Tourist Productions 2005

November 21, 2005

Paul Williams and his sources

I forgot one thing that disturbed me in reading Paul Williams' otherwise fascinating article on Cambodia's memorial sites.

One of his final sources, not an important one in terms of content, but still mentioned in a footnote, is Serge Thion... a famous French Holocaust denier, who has also questioned the use of "genocide" when it comes to Cambodia...
Here's the article from Wikipedia:

Serge Thion

Serge Thion (born 1942) is a French sociologist mainly known for his Holocaust denial.
Thion is associated with the bookshop and publisher La Vieille Taupe. It has been alleged that he is also linked to the website 'Ancient Amateurs Association of War and Holocaust Tales' [1] [2], which first appeared in 1996.

Thion worked as a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) from 1971 to 2000. Most of his research focused on Cambodia and Vietnam. Thion was the subject of some controversy when he wrote that "genocide" was not a proper description of what happened in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge rule. His employment was terminated in 2000 after a French newspaper revealed that Thion had used his position at the CNRS to promote Holocaust denial.

Posted by Brigitte Sion at 11:38 PM

Forget Me Not

In “Memory of the New Berlin”, Karen Till speaks to the performativity and materiality of memorials. Specifically, she discusses the newly emergent “memory district” in Berlin which marks a trend toward the centralization of memory while mapping itself as central to the global moral community through the public display and acknowledgement of past crimes. Till treats the spectacular nature of spatial and architectural aspects of Berlin as a staging of the city to its citizens and visitors. She problematizes the hypervisibility of the memory district and its “material performances [which] assume that urban space is transparent, that the city can be visually known.” (196) The “nothing to hide” stance communicated by the centrally location and highly visibility of these sites can be dangerously deceptive for visibility can be easily collapsed with clear-sightedness and moral foresight. (204) Furthermore, they may suggest the knowability of events which are by their vary nature unknowable: “place making and memory cannot be contained in space or time.” (ibid.)

Till further discusses the complex relationships between place and memory. Memorials which are site-specific function as traces, objective proof (Spuren) and evidence, testimony (Zeugnis). How are places of past cultural trauma along with visible material traces and the “spiritual field resulting from the suffering of those who no longer live” (208) similar and distinct from newly located memorial sites? Where does the actual construction of memory and mourning take place? How much materiality is necessary for its construction? Is it possible to experience these emotional and intellectual states with little or no mediation?

Enterprises like that of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, as described by Liz Sevcenko point to the potential of activating these sites to “promote a social conscience that values active Memory as a means of avoiding history from repeating itself.” (59) According to this model it is the sites’ stewards who are “responsible for engaging its audiences in civic dialogue around contemporary issues.” (ibid.) No matter how carefully disguised all of the sites treated in this week’s readings have a political agenda. Unfortunately, it is not always in keeping with the spirit of what they ostensibly represent. Memorials are potential sites of activism and contestation. In his article Sherman illustrates the link between monument building and areas of political contestation. What is significant is the fact that monuments’ meanings are often appropriated for political purposes: “it is the intrinsic nature of public art that it seems to adapt, collaborate.” (206) The sites studied this week seem to embody this very concept, when emotions are open and vulnerable they are easy to manipulate and harness toward specific political ends. For instance, in the case of Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek the Vietnamese had an implicit agenda in the construction of the memorials as sites that would justify the invasion. On the other hand initiatives like that of many Holocaust memorials has lead to pressures which resulted in some financial reparations, public acknowledgement of guilt which now serves as a model for recourses attempting to deal with other acts of crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, as seen is some of the websites browsed for this week, these enterprises are not without Zionist overtones.

As Williams points out memory must not simply be preserved it must be created. (249) Till also alludes to the constructiveness of memory highlighting the backstage aspects of memory production. How should memorial experiences be constructed, for and by whom and to what ends?

Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 2:24 PM

Performing absence--a draft

I thought I would offer some thoughts around questions of performativity, relevance and the production of memory through the filter of the District Six Museum. While I understand the academic anxieties surrounding the institutional appropriation and staging of traumatic memory, I think that the emphasis of these debates shifts somewhat when the memorial project in question is generated by its victims and is wholly concerned with the practical and metaphysical connections between their past and present lives. I would suggest that some of the disparities between the purpose, desired effect and reactions to the museums cited have more to do with embrace of history and collectors of the memories than the methods of its staging. I would argue that a space in which ethical questions and concerns are raised and reflected does not always have the luxury of being created in a post-oppressive, reparative state, and as such generates different if equally meaningful commentary on subjection. All the sites under inspection are thematically linked to impositions on individual and collective freedoms, and are ideologically related in a need to institutionally validate an experience of intense suffering, or to end a conspiracy of silence. Williams writes about the uneasiness between communities and memorials in Cambodia, attributing the dissonance between the two to a lack of cohesive national reconciliation through civil justice. Till explores the radical remaking and re-imagining of Berlin’s city-scape, in which the nation’s Nazi confessions are rendered intensely public in order to make an international apology, but to what end? An exercise in national moral redemption, or the archiving of terrible individual experiences? Sevcenko charts the Coalition’s commitment to the exposition of truth, the sense of connectivity between the past and the present and the need to stimulate dialogue around social issues.

I noticed, while reading some of the postings, that there are a number of times when the issues of “authenticity” and “purpose” become questions that rotate continuously around the sites. I understand the need to examine sites in relation to their function and while it would be easy to offer the District Six Museum as an institution that successfully straddles the space between memorialisation and the practice of democratic citizenship (which, incidentally I don’t think of as a necessarily Western construct), I think that this kind of civic interaction is only possible when there has been history of redress and the opportunity of real reparation is imminent. The possibilities of reparations surrounding holocausts and genocides are limited by their own inexcusable histories and at best they can be intangible, a practical offering of solace seems somehow impossible. The D6 museum has under-gone a transformation from being a community-based organisation that demanded the recognition of land theft under apartheid, to being an intellectual custodian of land redistribution post-apartheid and in doing so has managed to contribute its voice to both the ideology and the practice of reparation. So, I think the real interface between these public spaces is not about the events that shape them (which, though they are all grounded in experience of trauma, are profoundly different), but rather about the ghosts that haunt them.

