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At Memory's Edge PDF
At Memory's Edge PDF
Holocaust in v
At Memory's Edge
After- 1 mages of the Holocaust in
James E. Young
II
At Memory's Edge
At
After-images of the Holocaust in
Memory's
Edge
James E. Young
ISBN 0-300-08032-8
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-
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
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
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
Like others in the academic community, I owe great debts both to foundations
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
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
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,
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
— Eli Cohen ami Gila Almagor, from their film Under the Domini Tree
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.
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
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
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
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.
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-
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
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,
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,
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
Even more disturbing for Bartov, however, is the question historian Saul
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
Introduction
but the obsession it represents for the contemporary imagination
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
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
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
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-
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
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
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
their victims? How does a nation reunite itself on the bedrock memory of its crimes?
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
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.
iously, and to make meaning out of experiences they never knew directly that con-
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
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-
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;
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
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
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
Introduction 1
CHAPTER ONE
"How does history become 'personal' — only when it is survived, or only when private
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?"
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.
that makes room for a historiography integrating deep and common memory. For
the integrated historian, this means a historiography whose narrative skein is dis-
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-
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
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,
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
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.
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.
sessions themselves — in
painful mediacy.
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
16 Spiegelman's Maus
\// Spiegelman,
Breakdowns.
©ITRl 3* «P'<gjeW»«
Spiegelman's Maus 17
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
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
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.
18 Spiegelman's Maus
( )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,
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
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
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.
Spiegelman's Maus 19
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-
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-
20 Spiegelman's Maus
"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!]"
"
"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^
Spiegelman's Maus 21
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-
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
22 Spiegelman's Maus
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
Throughout Maus,
Spiegelman thus con-
fronts his father with the
Spiegelman's Maus 23
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.
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,
follow m Breakdowns.
Maus: A Survivor's
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
Spiegelman's Maus 25
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
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.-
Vblume 2 opens in
to day circumstances oi
"Which is the true historical project," Alice Yeager Kaplan has asked, "the pin-
Spiegelman's Maus 27
Art Spiegelman, Maus, 1:118.
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
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.
28 Spiegelman's Maus
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
Spiegelman's Maus 29
&FTEp> Ittilft VlEP V H&P to WiKC Arf Spiegelman, Maus, 7;/59.
Mi OWȣR.U)rrH EAIEIWHlNfr ...
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
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-
30 Spiegelman's Maus
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
^^^
i\
n i*i m
J
frame in the two volumes u i
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 humans^and 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:
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-
32 Spiegelman's Maus
\n Spiegelman, Maus, 2 / /
declared inadequac \.
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
Spiegelman's Maus 33
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
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
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,
.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
about "how it was in the camps" (2:90). In a pinch, as it turns out, the savvy survivor
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
Spiegelman's Maus 35
Vladek died of congestive heart failure on August 18, 1982. . . .
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.
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."
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
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).
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*-
generation? It is an irony
with a very clear judg-
ment built into it: the
Holocaust was an irre-
Spiegelman's Maus 37
AtvA $0
CLEAJ6 Po?
THE T We 5 ence then, had a terrible
OH- UET5
camiHue
effect on many survivors'
lives, and endows its vic-
HFTEEN PO lift R> H£ CHWtfCP TO Co MET
K *HE V*MT£p OKU Pi HPQC vjKTIL V>J^ I tims with no great moral
JTRoHGO*., I'D GOTO THE. &*N* ftvipTlflCE
ft NOTARY FOR ONU< ft qi/AKSER
1
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.
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
author I believe I might have lopped several years off the 13 I de-
repair concentration camp boots got the book onto your advice,
how-to and miscellaneous list. It's just that I shudder to think how
38 Spiegelman's Maus
I )avid 1 Hike it he could read would respond to seeing a care
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
Spiegelman's Maus 39
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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
40 Spiegelman's Maus
righl oi Ins head there's an arch from the Roman period. A little to
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
Spiegelman's Maus 41
CHAPTER TWO
"We make, we seek, and finally we enjoy, the contrivance of all experience. We fill our
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,
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
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
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.
and inert .is the photos themselves, the images already small and toylike.
us. 1
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
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
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
that are as much a part of their significance as the content of the glossy images
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
ternal reality and its more recently acknowledged role in revealing the inner realities
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
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-
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.
