, visitors will still have to find their
way through this field of stones even as they are never actually lost in or overcome by
the memorial act. In effect, they will make and choose individual spaces for memory,
even as they do so collectively. The implied sense of motion in the gently undulat-
ing field also formalizes a kind of memory that is neither frozen in time nor static in
space. The sense of such instability will help visitors resist an impulse toward closure
in the memorial act and heighten their own role in anchoring memory in themselves.
In their multiple and variegated sizes, the pillars are both individuated and
collected: the very idea of "collective memory" is broken down and replaced with
the collected memories of individuals murdered, the terrible meanings of their
deaths now multiplied and not merely unified. The land sways and moves beneath

Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra, Waving Field of Pillars. Proposal for Berlin's "Memorial for
the Murdered lews of Europe," 1997.
these pillars so that each one is some three degrees off vertical: we are not reassured
by such memory, not reconciled to the mass murder of millions but now disori-
ented by it.
In practical terms, the removal of some twelve hundred pillars has dramati-
cally opened up the plaza for public commemorative activities. It has also made room
for tourist buses to discharge visitors without threatening the sanctity of the pillars on
the edges of the field. By raising the height of the lowest pillar tops from nearly flush
with the ground to approximately a one and a half feet tall, the new design also en-
sures that visitors will not step on or walk out over the tops of pillars. Because the pil-
lars will tilt at the same degree and angle as the roll of the ground-level topography
into which the pillars are set, this, too, will discourage climbing or clambering-
over. In fact, because these pillars are neither intended nor consecrated as tomb-
stones, there would be no desecration were someone to step or sit on one of them.
But in Jewish tradition, it is also important to avoid the appearance of a desecration,
so the minor change in the smallest pillars was still welcome.

Schematischer Schmtt Detail A
Schematischer Schnitt Detail B
DENKMAL FUR DIE ERMORDETEN JUDEN EUROPAS Schematischer Schnitt Details A und B
EISENMAN ARCHITECTS AND RICHARD SERRA MaBstab 1:250
Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra, architects' sketch of original design, Memorial for the
Murdered Jews of Europe, 1997.
In their warm, sandy tone, the concrete-form pillars will reflect the colors of
the sun and sky on one hand and remain suggestive of stone, even sandstone, on the
other. The concrete will not have the rough lines of their pour forms but will be
smooth, close to the texture of sidewalk. They can also be impregnated with an anti-
graffiti solution to make them easy to clean. Over time, it will be important to re-
move graffiti as it appears, in order not to allow it to accumulate. The crushed-stone

ground surface is also an excellent idea, in that it inhibits running, frolicking, or lying
on the ground even as it marks the visitors' footsteps in both sound and space.
The architect prefers that the pillars, though stonelike, remain underdeter-
mined and open to many readings: they are alternately stones, pillars, blank tablets,
walls, and segments. This said, in their abstract forms, they will nevertheless accom-
modate the references projected onto them by visitors, the most likely being the

tombstone. I Ins is not a bad tiling and suggests the need to keep these pillars blank-
faced. With written text, they would look very much like tombstones, in fact, and
might begin to generate a dynamic demanding some sort ol formal treatment as
tombstones, even symbolic ones.
For this reason, I suggested that a permanent, written historical text be in-
scribed on a large tablet or tablets set into the ground and tilted at a readable angle.
This position will bring visitors into respectful, even prayerful repose as they read the
text, with heads slightly bowed in memory. These could be placed at the entrance or
on the sides, under the trees lining the perimeter of the field, leaving the integrity of
Peter Eisenman, revised design, Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, 1998.

the field itself formally intact while still denoting what is to be remembered here.
Thus placed, the memorial texts will not create a sense of beginning or end of the
memorial field, leaving the site open to the multiple paths visitors take in their me-
morial quest. This, too, will respect the architect's attempt to foster a sense of in-
completeness; it will not be a memorial with a narrative beginning, middle, and end
built into it.
The introduction of rows of evergreen trees and linden, trees was also wel-
come, insofar as they simultaneously demarcate this space, eên buffering it from the
city, while integrating the site into the cityscape by connecting it visually to the trees
of the Tiergarten on the west side of the street. Because the lower branches of the
Peter Eisenman, revised design, Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, detail with trees, 1998.

Peter Eisenman, revised design, Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, overview with bus-
loading area, 1998.
trees will be trimmed upward to a height often feet or so, the memorial site itself will
be fully visible from the street, sidewalk, and adjacent buildings. When visitors enter
the area, their line of sight will take in the surrounding skyline, but as they come fur-
ther into the center of the field of pillars, the horizon of treetops will gradually rise
to screen out all but the tops of surrounding buildings, thereby removing visitors
from the urban landscape and immersing them gently into the memorial space.
It was for these reasons that the Findungskommission approved Eisenman's
revised design and unanimously recommended it to the chancellor and memorial

commissioners. We had hoped for a memorial that would evolve over time to reflect
every generation's preoccupations, the kinds of significance every generation will find
in the memory of Europe's murdered Jews. In this memorial, which insists on its in-
completeness, its working through of an intractable problem over any solution, we

found a memorial that was as suggestive in its complex conception as it was eloquent
in its formal design. As such, it came as close to being adequate to Germany's impos-
sible task as is humanly possible. This is finally all we could as,k of Germany's national
attempt to commemorate the Nazis' murder of European Jewry.
Memory Meets Politics
By this time, the summer of 1998, national elections were looming, and Hel-
mut Kohl's Christian Democratic Union had suffered several losses in preliminary re-
gional elections earlier in the spring. All watched and waited as deadlines for the chan-
cellor's announced decision passed without comment. Into this void other politicians
occasionally leaped. Berlin's CDU mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, declared that he did not
want Berlin turned into a "capital of remorse" and that it would be best to suspend the
process indefinitely. 11 And then, with national elections only weeks away, Social De-
mocratic Party leader Gerhard Schroeder's culture minister-designate, Michael Nau-
mann, was asked whether or not an SPD government led by Schroeder would support
the building of Eisenman's Holocaust memorial. No, he answered, for two reasons:
first, he was skeptical of any monument's adequacy to remember the Holocaust, be-
lieving that any such monument would serve merely as a "suspension of guilt in art";
second, though he had not yet seen a model of Eisenman's design, photographs of it
suggested a certain "Speer-like monumentality," which he found inappropriate in such
a memorial. 12 Naumann's response to this question on his first day as culture-minis-

ter designate was as refreshingly honest as it may have been impolitic. For whether or
not he had intended it, the memorial had now become an electoral issue dividing the
two candidates and their party agendas. Among many in the Social Democratic Party,
there seemed to be an underlying belief that this memorial and its design had become
so closely associated with Chancellor Kohl that it would have to be defeated with him.
In German interviews, Schroeder publicly backed his minister-designate on this issue;
but in the United States, he diplomatically sidestepped the question. By the time of the
elections, in September 1998, the fate of the memorial seemed to be hanging on the
result of the elections alone.

Indeed, even though every memorial has built into it a political calculus, by
inadvertently turning the national question of] [olocaust memory in Germany into
a partisan electoral issue, the Social 1 Jemocrats also raised a number of questions as
to theii motives. Would a Schroeder era include a moratorium on new memorials

everywhere in Germany tor their intrinsic incapacity to memorialize history? Or
would there he a moratorium only o\\ new I [olocaust memorials? Had German So-
cial Democrats actually moved away from their traditional, reconciliative position
promoting memory of the 1 [olocaust, as embodied in Willy Brandt's kneeling at the

loot of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument in 1970, or their embrace of Richard von
Weiszacker's speech of May 1985, as Jeffrey Herf pointedly asked? 11
Or it there was simple political gain in such a position, where was its source?
A shadow constituency in Germany that secretly but fervently wanted no sign of Ger-
many's past crimes marring their capital's magnificent new landscape? Or worse,
those who were secretly happy that at least the war against the Jews was won, even if
the larger war was lost? Could this constituency actually comprise a swing vote in
Germany in 1998? At the time, I wondered whether the party's position on the me-
morial was based in principled, if theoretical doubts as to the efficacy of any Holo-
caust memorial or whether, more cynically, it stemmed from a cold electoral calcu-
lation, a seemingly elevated gesture actually aimed at Germany's sullen minority.