One of the reading guidelines suggests an exploration of the relationship between memory and history—a space I find especially fascinating because of the museum’s mediating function between the two. Up until ten years ago history (text-based, official accounts of events), were entirely at odds with the majority of South African’s memories (dismissed by the state as being fantastic and duplicitous). Post-apartheid national projects like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the D6 Museum and the Robben Island Musuem are all attempts at revisionist history in which the “truth” (in all it variant, fluid forms) is excavated in the interests of addressing the past and charting a viable political future. There is a temptation with any revisionist project to suggest that the sequence of events has been righted, that subjugated narratives have been made available and a sense of psychic justice now prevails. What is interesting is how that “new” memory or history is staged. How does the mission of the institution shape the arc of the stories, how does it inform the decisions of what is included? How are the ghosts of the past invoked, exorcised and manipulated? What is present, what is absent? Till writes of the new Berlin museums that “nothing appears to be hidden from view”. So everything, artefact, information, testimony, can be accessed from open information sources and re-interpreted and arranged through a creative prism, and it is precisely this sense of “openness” that unnerves and disturbs her. I have been embroiled in an ongoing discussion with the D6 Museum about the absence of the area’s apartheid collaborators in its exhibition space and within its research centre. I find it difficult to digest that in the staging of a place recognised for its diversity, this aspect of political difference is white-washed, ignored, made invisible in the interests of political expediency.

Williams suggests a more existential crisis in the memorials of Tuaol Sleng and Choeung Ek; that in the “context of unattained justice (they) remain disconnected from any historical narrative” and the spaces themselves become “guardians of absent meanings”.

Posted by Nadia Davids at 2:21 PM

Memory and Authenticity

What is the reason that keeps people going back to where atrocity happened? If tourism serves as something more than recreational purpose, and also function as educational device, is it true that the site actually speaks for itself or the tourists are hearing the stories of the commodified historical site/event?

In Memory in the New Berlin, it mentioned the relationship of authenticity and commemoration. In the article, it points out the Jewish Barrack in Sachsenhausen as an example (215), where people can be fooled by the old concept that seeing is believing. The reproduction of the site obviously misleads the tourist to believe that the location is the place that atrocity actually took place, and enhanced the theatricality and power to the place. But according to the article, one of the tourists, with tears in her eyes, said that there is no way to compare what she had read with the tour in the historical camp. Regardless whether the misunderstanding of the Jewish Barrack is an intentional behavior or careless malfunction of the instruction, it is obvious that the authenticity of a site is

I think the importance of the authenticity issue is that by creating a seemingly realistic environment, it creates the intimacy with the tourists and lead them to fall into the atmosphere of a historical event, especially for those tourists who have rarely any connection with the site in background or memory.

Posted by Yo-Chi Li at 1:06 PM

November 20, 2005

Performative aspects of memory sites

The “memorialization” of the past is, as the readings for this week demonstrate, always controversial and needs to be approached from a critical perspective. Certainly, what perspective of historical events is presented and from who’s vantage point is crucial (some people’s tragedy is always another’s glory), this is all the more the case when, as it almost always is, the process and purpose of memorialization is linked to nationalism and nation-building. In certain cases, the concept of “memory” can be coopted by an actor precisely for the opposite purpose, using organized remembering as a way of ensuring forgetting. The cases of Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Cambodia are textbook examples of the possible manipulation and misuses of memory, as is what is currently going on Ground Zero, a case perhaps closer to home.

However, looking at memorials and memory-making as a question of power dynamics, or of the politics/poetics of representation does not seem all that productive beyond the denunciation itself. Perhaps looking to the performative effects of memorials might lead us in more interesting directions. What is it memory spaces actually do? How do they do it? How are they used? Although each site is specific to its own historical context, all of the cases brought up in the readings and on the websites seem to have common features. Perhaps attempting to enumerate some of these parallels might be a way of better understanding the ways in which they actually work: most of the sites are framed as a form of reestablishing some sort of equilibrium, of providing reconciliation, repossession or atonement.

They are all also places where visitors are supposed to learn something about history, where an educational task is performed. This educational task generally involves making a connection between the past, what is learned about history, and the present, contemporary actions of visitors (this seems to be one of the main missions of the Site Museums of Conscience described by Sevcenko). They are also set as stages to perform something along the lines of empathy through experience, intended to actually influence people to react in certain ways in their own lives (the insistence on the “never again” that Till refers to). Many are also performing a ritual act, as places to pay respect, connect to or simply mourn the dead, all the more so in sites commemorating events where the burial or marking of individual bodies could not be realized (this is the case for the Killing Fields mentioned by Williams, the WW1 memorials discussed in Sherman, the Holocaust sites, as well as Ground Zero). The memorial sites are also produced to be consumed, to make profits, boost regional economies, recreate urban landscapes, to be bought and sold on an international memorial marketplace. Some sites as well as the historical events they are meant to immortalize have also become a type of heritage in themselves, something to be preserved not only because of their authenticity, but as memorial sites, as productions. This tendency seems to go in crecendo as the historical event commemorated becomes more and more distant in time.

