The Holocaust and Representation:Whose Memory?

Metal/StoneBrowningYoung

Comparing … METALshiny, bright, shaped with heatHardwestern beautycold/hotstrong, flexibleclean, powerful,simple/pureRust, liquidchangeable conducts heat

STONEdull/calminghard, shaped by natureJapanese beautybreakable, erodessmooth, rough long

lasting/constantusually coolsecurity

Genocide

Define: A deliberate and systematic

destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.

The word was first used in 1944. Why? Fear – Ideology?The Other: Why do we need an “other”?

Genocide happens through a combination of factors:

1. ethnic prejudice, racism, and other forms of hatred;

2. fear of the other;3. extreme forms of nationalism; 4. radical and absurd ideas of

social change;

Genocide happens through a combination of factors:

5. myth-making—just simply the idea of creating mythologies around a group, constructing the group as the embodiment of all evil;

6. And the desire on the part of the state to engage in extreme propaganda against the group that motivates large numbers of people to go out and destroy that particular group.

I: Browning asks …How do ordinary men become mass murders?

“Can one recapture the experiential history of these killersthe choices they faced, the emotions they felt, the coping mechanisms they employed,

the changes they underwent?”

II: Browning asks …How do ordinary men become mass murders?

Not only are memories potentially false, but they are different based on the individual’s pre-existing schemas.  Everyone had a different

perspective on the same eventseveryone has their “own ways of

seeing”Therefore would these accounts

be a valid  representation of the Holocaust?

III: Browning asks …How do ordinary men become mass murders?

Browning admits that he is only human and could’ve been in either group of the Battalion- killers or evaders. What makes a killer/evader?  Should we have written accounts if not to represent the Holocaust but to better understand humans and the power of situations? 

Young: Texture of Memory  Relation of Memory &

Monument The quotes:

Baudrillard/Améry, p. 1 Memory is never shaped in a

vacuum.The traditional Jewish injunctions

to remember.A government’s need to explain a

nation’s past to itself.eg. US – liberty, pluralism, immigration.

Memorials take on a life of their own.

'Oddali zycie abys Ty mogl zyc godnie.'

'They sacrificed their lives so you could live with dignity.'

Solidarity MonumentGdansk, Poland -- 1970

Young: Texture of MemoryAre monuments to remember

and memorials so we never forget?Washington Monument/Lincoln

MemorialBeginnings/Endings?

Young considers all memory sites memorials, the objects inside as monuments.A memorial need not be a

monumentBut a monument is always a kind

of memorial.

Young: Texture of MemoryFunction of a monument?

Bury events rather than remember?

Displaces memory, substitutes “memory work” with an object. Memorial = forgetting

Institutions of a society are automatically geared towards creating a shared memory – or the illusion of one.

Young: Texture of Memory

 Site & Monument First memorials were the Yizkor Bikher – memorial booksThe site of reading would become the memorial space

Monuments – “better to provoke the space” Why?Often placed to maximize symbolic meaning

Young: Texture of Memory The Art of the Monument

Tied to national & communal remembrance as well as designer’s own time and place.

Survivors want a literal expression of their experiences. p. 9

Abstractions encourage private visions – defeats public/communal aims

Problems: How refer to events in a medium

that refers to itself? How can remembering a person or

event be done abstractly?

Warsaw Memorial

Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial: Washington, D.C

Young: Texture of Memory

 The Consequences of Memory Two questions:

What role monument plays in current history?

What the consequences of public memorial art for people?

Young: Texture of Memory

 The Consequences of Memory Two quotes: p. 13

“The public monument has a responsibility apart from its qualities as a work of art.” Doezema

“There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument.” Musil

Young: Texture of Memory

 ”It is not enough to ask whether or not our memorials remember the Holocaust, or even how they remember it. We should also ask to what ends we have remembered.”

p. 15