As it turned out, once it became clear that as an electoral issue, the memorial
would only burn any politician who came too close to it, a truce of sorts was called.
On the eve of a vote in the Berlin Senate on 26 August to determine whether the city
of Berlin would continue to support a central "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of
Europe," Mayor Diepgen announced that he had enough votes to block the memo-
rial. In response, the memorial's organizers asked me to publish my assessment of
Eisenman's revised design. It would be the first public presentation of the new de-
sign, and the organizers hoped it would sway the vote toward the memorial. 14
Whether it was as a result of my article or not, two days after the assessment ap-
peared, Chancellor Kohl and Mayor Diepgen agreed to defer further discussion on
the memorial until after the elections on 27 September.
After handily defeating Helmut Kohl and his Christian Democratic Union,
Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democratic Party entered into a so-called red-green
governing coalition with Joshka Fischer's Green Party. Because the Greens supported
the memorial for Europe's murdered lews, the coalition agreement stipulated that the
memorial be put to a vote in the Bundestag sometime in the new year. With the me-
morial itself now seemingly ratified by the coalition agreement, the new minister of

culture, Michael Naumann, began to float a series of alternatives to Eisenman's field
of pillars, which was, procedurally at least, still the project's winning design.
Naumann, a former journalist and recent president of the German-owned

Henry Holt Publishing Company in New York, made it clear that if Germany was
going to build a Holocaust memorial, he preferred that it be as pedagogically inclined
as possible, a center for learning and research, not just contemplation. Toward this
end, the he proposed, among other possibilities, a permanent installation for screen-
ing Holocaust survivors' video testimony from Steven Spielberg's Shoah Oral History
Project. When asked about this project, Spielberg demurred and suggested that this
was a German question to be decided by Germans only. Besides, the new Jewish Mu-
seum in Berlin had already agreed to house an archive of these testimonies and to
show them, as well. A few weeks later, Naumann proposed building a complex of
three institutions in the memorial's place: a Leo Baeck Institute, a Holocaust Mu-
seum, and an Institute for the Comparative Study of Genocides. In a heated response,
the directors of all of Berlin's existing Holocaust research archives and institutes ob-
jected that not only had they not been consulted, but how would such centers be co-
ordinated with their own, without making them redundant? At about the same time,
editorial writers began to ask whether the memorial procedure already in place had
been abandoned, or whether the previous memorial procedure itself had been se-
cretly abrogated. 15
Government lawyers initiated an inquiry to determine just what
the legal status of the memorial procedure actually was.
They found that in spite of the Findungskommission's explicit recommenda-

tion of Peter Eisenman's revised design for the memorial (now called Eisenman-II),
and the support of two out of the three groups of organizers (the Citizens' Commit-
tee headed by Lea Rosh and the federal government), the coalition agreement's stip-
ulated vote in the Bundestag on whether to accept the winning design had yet to be
taken. But even here, the issue as to what constituted the "winning design" had be-
come almost hopelessly muddled. For as it became clear to all that the original pro-
cedure was still in place, and that there were enough votes on both sides of the aisle
in the Bundestag to approve Eisenman's design, the culture minister hoped to reach
a compromise whereby both Eisenman's memorial and Naumann's plan for an in-
terpretive center might be adopted together in the same space.
With this in mind, and with the tacit approval of members of parliament, the
Findungskommission, and the memorial commissioners, Peter Eisenman and Nau-
mann began unofficial discussions on how a synthesis might be achieved between

I isenman II I
now supported by Naumann) and the minister of culture's own desire
for an added "interpretive center, library, and research center." These discussions
were moderated by Michael Blumenthal, director ol Berlin's Jewish Museum, amid

consultations with members of the Findungskommission and the commissioners.
In appearing to reach a synthesis in which both the memorial and an added inter-
pretive center would be acceptable to the minister of culture and the architect, all
parties hoped that the process could go forward. Michael Naumann would now sup-
port Eisenman-II, and the architect would agree to consider possible additions to
the memorial.
But here a public relations fiasco erupted. Asked by the minister of culture
what such an addition might look like, Eisenman presented a beautifully constructed
model and computer-generated images of a possible archive and library complex

built into his field of pillars. In his proposal for a Holocaust memorial archive, Eisen-
man seemed to lift one corner of his field of pillars so that they would rise into a se-
ries of color-blended buildings, which would in turn be connected by pedestrian

ramps to a gigantic, freestanding glass wall of one million books, visible from the
memorial area. Exhibition space would be built underground to house a permanent
installation on the Holocaust, as well as a lecture hall, research facilities, and offices.
When this project was unveiled, however, it assumed the mantle of an ac-
complished fact. For almost all in the press and public sphere, this seemed to be a
new proposal altogether, a departure from the process. Even among the project's
most vocal supporters, many viewed this as an opportunistic betrayal of the process
by the architect, by which the architect himself had replaced Eisenman-II with
something now called Eisenman-III. In fact, this provisional design was never in-
tended by Eisenman to replace Eisenman-II but had been presented, somewhat in-
genuously, as an act of good faith on Eisenman's part to repay Naumann's own act of
good faith on agreeing to support the memorial. At this point, nobody seemed to
know where the memorial stood, which design was even being debated, or what the
procedure itself allowed.
In what seemed to be a last-ditch effort to save the memorial from itself, SPD
member of Parliament and chair of the Bundestag Committee on Cultural and Media
Affairs Elke Leonhard convened a public hearing in the Bundeshaus on 3 March 1999
intended to address the "state of deliberations" surrounding Berlin's "Memorial for
the Murdered Jews of Europe." If the Bundestag was going to vote on the memorial, as
mandated by the coalition agreement, it now needed to know exactly what it would

Peter Eisenman, proposed archive addition (not to be realized), Memorial for the Murdered Jews of
Europe, 1999.
be voting for or against. As the so-called speaker for the Findungskommission, I was
invited to open the hearing with a short history of the project and answers to four
pointed questions: What is the state of deliberations on the question of ( 1 ) why a
monument should be erected; (2) where a monument should be erected; (3) how a
monument to the murdered Jews of Europe should be designed; and (4) what con-
clusions can be drawn from the current state of deliberations for the further dis-
cussions and decision-making process of the German Bundestag? In the next six
hours, my presentation was followed with statements by two other members of the
Findungskommission Josef Paul Kleihues and Dieter Ronte),
(
as well as by represen-
tatives of the memorial's organizers, including Lea Rosh for the Citizens' Committee,
Peter Radunski for the Berlin Senate, and Michael Naumann for the federal govern-
ment. In addition, two of the memorial's leading opponents — Gyorgy Konrad, pres-
ident of Berlin's Academy of Art, and cultural critic Solomon Korn — were invited
to make presentations against the memorial. After each presentation, members of the
parliamentary committee asked questions of the speakers. In my presentation, I de-

sv i ibed both my initial opposition to the memorial and my eventual role in trying
id accomplish it basically an extemporaneous version of this chapter. Michael
Naumann eloquently detailed his own initial opposition to the memorial and his
qualified supporl for it now. ( lyflrgy Konrad and Solomon Korn both questioned the
premises ol such a memorial and suggested that by definition it would have to result
in bad and bombastic art and that, in tact, Kisenman's design only proved their point.
And in a somewhat startling formulation, Speaker of the Berlin Senate Peter Radunski
confounded all by suggesting that the Berlin Senate could not vote on whether to
support the memorial until the bundestag itself had voted on it — even though the
procedure seemed to demand just the opposite sequence.
At the end of the six-hour session, which had proceeded without a break, I
was asked by Hike Leonhard for a concluding statement. Here I suggested that now
it was time for the Bundestag to vote on Kisenman-II only, to approve it or reject it
on the basis of the arguments we had made that day. Once the memorial had been
voted into existence, then the question of whether a library and research center
should be added and what that might consist of could be considered by the organ-
izers. I cautioned that attaching an addition to the memorial before a vote could in-
troduce a number of complicating dimensions, some of them possibly fatal
especially questions of institutional redundancy and sources of archival material al-
ready housed elsewhere. Such an addition would demand its own debate and pro-
cess, I said, separate from and subsequent to the Bundestag's approval of Eisenman-
II. Proponents of such an addition may well make a persuasive case for it, but
without consulting and collaborating closely with the directors of other well-estab-
lished pedagogical centers (such as those at the Wannsee Villa, Topographie des Ter-
rors, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald, among others), such a project will never find
the support it needs among existing memorial and research centers.
Should the memorial go forward? I asked. Past decisions to proceed with it,
even if made for wrong-headed reasons, have also created their own set of political
realities, no less consequential for all their political logic. At this point, I concluded,
the only thing worse than making the monument now would be to reverse course
and deliberately choose not to make it. The unwelcome guest of Holocaust memory
has already been invited to Germany's millennial party. To disinvite this guest now,
as unpopular as he may be, would seem to give grave offense to the memory of all
whom this guest represents.
So, yes, I said. Gerhard Schroeder's government should build the memorial
and give the German public a choice, even an imperfect choice: let them choose to re-

member what Germany once did to the Jews of Europe by coming to the memorial,
by staying at home, by remembering alone or in the company of others. Let the peo-
ple decide whether to animate such a site with their visits, with their shame, their sor-
row, or their contempt. Or let the people abandon this memorial altogether, if that
is what they choose, and let the memorial now become the locus for further de-
itself
bate. Then let the public decide just how hollow or how substantial a gesture this me-
morial is, whether any memorial can ever be more than a ritual, gesture to an unre-
deemable past. With these words, I sat down. m
The Bundestag committee chair, Elke Leonhard, thanked me and adjourned
the hearing. Having beaten us all into exhaustion on that day in March, the question
of Germany's national "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe" was returned to
parliamentary committee, where it was drafted for a vote in the Bundestag on 25