However, although specific memorials are intended to work in specific ways, and although they all share common traits, we should take Sherman’s claim seriously: memory and memorials are quintessentially unstable. They can function in completely unpredictable ways, or even not function at all. Nothing stops people from deciding to exclude memorials from their itineraries, even from their fields of vision. It is not uncommon for a memorial’s meaning to be made opaque by its plasticity or aesthetic value. And, as unfathomable as it may sound, nothing stops a neonazi from going to a Holocaust memorial as a form of ritual celebration. Memorials are not static structures with static messages, but constantly subject to resignification and reinterpretation. I think the inclusion of memorials and memorial sites in the tourism industry is especially revealing of this. Memory can become part of an itinerary, something that needs to be ticked off a list of attractions that make a place a place. One can plan a trip where a visit to the killing fields is sandwitched between a Ramayana dance performance and a visit to Angkor Wat, or simply, as Brigitte has often discussed as part of her case study, used a memorial site as a place of childish recreation, to eat a hot dog or kiss a lover.

The challenge, thus, is to manage a panoramic vision of memory-making, to look at the ways in which memorials work and they ways in which they don’t, or at least the ways in which their intended effects are not the end result. However, this leaves me with a question: do memorials need to work in the ways intended by their producers in order to be efficacious?

Posted by Sandra Rozental at 6:36 PM

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

The AIDS Memorial Quilt
Quicktime movie, from CNN

Posted by BKG at 4:36 PM

Faces

Billie Jones, Employing Identification in Online Museums

ABSTRACT

Historically, museums have been the place of rare and often valuable collections, preserved and displayed predominantly for their aesthetic value. These collecting museums did not intend to educate; however, after World War II, modern science museums and children's museums were created around the message they wished to espouse rather than a collection they wished to exhibit (Weinberg and Elieli. The Holocaust Museum in Washington New York: Rizzoli, 1995: 50). Instead of the collection as a museum's commodity, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill concludes that "Knowledge is now well understood as the commodity that museums offer Museum, Message, MediaLondon: Routledge, 1995: 2). In discussing historical museums, Weinberg and Elieli state that in such a museum, the narrative arranges knowledge like "building blocks in a continuous story line [designed to] educate in the sense of changing and developing their visitors mentally, emotionally, or morally (The Holocaust Museum in Washington New York: Rizzoli, 1995: 49).Such education is rhetorical, and as such requires, according to social critic Kenneth Burke, the establishment of identification. He writes, "You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his" (Burke, The Rhetoric of Motives New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950: 55; original emphasis). In order for a museum exhibit to persuade and thereby educate its audience, it must establish identification with that audience.

Turning first to the physical presence of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), I will show how the designers of the Permanent Exhibition of the USHMM have attempted to build identification throughout the museum through the display of personal artifacts, as ordinary and yet as intimate as shoes and toothbrushes; and photographs, which emphasize the individual humanity of the victims rather than massive dehumanization of entire cultural groups. After I have illustrated some of the ways in which a physical museum attempts to establish identification, I will turn my attention to the ways in which a museum's online presence can also establish identification by which to educate and persuade its audience. Demonstrating goodwill toward the audience of an online museum, a largely anonymous and widely diverse audience, is more difficult than establishing identification with visitors to a physical space. First of all, there are no physical beings with whom to identify; cyberspace breeds an impersonal environment. Furthermore, designers of online museum exhibits do not have the luxury of spinning knowledge with a single, narrative thread; cyberspace valorizes hypertextuality-not linearity. Nevertheless, online museum designers can still work to establish identification with their cyber visitors. Looking at the online presence of two Holocaust museums, the USHMM http://www.ushmm.org and Yad http://www.yad-vashem.org I will attempt to show design components that help to establish identification, as well as to suggest other ways that identification could be utilized in these online museums-and others.

Posted by BKG at 4:16 PM

It Happened Here: Memory and Dark

In “Memory in the New Berlin” Karen Till describes a series of spaces dedicated to memorializing the events of the Holocaust. She notes that “The “authentic” or real place is defined according to its artifacts and historic location: it is understood as historical events (Zeugenis) of crimes against humanity and as a material trace (Spur), even sacred relic, that embodies a past that by definition is understood as unknowable and unrepresentable. When place is constructed as having an authentic aura, as being an eyewitness to past atrocities, it is also situated in social space, acquiring a special status in relationship to other places through international moral hierarchies and tourism economies.” (p. 197) There are two types of commemorative sites: those that are situated in a location that is identified with the events being commemorated and those that are situated in a location assigned because a variety of stakeholders in the area wish to commemorate events that occurred elsewhere. These different types of sites are significant because the cultural, political, social and economic debates that they engender can differ significantly. One might consider the different nature of a competition to create a memorial at Ground Zero and “honor” the “footprints” of the Twin Towers with a competition to design a memorial for a town in New Jersey that counts a number of its residents as victims who perished in the attack on the Twin Towers.

The distinction between space that is considered “authentic” and space that is not can be seen in the building designs of two very different memorial Museums: the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City. In both cases the architecture of these museums underscores messages about the museums’ content that are rooted in their geographic locations.