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-
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
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.
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
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-
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
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
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
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-
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
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
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
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.
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,
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
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
a fountain-of-youth tech-
Gerhard Richter or Ed
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
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.
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.
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
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
— and then again with the recirculation of such images. Only now we are the pas-
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
\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
.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-
gestion that we, as viewers, may be no less complicit in the continuing degradation
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
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
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,
It this relationship among the killers, their own photographs, and ourselves
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
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
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
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.
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.
Sites Unseen
"Lieux de memoire are created by the interaction between memory and history. . .
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.
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
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1 11 1
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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-
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-
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)
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
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
"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
Linienstrasse
on Former
Jewish Residents,
1920, 1992.
( Writing on the
Wall, Berlin)
Joachimstrasse
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
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
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-
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
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.
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-
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.
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-
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
source. With these thoughts in mind Shimon Attie chose the Borsgraven Canal in
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
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
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.
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
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-
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
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
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
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-
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)
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.
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
matter of national self-aggrandizement but has much more to do with the deeply
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 ^im.\ 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
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-
Amsterdam, 1995)
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
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-
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
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
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
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-
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.
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
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
copies of the famous stars lining Hollywood Boulevard's "Walk of Fame," on Szeroka
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
down their knowledge to him. But although he acknowledges this necessarily vicari-
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-
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.
Memory, Countermemory,
and the End of the Monument
"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
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
E^E3
Auschwitz Treblinka Majdanek Stutthof Sobibor Kulmhof Belcec
Horst Hoheisel, Blow Up the Brandenburger Tor. Proposal for the 1995 competition for "Berlin's
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
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-
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
AH Denkjnol enmehen 2w* leere One. deren doopeke leere o..iZ^hakcrt. dot ergentkerte 0?-'
Horst Hoheisel, Blow Up the Brandenburger Tor. Proposal for the 1995 competition for "Berlins
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
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
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
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
94 Memory, Countermemory
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,
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-
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:
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
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.
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-
past they would have us contemplate — and finally, against the authoritarian propen-
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
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
96 Memory, Countermemory
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-
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
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
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
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.
countermonument, therefore,
Hall Square.
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
98 Memory, Countermemory
Horst Hoheisel, model for the Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial, Kassel, 1987.
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
sociations as well, linking the monument to both the town's Jewish past and a tradi-
Memory, Countermemory 99
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
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
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
like. I le asked them to visil formerly fewish neighborhoods and gel to know the Ger-
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.
-~
*rf fi ri*
T n
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-
Buchenwald, 1995.
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.
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-
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
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
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
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-
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-
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."
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
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-
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.
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Memorial to the Deported Jewish Citizens of the Bayerische Viertel,
Berlin, 1993.
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-
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
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
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
|
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
and
"infil-
in
qpo
trate the daily lives of Berliners," Stih
Berlin, 1993.
Benutzungsverbot
oftentlicher upon them one or two at a time,
•
Fernsprecher. ,
.
, , ,
2] p [94J
the artists can show that the laws
»»
"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
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-
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."
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
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-
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-
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
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
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
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-
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.
in Germany Today
"When it comes to fascism, Germans tend to be speechless. But here, you see, they have
"What we did not want was an enormous pedestal with something on it presuming to
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
N,ch.g»" ,,e
""
'" dco
, p.. Rauct«>"
d ergleic*en w ortn.ng|eC»C«"
/oc/ien Gerz, "Memorial Site Rides" at the Dachau Memorial Museum, EXIT / Materialien zum
Dachau-Projeckt.
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
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.
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.
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
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'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."
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
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.
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.
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:
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
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
terindex" to the ways time, memory, and current history intersect at any memorial site.
1986.
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
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,
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-
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
.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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
140 Memory Against Itself
I f w M
.1 » " _ 1 _ _ L
^1 ^ ,
Jochen Gerz, Place of the Invisible Memorial — 2,146 Stones Against Racism, Saarbriicken, 1997.
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
of stone.
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-
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
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-
speak for the others. This shows that today one can't pose such
questions any more. Three years later I asked the people themselves
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
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 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
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
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.
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
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,
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
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
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-
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
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)
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-
"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-
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
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
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.