June 1999. There it became enmeshed yet again in parliamentary politics, but it was
also back in German hands, where it belonged. Michael Naumann continued to
lobby for as large an interpretive center as possible, something approaching a na-
tional museum to share Eisenman's field of waving pillars. Other proposals included
theologian Richard Schroeder's suggestion that a single tablet be installed, inscribed
in both the Hebrew original and several other languages, "Thou shalt not kill."
Beginning that morning at nine and running until after two in the afternoon,
a full session of the German Bundestag met in public view to debate and finally vote
on Berlin's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe." Both opponents and pro-
ponents were given time to make their cases, each presentation followed by noisy but
civil debate. By this time, in fact, the positions of all the members of parliament were
well known and counted in advance. A number of alternative measures to the me-
morial were duly proposed and defeated, including a memorial for all of the Nazis'
victims and the above-mentioned tablet with "Thou shalt not kill." Finally, by a vote
of 314 to 209, with 14 abstentions, the Bundestag approved the memorial in three
separate parts:
( 1 The Federal Republic of Germany will erect in Berlin a memo-

rial for the murdered Jews of Europe on the site of the former Min-
isterial Gardens in the middle of Berlin;
(2) The design of Peter Eisenman's field of pillars will be realized, as
well as a small place of information that will detail the fate of the
victims and the authentic sites of destruction; and

\ public foundation will be established by the Bundestag to
oversee the completion oi the memorial. It will be composed of

representatives from the Bundestag, the city of Berlin, and the cit-
izens' initiative lor the establishment of the memorial, as well as the
directors oi other memorial museums, members of the Central

( Committee lor the Jews of ( lermany, and other victim groups. The
foundation will begin its work with the memorial's groundbreak-
ing in the year 2000. 16
When asked by reporters if I was sorry the debate was finally over, whether
this might actually mean the end of Germany's Holocaust memory-work, as I had
initially feared, 1 could answer honestly that only half the debate was over. Now that
the parliament had decided to give Holocaust memory a central place in Berlin, an
even more difficult job awaits the organizers: defining exactly what it is to be re-
membered here in this waving field of pillars. What will Germany's national Holo-
caust narrative be? How will the memorial's text actually read? Who will write it and
to whom will it be written? The question of historical content begins at precisely the
moment the question of memorial design ends. Memory, which has followed history,
will now be followed by still further historical debate.
In the end, by choosing to create a commemorative space in the center of
Berlin — a place empty of housing, commerce, or recreation — the Bundestag re-
minds Germany and the world at large of the self-inflicted void at the heart of Ger-
man culture and consciousness. It is a courageous and difficult act of contrition on
the part of the government and reflects Germany's newfound willingness to act on
such memory, as it did the summer of 1999 in Kosovo, and not be merely paralyzed
by it. But because the murdered Jews can respond to this gesture only with a massive
silence, the burden of response now falls on living Germans — who in their memo-
rial visits will be asked to recall the mass murder of a people once perpetrated in their
name, the absolute void this destruction has left behind, and their own responsibil-
ity for memory itself.

Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 Kaplan, "Theweleit and Spiegelman," 1 60.
2. See Hirsch, "Family Pictures," 8-9. Also see Hirsch's excellent elaboration mf this notion in
her Family Frames.
3. In responding to my call for interweaving a history of events with a reflection on how
Holocaust history comes to be told, for example, a well-respected historian, Peter Hayes,
suggested that such a study, "as well as Saul Friedlander's recent work, lavishes talents on
a project not quite worthy of [Young and Friedlander]. Their preoccupations reflect a sort
of scholasticism now quite rampant in the academy in which commonplace problems of

technique are mistaken for profound matters of substance, in which how we learn and
relate what we know becomes as intellectually significant and preoccupying as the knowl-
edge itself, and in which — in self-flattering fashion — the scholars who interpret and the
students who learn become the subject of inquiry, inevitably displacing the participants
themselves."
Here I am grateful to Peter Hayes for sending me his "Comment in Response" to an

early version of "Toward a Received History of the Holocaust," both delivered as parts of a
panel on "Contemporary Interpretations of the Holocaust," at the annual Social Science
History Association Conference, New Orleans, 12 October 1996.

4. Bartov, Murder in Our Midst, 1 1 6.
5. Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism, 19.
6. For a brilliant illustration of history that includes the art and literature of the era under
discussion, see Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1
7. Adorno, "Engagement," 125-127.

8. Friedlander, Memory, History, and Extermination, 6 1
9. Ibid., 55.
10. Adorno, Prisms, 27, 19.
1 1 For an insightful elaboration on the "ever-dying" of the avant-garde, see Mann, Theory-
Dea th of the Ava n t- Ga rde.
1 2. See Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1:3.
1 3. For a detailed discussion of the Harburg counter-monument, see Young, Texture of Memory,
27-48. Also see Konneke, ed., Das Harburger Mahnmal gegen Faschismus.
14. Here I refer to my earlier book, The Texture of Memory, as well as to the catalogue of essays I
introduced and edited for an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, The Art of
Memory.
1 5. Here I must acknowledge some of the important discussions of this "cutting-edge" art
224
already undei way. I 01 example, mv van Alphen's fine study, ( aught by History, Liss, Tres
passing through Shadows; and Sicher, ed., Breaking Crystal.

I
01 exhibition catalogues to shows on contemporary I lolocausl art, see Feinstein, ed.,
Witness and I egai y, and Snyder, ed., Impossible Evidence.
id. I lere I .mi indebted to Bernstein's Foregone Conclusions.
chap i i R o n e Art Spiegelman's Maus and the After-images of History
l . See Friedlander, Nazi ( Germany and the lews, vol. l
.' I i iedlander, " I rauma, Transference" 55. In his earlier Reflections of Nazism, Friedlander was
more skeptical ol whal he would later call postmodern responses to the Holocaust and
more deeply ambivalent toward the very motives for such art (see citation in Introduction).
3. Friedlander," Trauma, Transference," 41.

I. [bid.
5. Spiegelman, Maus, 2:135.

6. Friedlander, "Trauma, Transference," 41.
7. Friedlander, Memory, History, and Extermination, 132.
8. Ibid., 53.
9. Broszat and Friedlander, "Controversy About Historicization," 129.
10. See Hirsch, "Family Pictures," 8. For more on my own notion of "received history," see
Young, "Toward a Received History," 21-43.
1 1 Hirsch, "Family Pictures," 8-9.
1 2. From author's interview with Spiegelman, as well as from Spiegelman, "Commix," 61
1 3. Spiegelman, "Artist's Statement," 44.
14. Spiegelman, "Commix," 61.

15. From Kalir, "Road to Mans," 2.

17. Ibid.
18. Kalir, "Road to Maus," 1.
19. Spiegelman, Breakdowns.

20. Ibid., unpaginated.
22. Varnedoe and Gopnik, High and Low, 154. For an overview of the comics' place in modern
art, see 153-229.
23. Laub, "Bearing Witness," 57.
24. For a full elaboration of this kind of "side-shadowed" history telling, see Bernstein,
Foregone Conclusions.
25. Though Spiegelman wrote and conceived of Maus as a single work from the beginning, he
agreed to allow Pantheon Books to divide it into two volumes, the first published in 1986.
This was partly to preempt possible copy-cat "comics" and animated cartoons by those
familiar with the sections of Maus already published in Raw Comics, the journal Spiegelman
and his wife, Francoise Mouly, co-edit.
Notes to Pages 11-28 225

26. Kaplan, "Theweleit and Spiegelman," 1 62.
27. See Miller's deeply insightful essay, "Cartoons of the Self," 49.
28. From author's interview with Spiegelman, November 1993.
29. Gopnik, "Comics and Catastrophe," 33.
30. Storrs, "Making Maus," 1
3 1 Author interview with Spiegelman, November 1 993.

32. Rosen, "Trivialization of Tragedy," 85.
33. "Letter to the Editor."
34. Miller, "Cartoons of the Self," 46.
35. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 72.