The Berlin Jewish Museum was originally designed as an extension of the Berlin Museum but ultimately took over the Museum itself. This is attributed to the power of the architect Daniel Liebeskind’s design (ibid. p. 198) but it also seems to speak to the power of the Holocaust as a historical era that “unseats” other aspects or eras of German cultural heritage that might be featured in a museum in the nation’s capital. The Jewish Museum building, “created of voids and voided voids (empty spaces that can be seen but not physically accessed)” (p.199) is meant to be literally unsettling. Till notes “While the physical space of the museum communicates rupture and loss, the historical content of the exhibitions indicates continuity, dating from medieval times to the present day.” (p. 199-200) While I understand her point I would argue that the building itself is meant to serve as the overarching statement of the narrative, meant to contextualize all that is within. The “rupture” of this Museum in the context of the street and cityscape also underscores its mission as commemorating a drastic, even inconceivable, break.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage: a Living Memorial to the Holocaust is a project of a very different order, a Memorial constructed in a country that, if anything, is seen as responsible for ending the horrors being commemorated in the exhibition spaces. [There is a complicating factor here, the question of whether America’s response was swift enough; a gallery in the Museum exhibition’s Holocaust area is devoted to exactly this topic.] Without the “authenticity” of being the site of the atrocities, the Museum’s purpose in regard to its location must be construed differently. Most centrally is the Museum’s contextualization of its purpose and commemorative content within the greater narrative of the greatness of the United States. In fact, the project came to be in response to the request of an immigrant population to America petitioning the government for the ability to construct such a memorial. (James Young, in his book “The Texture of Memory” chronicles the history of this project.) Hence, in the context of this Museum, the subject matter of the Holocaust is sandwiched between two other narratives: that of Jewish immigrants coming to America in order to experience greater freedom and opportunity and the flourishing of Jewish life. The “sandwich” metaphor is literal, as the second floor of exhibition on the Holocaust is located in between a ground floor that chronicles the Jewish experience of immigration to America and the cultural traditions that they brought with them and a third floor that explores the evolution of Jewish life after World War Two, with a great emphasis placed on American Jewry.

The salience of the themes of freedom and opportunity and the dominance of America’s role as a country that offered such gifts to its immigrants is heavily underscored by the Museum’s location in Battery Park City. Visitors emerge from the permanent exhibition into an open space (once empty, now serving as exhibition space as well) and immediately face wide open windows that offer stunning views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The emergence into this viewing space is all the more powerful given the fact that the exhibition space is constructed almost entirely without windows or natural light. These views are also captured in the Museum’s new Education Wing, with both the Museum’s café and Holocaust memorial garden situated to offer similarly focused views of the landmarks in the harbor. It would be hard to find to more powerful architectural symbols to underscore America’s mythologized identity as “the land of freedom.”

Ironically, both Museums are now located in larger “districts” that serve as destinations of dark tourism. The Jewish Museum is located in proximity to the “Topography of Terror International Center” and the newly opened Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. The events of September 11th, 2001 placed the Museum of Jewish Heritage in close proximity to Ground Zero. Among the repercussions of the events of that day is that the area of downtown Manhattan in which the Museum is located was subject to tremendous economic upheaval, simultaneously losing business residents and being reconstituted as a site of pilgrimage for tourists. The Museum has publicized that its Education Wing was the first major construction in the area completed post 9/11 and is one of a consortium of museums that self-identify as being “downtown.” Certainly the Museum would benefit economically if tourists visiting Ground Zero would continue southward and visit the Museum as well.

I have focused on museum architecture because of its significant role in constituting the experience of a constructed memorial. These constructions play no small part in the “success” of a memorial space, including one that is considered an “authentic” site of an atrocity and hence serves to attract visitors even when in a “raw” state, such as Ground Zero was in the weeks immediately after 9/11. It is the tension between what is understood as the “authentic” site and its “true” artifacts and the architecture that develops in order to bound the site and make it more accommodating for tourists (as building also include bathrooms, coatrooms, cafes and places to sit) that form the “tourism industry” that develops these sites for ongoing visitation.

Posted by Leah Strigler at 2:37 PM

How to commemorate whose atrocity?

District Six, Capetown. Click on image for interior of District Six Museum.

This weeks reading bring up the questions of how to commemorate an atrocity? What is being commemorated –individual’s deaths or abstract ideas? Who is it for –the local victims, or a broader audience? What is the purpose –to inform or create dialogue? In “Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France After World War I,” Daniel Sherman approaches “collective memory” as something that is discursively constructed, rather than something that exists a priori and is represented in public monuments. For him, “commemoration” is the practice of representing that enacts and gives social substance to the discourse of collective memory. One thing this week’s readings demonstrates is that collective memory as enshrined in public monuments is that the meanings and conventions are themselves battlefields in which different viewpoints compete, and that norms are historically and culturally variable.

Sherman looks at the development of a field of French public monuments commemorating World War I in its historical context. He locates their genesis in the modern nation-state’s democratic practice of erecting monuments to ordinary soldiers rather than focusing on a sovereign as the focus for commemoration. This historical change, however, produced a tension between the nationalistic mode and local memorials produced in mourning and tribute of individuals belonging to those specific communities. The inability of some families to make graves because the bodies of their loved ones had not been found was one motive for the creation of war memorials in the post war period. Some communities put memorials in their cemetery others in public places. Many towns got low cost monuments from major suppliers. For them, their mass-produced nature situated the sense of loss with the many similar losses suffered by towns in the whole nation. The State wanted localities to have some control over their monuments, yet wanted to intervene to save the popular strata from their own vulgarity. Commissions abhorred monuments ordered from catalogs, yet were forced to recognize that small towns could neither appreciate nor afford the services of artists and architects with good taste. The dichotomy between art and commerce or high and popular art indexed a basic division between state and local commemorative interests.

In “Memory in the New Berlin,” Karen Till also speaks of the centralization of memorials. The regionally-based German memorial landscape is becoming a federalized, centralized one. In this historical moment, the tension between small communities and the nation-state, is compounded by an additional tension between the national monument and the world. She addresses centralized war memorials that have emerged during an international moment during which world leaders have apologized for their nations’ participation in atrocities, and during which participation in the memorialization of the Holocaust in particular, marks nations as members of a civilized cosmopolitan modernity. She points out the “globalization” of Holocaust memorials has produced a cosmopolitan Holocaust memorial discourse in which fourth generation visitors no longer have direct connections, and the memorials foreground more general themes such as good versus evil rather than the commemorations of actual people. And, like Paul Williams, notes how tourist expectations and the emergence of a transnational discourse around specific tragedies pose tensions that conflict with local ways of understanding and commemorating these events.