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
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.
" [According to Schelling], the uncanny [is] something which ought to have remained
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
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
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.
what literary critic Robin Lydenberg aptly sees in "uncanny narrative" might be also
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-
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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-
tion^ model for the Jewish Museum in Berlin first proposed and first challenged
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
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-
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
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
tonomous Jewish department within the Berlin Museum. In 1971, two years after
opening in the Colliegenhaus on Lindenstrasse, the Berlin Museum mounted its first
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
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
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
a milestone in the gradual process to reconstruct and extend the Jewish department
of the Berlin Museum," he said, before continuing,
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. . .
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
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
160 Libeskind's Jewish Museum
name with which they hoped to finesse the connection between the two: "Extension
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
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
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
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
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
Guided by this conceptual brief, city planners issued an open invitation to all
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
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-
Berlin, Libeskind proposed not so much a solution to the planners' conceptual co-
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
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
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
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-
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
.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
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.
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-
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
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
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
Daniel Libeskind, architect's sketch of a distorted Star of David overlaid onto a map of Berlin,
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
In his preliminary sketch of the city, therefore, Libeskind traces what he calls
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-
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-
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
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
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-
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
Galinski wrote. "Libeskind has submitted a design that proposes a totally different
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
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
beside the existing building like a petrified flash of lightening, cannot be called de-
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
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
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
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
those changes that seemed to neutralize the difficulty of his design, especially those
thai removed the museum's estranging properties, hater, however, Libeskind offered
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.
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
"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.
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,
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."
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.
Facing page: Interior view of bridges and voids at The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin
Museum, 1997.
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
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
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-
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
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
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
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
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
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."
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-
His is a project that allows for the attempt at integration as an ongoing, if impossible
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
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,
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
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
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-
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."
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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-
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-
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.
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-
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-
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
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
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
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-
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
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)
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
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-
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
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
ters, both in Berlin; from the brooding and ever-evolving memorial landscape at
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-
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
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
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
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
would also find myself in a strange and uncomfortable predicament. The skeptics'
Jew, a sop to authority and so-called expertise. I asked myself: Was I invited as an aca-
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
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.
.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,
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
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-
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
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-
Before proceeding, we had to address two further concerns shared both by us,
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
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-
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
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
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,
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-
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
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-
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-
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-
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
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
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.
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
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
v^TTyr
- !
|Bj
1
Gerhard Merz, Open-topped Mausoleum, Hole in Ground. Proposal for Berlins "Memorial for
the 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-
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.
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
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-
«. 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.
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-
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.
in the design whatsoever. As a result, he withdrew from the project, suggesting that
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.
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
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
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.
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
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-
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
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.
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, e^en 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.
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
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-
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
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.
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
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-
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
of pillars, which was, procedurally at least, still the project's winning design.
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.
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-
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
for an added "interpretive center, library, and research center." These discussions
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
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
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
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-
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
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
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
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-
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
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:
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.
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-
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
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
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
.' 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).
8. Ibid., 53.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
3. ibid.
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.
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.
17. See Stih and Schnock, Arbeitsbuch fiir ein Denkmal in Berlin.
19. Ibid., 9.
20. Nicolai, "Bus Stop — The Non-Monument," unpaginated brochure on the project
"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
3. This project was reinstalled as part of the mammoth exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau
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-
Object oj Performance; I ippard, Changing 261-264; and Crimp, "Serra's Public Sculpture."
12. [bid.
"
13. From Gintz, *L' Anti-Monument,' " 80.
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.
18. From "Forwort," in Sefer Yizkor, 130, as quoted in Kugelmass and Boyarin, eds., From a
Ruined Garden, 1 1.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
24 Ibid., 166.
28. I oi lut thei insightful reflection on the role these voids play in Berlin generally and in
>0. Ibid
31. Forster, "Monstrum Mirabileel Audax,"19.
)2. Realisierungs Wettbewerb, 169.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
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.
43. Realisierungs Wettbewerb, 169.
In submitting a design for this memorial, the architect made clear that he did not want his
7. From Radunski's "Opening Remarks" to the First Colloquium on Berlin's Memorial to the
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-
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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
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,
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
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;
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,
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
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
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,
248
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