36. Amichai, "Tourists," as quoted in Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions, 127.
chapter two David Levinthal's Mein Kampf

1. Levinthal quoted in Wild West, 5.
2. In an eye-opening essay on the work of Hans Bellmer, Herbert Lust wrote that "any artist
interested in the female body's endless possibilities or 'forbidden' mental states must reckon
with [Hans] Bellmer" ("For Women Are Endless Forms," 47).
Although this is undoubtedly so, it may be equally true that neither can viewers
today see any of these contemporary artists' work without recalling Bellmer 's early
conceptual photographs of his violently reconstituted doll. Moreover, when we recall that
Bellmer made and photographed this doll in 1934 Germany as an explicit protest, dissent,
and challenge to the unyielding absolutism of the Nazis, Levinthal's images of erotic dolls
as Holocaust victims begin to resonate as a kind of protest art and further breaking of
cultural taboos.
3. For a fuller elaboration of both Levinthal's place among the "photo-conceptual vanguard"
and the place of his Mein Kampf series in his larger corpus of work, see Stainback and
Woodward, David Levinthal.
4. This chapter is adapted from my catalogue essay, "David Levinthal's Mein Kampf in
Levinthal, Mein Kampf, 67-83.
5. Chandler and Ride, "Foreword," unpaginated.
6. Levinthal and Trudeau, Hitler Moves East, 7.
7. "Toying with History," 29.

8. From Wild West, 7.
9. From interview with Woodward in David Levinthal, 1 53.
1 0. From Von Drateln, "Jochen Gerz's Visual Poetry," 47.

1 1 See Kuspit, "Sings in Suspense," as cited by Mellors, "David Levinthal," in Dark Light.
1 2. Reviews of Levinthal's Mein Kampf were generally, if warily, positive. In almost every case,
reviewers were moved by the power of the images, even as they were made intensely
uncomfortable by their subject — and its relentlessly cool treatment. "Lovely to look at,
horrific to behold" was how Robin Cembalist put it in her review of Mein Kampf in Forward
("Levinthal's Disturbing Photos," 9). Others, like Sarah Boxer, wonder whether Levinthal
226 Notes to Pages 28-54

(..m't help Inn become pari oi the pornographic culture he proposes to be exploring
("Hard!) ( hild's Play").
13, For an elaboration of the ways women's corpses, in particular, have have been represented as
emblematic inoui culture, see Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body.
i i Sontag, On Photography, 11-12.
I J, These images are available tor viewing in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo
\u hives, WIS nos. 136 138.
16. Hitlei Moves I ast, 8.
17. From interview with Woodward in David Levinthal, 153.
is. Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism, 19.
chapter three Sites Unseen

1. Nora, "Between Memory and History," 19.
2. Attie, "Writing on the Wall Project," 9.
3. ibid.
4. Attie quoted in Axelrod, "Time Exposures," 40.

5. Attie quoted in Chazan, "Ghosts of the Ghettos."
6. As related by the artist to the author in an interview. The exchange is also described by Attie
in Writingon the Wall, 12.
7. Michael Andre Bernstein, "Shimon Attie," 6.
8. As quoted from a handbill supplied to the author, courtesy of the artist (my translation).
9. See, for example, Ido de Haan's work in Holland, a preview of which I received in a copy of
"Invention of a National Trauma," a paper delivered at "Memory and the Second World
War," the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, Amsterdam, 27 April 1995.
10. For more in this vein, see Young, "Anne Frank House," 131-137.
11. As described by Attie in an unpublished project description for "Walk of Fame," provided to
the author.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. As described in Palowski, "Retracing Schindler's List," a travel booklet published by

Krakow's Ministry of Tourism.
15. Protzman, "Artist Projects a Ghostly Past," 10.
16. Attie, project description for "Walk of Fame."
chapter four Memory, Countermemory, and the End of

the Monument
1. Here I elaborate and expand on themes I first explored in "Counter-Monument," 267-296.
Also see Young, Texture of Memory, 27-48.
2. For a record of this competition, see Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas. For a col-

lection of essays arguing against building this monument, see Der Wettbewerb fur das
"Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas."
On his proposal to blow up the Brandenburger Tor, see Hoheisel,"Aschrottbrunnen —
Denk-Stein-Sammlung — Brandenburger Tor," 253-266.
3. Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History, 14-17.
4. Mumford, Cidture of Cities, 438.
5. Ibid., 434.
6. Broszat, "Plea for Historicization," 129.
7. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Carde, 280.

8. Nora, "BetweenMemory and History," 13. *
9. Huyssen, "Monument in a Post-Modern Age," 1 1 . Also see Huyssen's elaboration of this
essay in his Twilight Memories, 249-260.
10. Elsen, Modern European Sculpture, 122-125.
1 1. For elaboration of this theme, see Winzen, "Need for Public Representation," 309-314.
12. From Hoheisel, "Rathaus-Platz-Wunde." Subsequent quotations from Hoheisel on this
memorial are drawn from this booklet.
13. See Fischer and Glameier, eds., Missing House.

1 4. See Bradley, ed., Rachel Whiteread, 8. Other essays in this exhibition catalogue for the
retrospective of Rachel Whiteread's work at the Tate-Liverpool Gallery by Stuart Morgan,

Bartomeu Mari, Rosalind Krauss, and Michael Tarantino also explore various aspects of the
sculptor's gift for making absence present.
1 5. fudenplatz Wien 1996, 94.

16. Ibid., 109.
17. See Stih and Schnock, Arbeitsbuch fiir ein Denkmal in Berlin.
18. Stih and Schnock, Bus Stop Fahrplan, 6.
19. Ibid., 9.
20. Nicolai, "Bus Stop — The Non-Monument," unpaginated brochure on the project
published by Stih and Schnock.
chapter five Memory Against Itself in Germany Today

1 As quoted in Lichtenstein and Wajeman's interview, "Jochen Gerz," E-3.
2. In Gerz's difficult-to-translate words,
"Ihr Vorhandensein ist der Beweis ihrer Unverfanglichkeit. Die im Museum Dachau
reproduzierten — hier nicht aufgenommenen — Beschriftungen aus dem KZ Dachau zeigen,
dass die gleiche Funktion den Schriftzeichen eigen ist, im Museum und im KZ. Sie sind das
Medium, das beide moglich macht.

"Latent beinhaltet die Beschriftung im KZ Dachau das Museum Dachau und die im
Museum das KZ. Sie selbst ist das Dachau-Projekt." From text panel for "EXIT / Materialien
zum Dachau-Projekt," Neuer Berliner Kunstverein e.V. Zusammenarbeit mit dem Berliner
Kunslterprogramm des daad und den Berliner Festspielen, 1975.
3. This project was reinstalled as part of the mammoth exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau

in Berlin, "Deutschlandbilder," 7 Septembei 1997 ll lanuary 1998, where I saw it.
Foi further details on the installation and its reception, see Gerz and I e\ \, EXIT.
•I. Nasgaard, "Book of Gestures," 59.
5. "Between the real and its reproduc tion, there is .i no mini's land," ( lerz h.is said. "My work is
situated in this zone." Quoted in Stephen Snoddy,"25 May 1991 ... ,"67.
6. From authoi 's intei \ iew with the artists, lune 1989.
I
rom ( .mi/," I Wiit i Monument,'" 87.
8. Parts oi this section on the ( lerzes' Harburg monumenl appeared in Young, "< lounter-
monument," 267 296, and then in Young, Texture oj Memory, 28-37.

9. For further insights into the I larburg monument's commissioning, building, and reception,
see essays by Actum K&nneke, Karl Weber, Marcia Tucker, lean-Pierre Saigas, Thomas
Wagner, and myself in Konneke, ed., Das Harburge) Mahnmal gegen Faschismus.
10. Sec North, "I'li hi it. as Sc lilpture," 861 . As North shows, such an impulse has a long history in
its own right.
For further discussion ol these dimensions to contemporary sculpture, see Sayre,
Object oj Performance; I ippard, Changing 261-264; and Crimp, "Serra's Public Sculpture."
1 1. Gerz quoted in Von Drateln, "Jochen Gerz's Visual Poetry," 47.
12. [bid.
"
13. From Gintz, *L' Anti-Monument,' " 80.
14. From a public presentation by the Gerzes on the "Gegen-Denkmal," at a conference on

"Kunst und Holocaust," at Evangalischen Akademie Loccum, West Germany, 20 May 1989.
Speaking in German to a German audience, Jochen Gerz was making an obvious, if ironic,
allusion to the Nazis' own, notoriously literal-minded reference to being "stabbed in the
back" by enemies internal, external and imagined. Appropriating the Nazis' language in this
way was clearly intended both as a provocation and as an ironic self-identification by the
Gerzes as "enemies of the Reich." See Kunst und Holocaust.
15. Quoted in Gibson, "Hamburg," 106-107.
16. Ibid., 106.
17. Ibid., 107.
18. From "Forwort," in Sefer Yizkor, 130, as quoted in Kugelmass and Boyarin, eds., From a
Ruined Garden, 1 1.
1 9. On the "missing gravestone syndrome," see Merloo, "Delayed Mourning in Victims," in
Krystal, ed., Massive Psychic Trauma, 74.
20. For the details of this project, I am indebted to personal correspondence and conversations
with Jochen Gerz, as well as these articles, among others: Jhering, "Duell mit der Verdran-
gung"; Haase, "Mahnmale gegen Faschismus und Rassismus," 12-14; and Lichtenstein and
Wajeman, "Jochen Gerz," E1-E6.
2 1 See essays by Rogoff, "Dieses Obskure Objekt der Begierde," and Kugler, "Menschen Vers-
tummen, Steine Reden Immer ..."
22. Rogoff, "Aesthetics of Post-History," 1 38.
23. Gerz quoted in Friese, ed., Die Bremer Befragung, 8 (emphasis added).
24. Ibid., 103.