Like the abstractness that characterize centralized Holocaust memorials that are currently built, during the period Sherman describes in France, formal differences marked different memorials –while middle and upper class consumers bought allegorical, nationalistic “winged victories,” small towns purchasing monuments from the lower-end catalogues only had realistic statues of common soldiers, personalized with names of their own dead, and appropriate for mourning them. These modes of representations or genres mark the very different relationships the intended audiences were meant to have with the memorial.

A new type of museum is emerging that marries these two tendencies of realistic commemoration and universalizing abstraction. In “Activating the Past for Civic Action,” Sevcenko describes the International coalition of historic site museums of conscience. These museums activate objects and sites that index the experiences of real people in order to bring the issues of the past into the present to create dialogue and change in the present. Rather than mourning, commemorating, or making a statement about the nature of the nation or of a people, the model of memorial of sites such as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Gulag Museum in Russia, the Maison Des Esclaves in Senegal argues that history should play role in civic life.

Posted by Pilar Rau at 2:32 PM

The dispute on the narrative of the memorial

2/28 Peace Park, Taiwan
http://163.29.36.51/pkl/index.jsp?recordid=4086
http://228.culture.gov.tw/web/web-eng/228/228-c1.htm
Taipei 2-28 Museum
http://228.culture.gov.tw/web/web-eng/museum/museum-2.htm

The readings remind me of the 2/28 Peace Park in Taipei, Taiwan. The 2/28 Peace Park commemorates those who died in the brutal event in Taiwan history on February 28th, 1947. The construction of the memorial for the dead was/is polemical for various reasons, most of which are related to politics and the narrative of the history that will be foregrounded at the finish of the construction of memorial. The recount of what actually happened on February 28th, 1947, is one of the most controversial issues in recent years. Different political parties read such unfortunate event in history in ways that assert their political stances. Historians and scholars have different versions of “the truth of the 2/28.”

As a Taiwanese born in early 80’s, I acquired the knowledge of the 2/28 event—maybe “narratives of the 2/28 event” is a more proper diction—from history textbooks and lectures given by schoolteachers. I recalled, if not mistaken, I first learned such event at school in 6th or 7th grade, when the marshal laws had been lifted. Due to the resistance to the dark past as well as to the difficulty of acquiring the information regarding this unfortunate historical event, I have very vague idea of what actually happened.

My understanding of the 2/28 event is that it was a reaction launched by native Taiwanese (not aboriginals in Taiwan) to Taiwan administration/or subordinate to Chinese central government at that time. The 2/28 event shared the similarities of the state terrorism happened in Argentina (Sevcenko 61-3) and resulted in disappearances of political activists, most of whom were well-educated Taiwanese, and some people who have involvement with the event—both wittingly and unwittingly.

I remembered the protest taking place right after the finish of the memorial in the 2/28 Peace Park. The families of the dead and the disappeared refused to accept the narrative inscribed on the slate. They tear it down and discarded it. After that, according to my memory, Taiwan government does not install a new slate to replace the one discarded. The 2/28 memorial became a memorial without the recount of history, or an official narrative.

To read the 2/28 memorial in reference with the site of Combodian genocide (Williams), it is not unreasonable to say that the political power, to some extent, determines how the memorials are constructed in terms of physical structure and historical representation/narrative.

The resistance to revealing the dark past of Taiwan and the infrastructural limitation of accommodating a large number of tourists, the Taiwan government does not promote 2/28 Peace Park as a tourist attraction. I wonder how things will be if there are numerous tourists flood in the Park and pay a visit to the 2/28 memorial. Will the 2/28 memorial “[evolve] to become a tourism concept (Memory in New Berlin 200)”, or develop its own narrative after having dialogue with tourists?

Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 2:22 PM

Ghosts

It’s a cold, bright Thursday morning, and I’m having a conversation with Stephan Crasneanscki, the founder of Soundwalk, in his warm, cleanly-lit SOHO apartment/sound studio/sanctuary. We are talking about souls. Some believe, he begins, that when one dies violently, unexpectedly, the soul is unprepared, trapped. Lost. Do you think that happened when the Trade Towers fell? I ask. Yes, he says. There’s a lot of death on that block, a lot of lingering souls. Hovering over the bodies. And if you are open enough, emotional enough, you will sense this. For Stephan, sound (as opposed to sight) has the ability reconnect us with reality--“hyperreality,” he notes (what does this mean? I wonder). A memorial experience should evoke death and lost souls--it should be, first and foremost, an affective encounter that awakens emotions of sadness, pain, guilt, etc. I don’t think monuments can do this, he says. Sight and spectacle are displaced; sound is the sensory gateway to “effective” remembering.

While reading through this week’s readings, I often returned to this recent conversation, especially when thinking through Till’s ideas about haunting evidence, Sherman’s notions of monuments as tombs, and William’s writings on minimally mediated zones of killing. Besides these traceable strands, I also thought a lot about justice and social conscience: the construction and visitation of memorial sites associated with mass death and war violence is a process fueled by a communal need/desire to redeem, reconcile, and remember. The innocent, voiceless dead testify in a mock world court subsidized, in part, by the international tourism industry. But justice is always incomplete, representation is always inadequate, and traumatic events are ever-occurring. Commemoration will continue; but will this stop the killing?