25. Ibid., 104.
26. For answers to this implied question, see Gerz, Monument Vivant.
27. From interview with Snoddy, "25 May 1991 ..." 67.
28. Gerz, "Why Did It Happen?" 1
29. Ibid., 2.
30. Ibid., 6.
chapter six Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin

**
1. Freud, "Uncanny," 17:241.
2. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 7.
3. Ibid.,x.
4. See Lydenberg, "Freud's Uncanny Narratives," 1076. Here she also shows how the unheimlich
(alien and threatening) contains within it its own lexical opposite (heimlich, familiar and
agreeable). That is, part of uncanny's power to affect us is just its familiarity, which is all the
more disturbing when estranged.
5. Simon, Berlin Jiidische Museum, 9, quoted in Weinland and Winkler, Jiidische Museum, 10.
6. Ibid.
7. See Bendt, "liidische Museum," in 200-209.

8. Simon, Berlin Jiidische Museum, 34, quoted in Weinland and Winkler, Jiidische Museum im
Stadtmuseum Berlin, 10.
9. The issue of what constitutes Jewish art remains as fraught as ever in contemporary discus-
sions of national and ethnic art. Among others, see Gutmann, "Is There a Jewish Art?" 1 -20.
1 0. Weinland and Winkler, Jiidische Museum im Stadtmuseum Berlin, 1 0.
1 1 From an interview Robin Ostow had with Reiner Gunzer, the Museumsreferant who negoti-
ated with Galinski at this time. I am grateful to Robin Ostow for sharing with me her essay
"(Is It) a Jewish Museum," in Jeffrey Peck and Claus Leggewie, eds., Jewish Communities
(forthcoming), where these details are cited.
12. From Berlinische Notizen 1-2 (1975): 1 1, cited in Weinland and Winkler, Jiidische Museum, 17.
13. "Palais auf dem Prufstein," Die Welt, 19 October 1985, quoted in Weinland and Winkler,
Jiidische Museum, 28.
14. Ibid.
15. Weinland and Winkler, Jiidische Museum, 30.
16. Berlinische Notizen 4 ( 1987): 120ff., as cited in Weinland and Winkler, Jiidische Museum, 32.
17. Ibid.
18. See Bothe and Bendt, "Ein eigenstandiges Jiidisches Museum," 12.
19. "Nichts in Berlins Geschichte hat die Stadt jemals mehr verandert als die Verfolgung, Vertei-
bung und Ermordung ihrer jiidischen Burger — dies war eine Veranderung nach Innen, die
ins Herz der Stadt traf." Ibid., 12.
20. Ibid., 159.
2 1 Though this was Libeskind's first full commission, it was not his first building. Other proj-
ects subsequently commissioned have been built in Wiesbaden and Osnabriick, among
other places.
230 Notes to Pages J 46- 163

\s cited by Vidler, irchitectural Uncanny, 135.
Realisierungi Wettbewerb, 1 69.
24 Ibid., 166.
25. Libeskind, Between the Lines, J.
26 I ibeskind, "Between the I ines," 63.
27. As noted by Bendt, "Model oi Integration," 29.
28. I oi lut thei insightful reflection on the role these voids play in Berlin generally and in
I ibeskind's design in partic ular, sec Huyssen, "Voids oi Berlin," 57-81

i
2 ). Eisenman, "Representation of the l imit," 120.
>0. Ibid
31. Forster, "Monstrum Mirabileel Audax,"19.
)2. Realisierungs Wettbewerb, 169.
33. I ibeskind, Between the I ines, 8.
34. Realisierungs Wettbewerb, 166.
35. Ibid., 5S.
36. Ibid., L68.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Libeskind, Radix-Matrix, 113.

40. Libeskind, "Between the Lines," 65.
41. Schneider, "Libeskind's Architecture," 120.

42. "1 got the idea of using Zinc from Schinkel," Libeskind has said. "Before his very early death,
he recommended that any young architect in Berlin should use as much zinc as possible. . .
In Berlin, untreated zinc turns to a beautiful blue-gray. Many of Schinkel's Berlin buildings,
particularly at the Kleinglienicke Park, are built of zinc which has been painted white. When
you knock them, you can tell that they are just covers. That is very Berlin-like." Libeskind,
" 1 995 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture," 40.
44. Libeskind, "1995 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture," 34.

45. Ibid., 35.
47. Between the Lines, 12.
48. Derrida, "Response to Libeskind," 111.

49. Ibid., 115.
50. Libeskind, "1995 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture," 37.

51. Ibid., 33.
52. Freud, "Uncanny," 17:221.

53. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 70.
54. See Koselleck, Futures Past, 92-93.

55. Miiller, "Daniel Libeskind's Muses," 117.
56. Ibid.
57. Forster, "Mildew Green Is the House of Forgetting," 7.
58. Libeskind, "Countersign," 135.

59. In the next and final chapter, I explore briefly Libeskind's separate design proposal for
Germany's national "memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe," to be located in Berlin.
In submitting a design for this memorial, the architect made clear that he did not want his
museum design for a Jewish Museum to be turned into a Holocaust memorial.

60. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 262.
chapter seven Germany's Holocaust Memorial Problem- — and

Mine *
1. As quoted in Reichel, Politik nut der Erinnerung, 242. The Greens' statement is also cited by
Michael Wise in his excellent study of Berlin's architectural problems during reunification,
Capital Dilemma, 146.
2. For an excellent account of the entire Neue Wache debate, see Streit urn die Neue Wache.
3. For more on the debate surrounding the discovery of ruins on the Gestapo-Gelande and
subsequent architectural competitions to memorialize this site, see Young, Texture of
Memory, 81-90.
4. See Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas.
5. Broder, "Deutschmeister des Trauens," 222.

6. From Young, "Gegen das Denkmal, fur Erinnerung," 178.
7. From Radunski's "Opening Remarks" to the First Colloquium on Berlin's Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe, 1 1 January 1997.

8. For articulate arguments against the memorial, see Koselleck, "Wer das vergessen werden?";
and Konrad, "Abschied von der Chimare," 4 1
9. Habermas, quoted from a letter he wrote to Peter Eisenman, 16 December 1998. The article
from which he was drawing appeared as "Der Zeigefinger," Die Zeit, 31 March 1999.
10. I raised many of these same issues, in slightly different form, in Young, "Gegen Sprach-
losigkeit," 28.
1 1. For further details and an insightful summary of the entire process up to September 1998,
see Wise, "Totem and Taboo," 38-46.
12. As recalled by Michael Naumann in a conversation with the author in April 1999; also cited
in Cowell, "Opponent of Kohl."
13. On the implications of this issue for traditional stances in the CDU and SPD, see Herf's
insightful essay, "Naumann und Schroeder's 'Nein' zur Denkmal." Also see Herf's excellent
book, Divided Memory.
14. I published this as "Die menschenmogliche Losung des Unlosbaren," 25.
15. On the eve of a planned visit between Peter Eisenman and Michael Naumann, I was invited
to write a op-ed piece for the Berliner Zeitung, in which I asked just these questions, among
others. See James E. Young, "Was keine andere Nation je versucht hat," 1
3- 1 4.
1 6. For sending me the actual wording of the measure, I thank Dagmar Schwermer of Bay-
erischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio).

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242 Bibliography
Illustration Credits
i hapter I
Pages I I, 16, 2 \ 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 37, 38, 40: Reprinted by permission of Pantheon
Books, a division of Random 1 louse, Inc.; 17, 20, 21, 22: Reprinted by permission of
Art Spiegelman.
Chapter 2
Pages 18, 52, 53, 56, 57, 60: David Levinthal; 58: Etablissement Cinematographic et Photo-
graphic des Armees, Paris.
Chapter 3
Pages 64, 65, 68, 69, 73, 76, 77, 81, 84, 88, 89: Shimon Attic.
Chapter 4
Pages 92, 93, 98, 99, 100,101, 102, 103, 104, 105: Horst Hoheisel; 106: Henning Langenheim;
108, 1 12: Photos by author; 109: Micha Ullman; 110, 111: Rachel Whiteread and the
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Ltd., London; 113, 114, 115, 116, 117: Renata Stih and
Frieder Schnock.
Chapter 5
Pages 122, 125, 141, 142, 143, 148: Jochen Gerz; 128, 129, 136, 137: Jochen Gerz and Esther
Shalev-Gerz; 131, 132, 133: Photos by author.
Chapter 6
Pages 162, 164, 167, 168: Daniel Libeskind; 169, 172, 173, 176, 177, 180,181: Fotografie
Bitter-Bredt.
Chapter 7
Page 188: Photo by author; 190, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211: Senatswervaltung
fur Bauen und Wohnen, Berlin; 212, 213, 214, 215, 220: Peter Eisenman Architects.
243
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Berlin, Gestapo-Gelande, 187

Berlin, Institute for the StuqV of Anti-Semitism
abstract art, Nazi abhorrence of, 95 (proposed), 198
Ackerman, Chantal, 9 Berlin, Jewish Museurft: design competition for,
Adorno, Theodor, 6, 163, 196 160-163; development of, 155-162; exterior of,
Almagor, Gila, 1 772, 174,780, 181; goals of, 161, 198; interior of,
American Beauties (Levinthal, 1989), 46 165, 171-183, 773; Libeskind's design for, 8, 762,
Amichai, Yehuda, 40 162-171, 764, 168, 169; void space within, 753,
Amsterdam, Prinsengracht: Attie installation, 65, 163-165, 171-183,776, 777
82-84 Berlin, Markische Museum, 157-158
antinarrative, 19 Berlin, Ministerial Gardens, 184, 187, 192
Arendt, Hannah, 1 14 Berlin, Xeue Wache, 186-187
art: appropriate forms of, 4; as mediated experience, Berlin, Scheunenviertel district: Attie
3-4, 5; purpose of, 4, 46; redemptory function installation/performance, 3, 65, 67-73
of, 2, 5-9; repression of, 120 Berlin, Topography of Terror, 194, 198, 221
Aschrort, Sigmund, 97 Berlin, Wannsee Conference House (Villa), 194, 198,
Atget, Eugene, 45 221

Attie, Shimon, 3, 10, 155; Brick by Brick (1995), 79-82, Berlin Secessionists, 156, 195
81; The Neighbor Next Door (1995), 82-85, 84; Bernstein, Michael Andre, 40-41, 73
Portraits of Exile ( 1995), 75-79, 76, 77; Routes of "Between the Lines" (Libeskind design, Jewish
Silence (proposed), 87; Sites Unseen (1991-1996), Museum,), 164-165
62-89 passim; Trains (1993), 73, 73-75; The Walk Beuys, Josef, 9
of Fame 1996), 85-89, 88, 89; Writing on the Wall
( Biron ( France), Gerz installation, 146-147, 148
(1991-1993), 63, 64, 65, 67-73, 68, 69 Blanchot, Maurice, 12
Auschwitz-Birkenau: filming at, 86; in Spiegelman's Blow Up the Brandenburger Tor (Hoheisel, 1995), 8,
Maus, 27, 36 90-92,92,93, 187

Austria, memory of Holocaust in, 1 10 Blumenthal, Michael, 219
Bochum, Sammlung Kunstmuseum, 122
Bartov, Homer, 4 Boltanski, Christian, 9, 197; Missing House project
Beckett, Samuel, 31 (1990), 106-107,200
Bellmer, Hans, 45 Boorstin, Daniel, 42
Bendt,Vera, 161, 165, 179 Bothe, Rolf, 160, 161
Benjamin, Walter, 167, 179 Brandt, Willy, 217
Berlin: absent Jews of, 64-65, 67, 90, 114, 161, 165, Breakdowns (Spiegelman, 1977), 19, 20, 21, 22,
178; national Jewish memorial in, 9, 10, 90-92, 24-25

97, 116, 147-151, 183, 184-223 passim Breker, Arno, 95
Berlin, Bayerische Platz: Stih and Schnock Bremen, Gerz installation (1990-1995), 145-146
installation, 8, 112, 113, 113-116, 774, 115, 116 Brick by Brick (Attie, 1995), 79-82, 81
Berlin, Bebelplatz: Ullman "Bibliotek" memorial, Broder, Henryk, 191
107, 108, 109 Broszat, Martin, 15, 94
Berlin, Berlin Museum (Colliegenhaus): Bubis, Ignatz, 190, 196
development of, 158-162; role of Jewish Buchenwald: Cologne satellite camp of, 80; Hoheisel
Museum Department in, 159-162 "warm memorial" (1995), 704, 105, 705; memo-
Berlin, Brandenburger Tor: Hoheisel's projection on, rial landscape and exhibitions at, 194, 198, 221
706; Hoheisel's proposed destruction of, 8, Bus Stop — The Non-Monument (Stih and Schnock,
90-92,92,93, 187 1995), 97, 116-118,777, 187-189
244
i
age, lohn, 166 Frank, Anne, 82 83
caricatun ;
1 rankfurt, lewish Museum, 1 54
i elan, Paul, 166, 16 168 Frenkel,Vera,9
( ohen, I li, I I reud, Sigmund, 152, 154, 174, 183
collective memory, 2 10 I riedlander, Saul, 4 5,6, 10, 12 15,40 60

i
ologne \n air, totie installation
I 6 Friedrich Wilhelm I. King, 158
i ologne Fail Building, 9 80 Friends of the lewish Museum, 159
comix (commix, comics) form, i" 1 unkenstein, Amos, 40
commemorative forms, and history, I L. See also
monuments Galinski, Mem/, 158, 154, 1 70
common memory, 12 14, 29 gaze, pornographic, 57
i onradi, Peter, 195 Gerlach, Philipp, 158
( openhagen, Barsgraven ( anal: Artie Germany: anti lewish laws of, 8, 114, 157; memory
installation performance, 65, 75 74 ofHolocaust in,7 4,42, 144, 197-198, 223; na-
"countermonuments," 7 8,53,96 97,197 tional lewish memorial in, 9, 10, 90-92, 97, 16, 1
( rane, Susan, 12 147-151, 183, 184-223 passim; normalization

i riei jusqu'a I'ipuisement (Gerz, 1472), 126 of, 186; reunification of, 171-172, 186
( rimp, Douglas, 132 Gerz, fochen, 10, 53, 197; Berlin "Memorial" design,
200, 202, 207, 208; Bremen installation
1 tachau: Gerz's installation about, 7, 120-124, 122, i

1990 1995), 145-146; Crier jusqu'a
125; museum at, 194 V&puisement i
1472 i, 126; Die Transsib. Prospekt

deconstructivist architecture, 163, 171, 173 ( 1977 i, 1 27; EXIT/Materialien zum Dachau Pro-
deep memory, 12- 14, 28 jekt I
1971 ), 7, 120-124, 122, 125; Harburg-
Denk-Stein Sammlung (Hoheisel, 1988-1995), 8, Hamburg disappearing monument (1985), 7,
102, 102-104, 103 121, 127-139, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137,
deportation, of lews, 74, 97 138-139; Leben (Life, 1974), 126; Saarbrucken

Derrida, [acques, 178 invisible monument ( 1997), 7, 140-144, 141,
Diepgen, Eberhard, 216,217 143; The Secret Question: The Living Monument
Dietch,Amo,201 ofBiron (1996), 146-147, 148; To Warm the
Different Trains ( Reich), 9 Earth (1972), 126

Dresden, Attie installation/ performance, 65, 73-75 Glaser, Curt, 156-157
Gopnik, Adam, 20, 32
Eichstadt-Bohlig, Franziska, 171 Gould, Melissa, 9
Einstein, Albert, 1 14 Goya, Francisco, 59
Eisenman, "Memorial"
Peter, 10, 108, 163, 165, 184; Grass, Giinter, 193
design 1 (with Serra), 200, 203-204, 205-207, Gris, Juan, 20
208, 21 1, 212; "Memorial" design II (revised), Grosz, George, 20