Spectacle: In a majority of these pieces, the relationship between memory and history is configured around the idea of spectacle. The past is that which can – through the work of commemoration – be seen, viewed, voyeristically accessed in the present. For, Till, the three sites that compose the memory district in the city of Berlin represent the consolidation of commemoration in a public, easily accessible city-space. The state, in this way, performs atonement, owns up to the past, and addresses the horrors of history in a transparent and open manner. But Till expresses a worry that is similar to Williams’ worry: that visibility is too easily equated with “moral foresight” and justice. These sites also assume, to an extent, that brutality and destruction are representable aspects of the human condition. For Williams, the international tourism occurring at Choeung Ek runs the risk of converting potentially private sites of tribute to “theaters of grueling historical spectacle.” For the Cambodian sites, justice (or the prospect of true reconciliation) is displaced by commemorative practices that “spectacularize” the land.

The question then becomes, what kind of commemorative practice best respects the dead? Is this, in itself, an absurd, privileged, and disrespectful question that, in Williams’ terms, tries to know that which those murdered did not – could not – know? How can institutionalized remembrance conjure history, critique past actions and bring justice to victims and survivors? As Williams notes, intense national and international debates occurred over the Holocaust questions of “guilt, culpability and forgiveness” were publicly asked in around memorial sites. The case is different for Cambodians: Prime Minister Hun Sen has been reluctant to bring former Khmer Rouge leaders to trial. The atmosphere is not ripe for national debate about the 1979 genocide. Furthermore, what work can memorials do to prevent future “crimes against humanity?” Sevcenko’s article addresses this issue in discussing the role of the Museums of Conscience in fostering civic dialogue and connecting the historical issues with present ones. The website Facing History also approaches “history as a moral enterprise” and encourages education that actively confronts, critiques, and learns from the trespasses of past actors. Yet despite this project –- and despite the noble work the coalition of museums is involved in -- one cannot help but wonder how international memory mapping (and the global implementation of goals rooted in western democratic concepts of justice and rights) obscures or displaces local needs and specific reconciliation practices.

Lastly, back to sound. If the emphasis in these readings is on sight and spectacle, then thinking about the soundwalk can widen our discussion of commemoration and practice. The World Trade Center site is, in some formal ways, not unlike the Choeung Ek killing fields or the concentration camps: the dead remain there. There is, as of yet, no formal monument to the devastation, no artistic renditions of symbolic meaning; in other words, there is minimal mediation. Stephan noted this: he said there were many “pilgrims” traveling to the site and he had visitors and friends come visit New York who increasingly wanted to “go and see.” The panels on the fence, in his view, were inaccurate. He also worked under the assumption that the formal memorial would not be constructed any time soon. Using soundwalk technologies, he attempted, then, to make the land speak. Phone messages, testimonies, music, building sounds, city sounds, sounds of panic, fear, and death play on one’s ipod as one walks to the site, then away from it an towards the Hudson river. Soundwalk collects evidence, evokes the presence of the dead, uses sound to haunt, move, horrify, and remember. What is gained by remembering a space of massive death via sounds? What is lost? Does it “work” and how do we qualify effectiveness? I suppose I’ll be further grappling with these questions in my final paper. Justine and I spoke briefly about the walk and we both noted a similar response: some aspects of the tour felt “too personal.” It was as if we were intruding on some one else’s narrative, memory, and intimate experience with the site. In this case, the soundwalk, as a commemorative tool or device, creates outsiders; that is, it disrupts an attempt to incorporate tourists and pilgrims into a single national narrative of sadness, triumph and belonging. As Till notes, “ghosts make us aware of the losses from violent events, yet they also remind us of our inability to really ‘know’ about those past losses.” The questions then become: can we ever know the trauma of another and is it possible to truly know and confront past unspeakable (but somehow widely spoken) destruction through tourist productions?

Posted by Brynn Noelle Saito at 1:06 PM

performances and performatives of memories

Last October I joined my parents to their annual 'holiday' pilgrimage to the Jewish cemetery in Budapest. I have not been to the cemetery for several years, and I was stunned by the metamorphosis that had happened in the meantime: the cemetery has transformed into a memorial site of the Holocaust. The presence of loss and grief are traceable everywhere: almost every tomb of the twentieth century has a new epigraph remembering those who died in the Holocaust.

The new epitaph on my grandparents tomb: “To the Memory of the Martyrdom of the Rosenzweig family from Abaújszántó” followed by the names of the four families of three: father, mother and the nickname of a child.

Besides the epitaphs, a new Holocaust memorial was built in the center enlisting the names of those Hungarian Jews who died in World War II. What make this memorial unique are the desperate handwritings on the marble walls. Those, who could not find their family members on the list, inscribed the names into the walls.

The sight is heartbreaking: even sixty years after the Holocaust, those who lost their loved ones still struggle to find forums and forms to commemorate the dead. Why were these people so eager to scratch their loved ones’ names into the walls? Sherman offers two explanations: first, the inscribed names embody the denomination of its inhabitants, second, “by virtue of their inscription the names constitute themselves as part of a signifying process that seeks to transcend memory and its limitations by assigning it, in its “constructed” collective form, a historical role” (207). These characteristically old-fashioned, cursive handwritings suggest that most of them are old men and women, presumably survivors themselves, who helplessly seek the way of represent those, whose lives were not only taken, but also erased by the Nazi Regime. Are these walls different from other memorial sites which lack such palpable traces of individual memories? To what extent can memorial sites represent individual memories? While the epitaphs on the tombs are manifestations of individual memories, the Holocaust Memorial in the cemetery is an interesting composition of individual and collective memory: a mixture of officially inscribed and privately scratched names.

The reading assignments for this week imply that the main focus of memorials in general is to conceptualize a collective memory of the past in/for contemporary society. Collective memory is a master narrative composed of individual memories and canonized history/historiographic documentation. Narratives, as we pointed out in one of our earlier classes, are never free of context. Therefore, the construction of collective memory is also influenced, if not determined, by approaches, issues and political questions of the present. Memorial sites not only construct, but also perform these master narratives. In this interpretative process, power-relations of the original ‘actors’ may change; leads may become minors and vice versa. The shift in the interpretation will effect memorial sites, in the case of Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, for example, the focus is on torture techniques “and not on the victims” (Williams: 242). (Actually, who should we consider as ‘leads’ and ‘minors’ in the ‘original performance’? I might need to revise myself and say that in Cambodia, the oppressors succeeded in maintaining their lead roles for the future.)