208-216, 213, 214, 215, 218-219, 221, 222;
"Memorial" design III (revised), 219, 220 Habermas, Jiirgen, 199
Elsen, Albert, 95 Hamburg: Attie installation, 75; Gerzes'
Endlich, Stefanie, 193 disappearing monument (Harburg, 1985), 7,
eroticization, 55 121, 127-139, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137,
exile, signs of, 78 138-139
EXIT/Materialien zum Dachau Projekt (Gerz, 1971 ), Hassemer, Volker, 160
7, 120-124,722, 125 Hecker, Zvi, 108, 201-202, 206
Heine, Heinrich, 107
Fallen Man (Lehmbruck, 1917] 45 Heiduk, John, 163
fascism, fascination with, 4-5 Herf, Jeffrey, 217
Feininger, Lyonel, 20 Herz, Hans-Peter, 160
fiction, and history, 38-39 Herz, Rudolf, 200-201, 203
Filler, Deb, 9 Hirsch, Marianne, 2, 15
Fischer, Joshka, 217 historical documentary, 48-49, 86
Forster, Kurt W., 163, 166, 182 history: accuracy of, 38-39; authority of, 2;
Foucault, Michel, 11 cinematic experience of, 85-89; defined, 2, 182;
245
imagining of, 42-44, 59; as mediated experience, Kassel, Documenta exhibition (1977): Gerz installa-
3-4, 5, 62-64, 89; and memory, 12-15, 38-40; tion, 127
occlusion of, 78; as redemptive, 37-38; Kassel,Hauptbahnhof: Hoheisel installation, 8, 102,
represented in commemorative forms, 11; side- 102-103,703
shadowing of, 10-11, 24-34. See also received Keats, John, 75
history Kiefer, Anselm, 9
Hitler Moves East (Levinthal and Trudeau, 1977), 46, Kirschstein, Salli, 156
47-49, 48, 54, 59 Klee, Paul, 166
Hoffmann, E.T.A., 167, 179 Kleihues, Josef Paul, 170, 195, 220
Hoffmann, Werner, 195 Kleist, Heinrich von, 167
Hoheisel, Horst, 10, 197; Aschrott Brunnen (Kassel) Knigge, Volkhard, 105
project, 97-102, 98, 99, 100, 101; Blow Up the Knitz, Andreas, 105
Brandenburger Tor (proposed, 1995), 8, 90-92, Kocka, Jiirgen, 192
92, 93, 187; Brandenburger Tor projection, 106; Kohl, Helmut, 1 86- 1 87, 1 90, 208, 216,217
Buchenwald "warm memorial" 1995), 104, 105, ( Kollwitz, Kathe, 20; Pietd —Mother with Dead Son
705; Denk-Stein Sammlung (1988-1995), 8, 102, (1938-1939), 186-187, 188
102-104, 1 03 Konrad, Gycirgy, 220, 221
Holocaust: commodification of,11; common mem- Korn, Solomon, 193, 220, 221
ory of, 12-14, 29; deep memory of, 12-14,28; Koselleck, Reinhart, 182, 193
mythic memory of, redemption of, 5-9;
15; Krakow, Kazimierz neighborhood: Attie installation,
reflected in games, 42-44; vicarious memory of, 65,85-89
1-5,44-45 Krauss, Rosalind, 94
Holocaust Remembrance Day, 192, 200 Kurtzman, Harvey, 20
Horn, Rebecca, 200, 201 Kuspit, Donald, 54
Humpert, Klaus, 170
Hutton, Patrick, 39-40 Lafontaine, Oskar, 142
Huyssen, Andreas, 94 Landsberger, Franz, 157
Langenheim, Henning, 706
imagery: recirculation of, 49, 54, 56; retouching of, Laub, Dori, 24
70 Leben (Gerz, 1974), 126
Israel, Masada, 189-190 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 95
Israel, Yad Vashem, 56 Leonhard, Elke, 219, 221, 222
Levi, Primo, 150
Jackel, Eberhard, 184, 187 Levinthal, David, 3, 10; American Beauties ( 1989),
Jackob-Marks, Christine: "Memorial for the 46; HitlerMoves East (with Trudeau, 1977), 46,
Murdered Jews of Europe": first design, 47-49, 48, 54, 59; Mein Kampf (1994-1996), 43,
1 89 - 1 90, 1 90, 1 98; second design, 20 45-46, 49-61, 52, 53, 56, 57, 60; Modern
laeger, Falkk, 171 Romance (1985), 46; The Wild West (1987), 46
Jahoda, Susan, 9 Libeskind, Daniel: Berlin Jewish Museum design
Jerusalem, Israel Museum, 157 (1989), 8, 10, 762, 162-171, 764, 168, 169; Berlin
Jewish art, defined, 156-157 "Memorial" design, 200, 202, 207, 207; Chamber
Jewish Museum Society, 156 Works (1983), 165, 166; Line of Fire (1988), 166;
Jewish Relief Organization (JRSO), 157 Micromegas (1978), 165-166
"Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk" (Kafka), Liebermann, Max, 156-157, 179
16 Liipertz, Markus, 201
Lydenberg, Robin, 154
Kabakov, Ilya, 108
Kafka, Franz, 16 Mad magazine, 20
Kalir, Jane, 19 Maile, Mathias, 74, 79
Kaplan, Alice Yeager, 1, 28 masking traditions, 32
Karavan, Dani, 187, 200, 201, 205 Matz, Reinhard, 200-201, 203
Kassel, Aschrott Brunnen: Hoheisel installation on, Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Spiegelman, 1972-1985),
8, 90, 97-102, 98, 99, 100, 101; restoration of, 73, 15-41 passim, 76, 77, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30,
97-98 31, 32, 37, 38, 40; CD-ROM of, 34; classification
246
of, 18 19; exhibitions of, M; success of, \6 photoconceptualism, 45
McKay, Winsor, 18, 19 photographs: ambiguity about reality and history in,
meaning, m isson <>i, i i

•
I i2; as art of non intervention, 58; essential
Meier, * hi istian, 19 melancholia of, 73; imitation of reality in, 44,45;
Mein Kamp/(Levinthal, i
l
»''i 1996), 0,45 16, retouching of, 70
19 61, •.'. > ;
.
•". i ',60 Portraits oj I rile I
Attie, L995), 75-79, 76, 77
Memorial to the l Reported Jewish < itizens o) the post memory, 2, 15, 38-41
Bayerische Vtertel (Stih and Schnock, 1993), 8, postmodernism, 6
112, ri3, 113 l l". 114,115,116 process architecture, 163
memor) ambivalence about, J5
: >8; collective, 210; public spaces, meaning of, 70
common, 12 14, 29; deep, 12 14, 28; mythic,
15; vicarious, I 5;and"will to remember," 62 Radermacher, Norbert, 197
Mere, Gerhard, 201, 204 Radunski, Peter, 192,195,207,220,221
Miller, Nancy, J0.38 Raven, Abraham, 9
mimesis, safety of, 59 Reagan, Ronald, 186
Missing House project (Boltanski, 1990), 106 107, reality, fabrication of, 45
200 received history, 1 5, 39. See also survivors' tales
modernism, 6 redemption, 2, 5-9, 37-38, 144, 155

Modern Romance 1
1 evinthal, 1985), 46 Reich, Steve, 9
Monument Against Fus< ism [( ten and Shalev- repression, 120, 154, 183
Gerz),7 resentment, 138

monuments: ambivalence about, 93—96, 1 19; resolution, 144
contested nature of, 193 Ribalta, Jorge, 45
Miiller, Alois M., 182 Richter, Gerhard, 53
Mumford, Lewis, 94 Riefenstahl, Leni, 50, 59

Musil, Robert, 40 "Road to Maus, The" (Spiegelman), 34
mythic memory, 15 Rogoff, Irit, 144
Ronte, Dieter, 195, 220
narrative: in comix (commix, comics) form, 18, 19, Rosen, Jonathan, 37
22-24, 47; construction of, 34 Rosh, Lea, 184, 187, 189, 192-193, 196,207,218,220
"narrative collage," 47 Roth, Karl, 97, 99
Nasgaard, Roald, 126 Rothenberg, Ellen, 9
Naumann, Michael, 216, 218-219, 220, 221, 222 Routes of Silence (Attie, proposed), 87
Nazism: obsession with, 4-5; pageantry of, 50, 59 Ruscha, Ed, 53-54
Neighbor Next Door, The (Attie, 1995), 82-85, 84
neo-Nazism, 101, 102, 115, 194 Saarbriicken, Gerz's invisible monument (1997), 7,
New York, Galerie St. Etienne, 34 140-144, 141, 143
New York, Museum of Modern Art, 34 Sachsenhausen, memorial exhibition at, 198, 221
New York Times, 38-39 Schindler's List (Spielberg), 55, 59, 85, 86, 89
Nicolai, Bernd, 118 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 186
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 94 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 167, 168
Nora, Pierre, 62, 94 Schneider, Bernhard, 173
North, Michael, 132 Schneider, Peter, 193
Schnock, Frieder, 10, 155, 197; Bayerische Platz
Olympic Games (1936), 115 installation (1993), 8, 112, 113, 113-116,114,
Ost-Juden, images of, 71 115, 116; Bus Stop — The Non-Monument (with
Ostow, Robin, 158, 159 Stih, 1995), 91, 116-118,117, 187-189
Schoenberg, Arnold, 166, 167
Palowski, Franciszek, 85 Schoeps, Julius, 193
Paris, Etablissement Cinematographic et Schroeder, Gerhard, 216, 217, 221
Photographie des Armees, 59 Schroeder, Richard, 222
parody, 85 Schwarz, Karl, 156
Passover Haggadoth, 32 Seated Youth (Lehmbriick, 1917), 95
Perlman, Yitzhak, 163 Seraji, Nasrine, 149
247
Serra, Richard, 203-204, 205-207, 208-209, 211, To Warm the Earth (Gerz, 1972), 126
212 toys: as cultural icons, 46-47, 51; as golem, 50; Nazi,
Shalev-Gerz, Esther, 127; Harburg-Hamburg 50,51
disappearing monument ( 1985), 7, 121, Trains (Attie, 1993), 73, 73-75
127-139, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, Transsih. Prospekt, Die (Gerz, 1977), 127
138-139 Treblinka, photographs of, 56
shame: about national Jewish memorial debate, Triumph of the Will ( Riefenstartl, 1935), 50, 59
194-195; and redemption, 7 Trudeau, Garry, 47, 59
Sherman, Cindy, 45 Tscemikow, Jakob G., 166
Shoah Oral History Foundation ( Project), 149, 218 Turrell, James, 200
Simmons, Laurie, 45 2,146 Stones: A Monwnent Against Racism (Gerz,
Simon, Hermann, 156 1997), 7, 140-144, 242, 143
Simon-Dietch, Anna, 201
socialist realism, 95, 96 L'llman, Micha, 8, 10, 197; "Bibliotek" memorial
Society for a Jewish Museum, 159, 160 (1996), 107,208, 109
Society for the Friends of the Jewish Museum, 56 1 Under the Domim Tree (film), 1
Society for the Rescue of Historical Monuments, 97 lingers,Simon, 189,201

soft-focus portraiture, 53-54 unheimlich (uncanny), 8, 152, 154-155, 179-180,
Sontag, Susan, 42, 58 183,206
Sophie's Choice (film), 55
space: in Levinthal's photographs, 52-53; in vandalism, 138, 142
Libeskinds Jewish Museum design (Berlin), 153, van der Rohe, Mies, 168
163-165, 171-183, 176, 177; of memory, Varnhagen, Rachel, 167, 168
118-119 victims: eroticization of, 55; humiliation of, 55-58;
Spiegelman, Art, Breakdowns (1977), 19, 20,
3, 10; objectification of, 55-56, 59-60
21, 22, 24-25; comix (commix, comics) form of, Vidler, Anthony, 154,182
1 6-22, 47; critique of Levinthal images by, 55; Vienna, Judenplatz: Whiteread's Holocaust
Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1972-1985), 13, 15-41 Memorial (1997), 107-113, 110, 111, 200
passim, 16,17, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30,31, 32, 37,
38,40 Walk of Fame, The (Attie, 1996), 85-89,88, 89
Spielberg, Steven, 59, 85, 86, 149, 218 Weber, Anton, 166
Stern, Moritz, 155 Weimar, Hoheisel installations in, 8
Stih, Renata, 10, 155, 197; Bayerische Platz Weinland, Martina, 157
installation (1993), 8, 112, 113, 113-116, 114, Weinmiller, Gesine, 203-205, 208, 209
1 15, 1 16; Bus Stop — The Non-Monument (with Weiszacker, Richard von, 2 1
Schnock, 1995), 91, 116—118, 2 27, 187-189 White, Hayden, 40

Stolzl, Christoph, 195 White Hotel, The Thomas I, 55
(
Storrs, Robert, 34, 112 Whiteread, Rachel, 8, 10; Berlin "Memorial" design,
Storz, Rolf, 202 200; House, 107; Vienna Judenplatz Holocaust
Sturmer, Michael, 192 Memorial (1997), 107-113, 110, 111, 200
Sultanik, Kalman, 86 Wiesenthal, Simon, 107
survivors' tales (testimony): collection of, 1, 3, 34, Wild West, The (Levinthal, 1987), 46
36, 218; loss of, 29-31; narrative of, 24, 26; and Winkler, Kurt, 157
survival of listeners of, 35, 36-37. See also Wolf, Albert, 155
received history Worhle, Hans Jorg, 202
Writing on the Wall Att ie,
( 1 99 1 - 1 993 ) , 63, 64, 65,
Thomas, D. M., 55 67-73, 68, 69; reactions to, 72

Tinguely, Jean, 131, 132
Tobey, Mark, 138 Yizker Bikher (memorial books), 140
Topfer, Rodolphe, 18 Young, La Monte, 149
248
^3^- r; ~
\*iV II pr
BOSTON li! I I
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1
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"3 9999 03897 463 8 ...
SaleofthL **Y
eAKER & TAYLOB

( lontinucj tVi
Holocaust but indelibly shaped bj
memory as passed down through
memoirs, film, photographs, and
museums. In the context of the moral
and aesthetic questions raised by these
avant-garde projects, Young offers fas-
cinating insights into the controversy-
surrounding Berlin's newly opened
Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel
Libeskind, as well as Germany's soon-
to-be-built national Holocaust memo-

rial, designed by Peter Eisenman.
Illustrated with striking images
in color and black-and-white, At
Memory's Edge is the first book irfany
language to chronicle these projects
and to show how we remember the
Holocaust in the after-images of
its history.
James E. Young, professor of English
and Judaic studies at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, is also the
author of The Texture of Memory, pub-
lished by Yale University Press, which
won the National Jewish Book Award.
Jacket illustration: Shimon Attie, Almadtstrasse

(formerly Grenadierstrasse and corner of
Schendelgasse), Religious Book Salesman, 1930,
1992. (Wijiting oifthe Wall, Berlin)
Printed in the U.S.A.

llKJMinilRl
lights is matched by his outstanding knowl-

,ge of the vast array of representations of the
i i 11 i • . • .
li-.
nam
•
Jiiwan aii\A im ins ai aiiu uiiiui \ otnoi
ity. This will become an influential book."
—Saul Friedlander, University of California,
Los Angeles
"James Young explores in fascinating detail the
ethical, aesthetic, and historical problems that

accompany contemporary attempts at Holo-
caust memorialization, whether by individual
artists or by a whole country, Germany. His
chapters on Berlin's new Jewish Museum and

its recently approved Holocaust memorial read
like suspense tales, without letting us forget
that there is no redemptive endnig to the Story.
The place of Europe's murdered -lews can never

be Tilled,' and the best memorials Incorporate
that void.' Continuing his earlier work on
Holocaust memorials, in At Memory's F.dge
Young makes a compelling case for the
postmodern monument. A powerful, thought-

provoking book" —Susan Rubin Suleiman,
author ot Risking Who One Is: Encounters
with Contemporary Art and Literature
• ' si
Yale
University
Press
ISBN 0-300-08032-8
New Haven
780300"080322
London
www, yale.edu/yup

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After-images of the

Art and Architec

Contemporary Art and Architecture

How should Germany commemorate

the mass murder of Jews once commit-

ted in its name? In 1997, James E. Young

was invited to join a German commis-

sion appointed to find an appropriate

design for a national memorial in Berlin

to the European Jews killed in World

War II. As the only foreigner and only

In this book, he tells for the first time

Holocaust memorial and his own

In exploring Germany's memorial crisis,

Young also asks the more general ques-

tion of how a generation of contempo-

rary artists can remember an event like

the Holocaust, which it never knew

directlv. Young examines the works of a

number of vanguard artists in America

and Europe — including Art Spiegelman,

Rachel Whiteread — all born after the

Continued on back flap

Contemporary Art and Architecture

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2000 by James E. Young.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole

(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107

Designed by Sonia L. Scanlon.

Set in Minion type.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Card Number: 00- 00482 1

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines

for permanence and durability of the Committee

mal articulations of Holocaust memory in this decidedly antiredemptory age.

and symposia organized by colleagues as preoccupied by these difficult questions as

interdisziplinare Forschung at the University of Bielefeld, Germany; Gary Smith at

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Berliner Zeitung, and Tages Spiegel in Germany.

and to administrators at my home institution for so generously supporting my

publication grant that has allowed me to show in images, as well as to describe in

the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

It becomes almost impossible to acknowledge just how crucial a role my friends

Anson Rabinbach, Jeffrey Herf, and Michael Wise.

where they've never been."

The Holocaust as Vicarious Past

how is a post-holocaust ci e n e r at i n of artists supposed to "re-

Coming of age after — but indelibly shaped by — the Holocaust, this

this sense of vicariousness, for measuring the distance between history-as-it-hap-

remains an unfinished, ephemeral process, not a means toward definitive answers to

history's reality. Neither history memory is regarded by these artists as a zero-sum

When photographer )avid Levinthal was asked by

tographing his imagined re-creations of Nazi pageantry, the fascist war-machine,

"memory" of what happened there. Haunted by what he regarded as the specter of

missing Jews in Berlin's Scheunenviertel, Attie projected photographs of Jews from

in his mind back onto otherwise indifferent landscapes.

poems, plays, survivors' testimonies. It is necessarily mediated experience, the afterlife

too, into its canvas of history?

to them afterward. Also implied here is an understandable leeriness on Bartov's part

Friedlander has raised in his own profound meditations on "fascinating fascism," in

a reflection on fascism than it is an extension of it. Here Friedlander asks whether a

to it. "Nazism has disappeared," Friedlander writes,