To what extent can memorial sites be analyzed as performances/tourist productions? My instinct suggests that we should differentiate between on- and off-site genocide memorial sites in our attempt to answer this question. The commercialization and the performativity may have a very different effect on sites which are constructed to perform (history and memory), produce (identities) and commoditize (the site as a tourist production), from those, which originally were constructed to terminate millions of human lives without witnesses or audiences.

On-site memorials are a priori sites of individual memories. The site of genocide becomes a ‘sacred’ site and it is understood “in very personal ways, defined by the touch of humans; they are where people left their last footprints, tears, and even hopes. For some of the living, these places are cemeteries, where their loved ones lie buried”. (Till: 208) At the same time, it also needs to fulfill the social mission of the memorial site to “act as an aide to understanding events that challenge our notion of human history”, “create memory for the next generation) (Williams: 249), leave “symbolic footprints for a future generation” (Till: 209), “mediate both the experience and the representation of memory” (Sherman:187) “offer history as a resource for considering and addressing issues in the present” (Sevcenko: 55). Sevcenko and Till both argues the activist role these memorials need to play in society.

Nevertheless, the question arises, whether these sites can “play” this role, whether they can perform master narratives without disrespecting personal grief and loss. Till points out that for children and relatives these “places stood for silence” (211). On-site memorials are doomed to silence and minimalism. Their social function is limited to “passive activism” as opposed to the conspicuously active off-site memorials that loudly fulfill several of the aforementioned functions. Not only the actual sites, but also virtual websites support this thesis. While for example Yad Vasem and Facing History, facing ourselves have an impressive outreach program, Auschwitz limits itself to the description of the site and history. I have not seen any sign of interactivity or consumption on the website (except for the financial support); one cannot even order the books enlisted on the website, published by the museum.

Ultimately, on- and off-site memorials may fulfill similar missions, only they have to rely on different resources: while it is the individual memory that makes on-site memorials so powerful, individual creativity becomes the measurement for effectiveness in the case of off-site memorials.

Posted by Aniko Szucs at 1:05 PM

Cemetery with many uses

Not that I feel I should be trigger-ready to always pull out a Naga example, I could not resist this one, and I thought Brigitte might particularly find this interesting. This picture was taken last week (Nov 14) by my father of a children’s painting competition which was conducted at the war cemetery of Kohima, the capital of Nagaland. The theme of the painting competition was ‘Energy Conservation: saving electricity’. The governor and top officials of the government attended the event. The theme has nothing to do with war or memory. But the Kohima war cemetery is the only central outdoor location in Kohima with manicured lawns, trimmed hedges and beautiful flowers – the only park! Underneath lies buried over a thousand soldiers that fought for the British army of World War II, a small rectangular metal plaque with a personalized inscription over each grave. There is one Naga soldier buried in this famous cemetery. This is the place where lovers go to hang out, locals go to relax and take in the scenic view and the flowers. Paid by the British High Commission for its maintenance this is a sort of an oasis in the heart of town. It is not a place that necessarily arouses grief, for the locals relaxing amidst graves. When the British war veterans visit the site once in a few years, it is a place of reflection, memory, tears and solemnity. (Kohima is a historic site for being the town where the Nagas as British subjects played a crucial role in the turning point of the war leading to the retreat of the Japanese army and the ultimate victory of the British).

This is a war site that is serving many functions for various kinds of visitors, a place for having a little fun, for education, for holding competitions, for observing historical moments, for grieving, for picnics, for holding multi-tribal Easter sunrise service etc. The aesthetic beauty of the site supercedes other thoughts and notions for many visiting the site. The Kohima war cemetery has a huge rock that is almost symbolic of Kohima town itself that says "When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say, For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today". Here is an account of the site from Major Gordon Graham, a veteran who returned ten years later in 1954, and calls the site a design of a “pious peace that follows war”. (I like to read the following statement juxtaposed against Till’s articulation in the New Berlin article “Places of memory are made to evoke ghosts, localize emotions associated with hauntings, and establish cultural practices that delimit social relations to the past”). Graham says “I looked for ghosts and found none. We are the ghosts called forth by our own memories, investing each impersonal inch of soil with our own personal meanings; these meanings our self-conjured mists in which wraithlike, we startle only ourselves.” http://www.mod.uk/aboutus/history/kohima60/kohima4.htm

There could be so many reasons why sites of memory are built. The paradigmatic thread that runs through the sites in our readings are quite unanimously supposed to be places of solemnity, education, reflection, documentation, places that expose truths that would rather be denied, a way of mourning, showing respect to the dead, expressing guilt for some, or perhaps for the ‘perpetrators’ a chance to proclaim how ‘yesterday’ the event was - that it has to be museumized, a way of challenging contemporary forms of social oppressions by opening forums for dialogues and narratives to happen thereby guaranteeing “liberation for future generations”(Levcenko, 59). All said and done “Collective memory emerges as a construct of the political, social and economic structures that condition or determine the production of these forms” (Sherman, 186). Despite the lack of mediation in the Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek sites, these sites are considered ‘culture tourism ventures’ by the Cambodian Government, and an important way of gaining tourist dollars as well. I found this article on the BBC archive quite interesting http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3099848.stm

What interests me is how these tragic events of the past get interwoven into the ‘culture’ of a people. I understand ‘culture’ to mainly mean certain practices and memory that are valued. Instead of disidentifying these practices, there is identification and in doing so, disavowance or disidentification of the present with these past atrocities. At the same time, this open wound/scar becomes an important dependable source of income for the state, and necessarily needs to be woven into the ‘cultural’ fabric of the town, city or state. With these commercial interests in the mix, how much assurance can it give us for the future, that such acts will not be repeated again?

btw, another interesting news clipping: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051109/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_crime_cambodia_euthanasia

Posted by Senti Toy at 1:01 PM | Comments (1)

History and Memory, Memorials and Museums -- How to Support Healing and Civic Dialogue

The relationship between memory and history is a complicated one, especially because of the revisionist understanding of history as multi-narrative and unstable i.e. its constructed nature. However, in the case of traumatic national events, i.e. the Holocaust and the genocide in Cambodia, the first step after the event seems to be to “learn the history” - to find out as much information as possible about what happened - to come up with as complete, and thorough, and truthful a narrative of what occurred as possible. After that project is solidly on its way then there is the question of how the state and individuals want to perform the collective memory of the event. What “authentic sites” should be preserved for memory work, and in what way? What museums, memorials or other memory sites should be constructed, and in what way? New history is continually being added to the archive and the repertoire (how history is performed and read) is unstable, constantly in flux.

Laying the framework to compare specific sites, Sevcenko in her incisive and well-written article, “Activating the Past for Civic Action: The International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience,” articulates the mission of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and other “sites of conscience.” “[H]istoric sites have a special power to inspire and shape important new dialogues on pressing issues that divide us” (55). Sevcenko articulates that unlike the old musicology, of dead things in display cases, in the new musicology the past in activated to better understand the present and to make choices that will positively affect the future. These sites of conscience provide opportunities to open up civic dialogue, by providing a forum to relate the past to present.

Till’s “Memory in the New Berlin” and Williams’ “Witnessing Genocide: Vigilance and Remembrance at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek” describes two countries at different places in dealing with their respective histories. The Germany of the “New Berlin,” is about transparency to a fault; the emphasis on transparency shuts down possibilities for hauntings and critical memory work and should revisit the importance of “authentic” places. Whereas in Cambodia the lack of transparency and mediation of the memorials leads to a voyeuristic, overwhelming experience.

In the case of Berlin, there is an aim for transparency, “a hypervisible performance of Holocaust memory in the New Berlin” (196) with the memory district in central Berlin - composed of the Topography of Terror, Jewish Museum, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Not just for German citizens, the memory district puts Germany in “a Western moral community of democratic nations” (202). The memory district frames the Holocaust, a “rupture in modernity,” within the categories of good and evil and represents the unrepresentable (202). These “public act of atonement, mourning, and healing” position Germany firmly in the Western moral community by its ability to admit to its past wrongs, display them prominently and offer spaces for mourning and healing. The memory district is both a space for the nation to represent and to perform is place within the Western global moral order (203).

The sensorial focus of these centralized, constructed spaces of the memory district privileges the ocular, endorsing the idea that transparency allows one to “see what actually happened.” Yet these apparently transparent spaces with their focus on vision “renders the hauntings . . . spatially invisible.” Temporally flat, hypervisible spaces do not allow for the layers of experience emerging from that which we cannot see.

Indeed, those critical of the centralized memory district feels that “the nascent memory district of the New Berlin allows for no vantage point from which to engage in critical memory work” (204). These localized memory production are different from the kind of work advocated by Sevcenko, who sees engaging in critical memory work at the sites themselves, as being the vital role that historic sites can play.

Germany has had sixty-five years, and an intense national commitment to grappling with the Holocaust. In contrast, Cambodia’s the genocide is still very present, with 90% of Cambodians having lost a relative in the genocide and no national effort to know the truth of what happened. Therefore, the issue of memorials in Cambodia raises another set of issues. Indeed, I would argue that the first step in dealing with genocide is transparency - the honest investigation and compilation of all the information - documents, survivor testimony etc, to understand what happened. First, the history needs to be uncovered and documented; the archive needs to be established. Then, there is the issue of prosecution. In Germany, there were the Nuremburg Trials, whereas in Cambodia no one from the DK regime has been prosecuted. I do not know if trials per say are necessary for healing, but definitely a open accounting for what happened and a switch of the power guard expunging those who were involved in the violence is necessary; having a trial is helpful to both find out what happened and scare or forcibly remove through imprisonment those who perpetrated crimes. After a full accounting (historical, archival) then memorials and museum are vital to displaying this information to the public and to create dialogues about how to prevent such events in the future.

While the memorial district in Berlin is an example of overmediated that shuts down critical memory work, the Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Cambodia are examples of undermediated spaces that invites voyeurism and where much work must be done before these sites can enable critical memory work. The Cambodian memorials of the Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are ineffective, problematic, and profoundly disturbing, even just reading about them, because they have very little mediation. I would argue that when visiting “dark tourism” sites mediation is necessary because otherwise it becomes a voyeuristic foray into another’s suffering, rather than the possibility for connection (i.e. personal relationship to place because of family connections) or an opportunity for education and prevention of future genocide.

Indeed, that Avery Gordon (“Memory in the New Berlin,” 204) can argue for spaces in Germany that open up to haunting, exploring “Spuren,” (trace) “Zeugnisse” (evidence), is a testament to how transparent the history of Germany has become. In Cambodia, because there has not been a national effort to find the history of what happened, the hauntings become overwhelming, non-centextualized and the torture and death all too real. There is no framework to make sense of the torture and killing, to understand and learn. There is simply the fact that it happened.

Therefore, in terms of efficacy, the memorial district in Berlin and the Concentration Camps are (relatively) effective, whereas Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are not effective. In the sites in Germany, there is the right amount (or closer to the right amount) of mediation to allow for a successful visit. There is informative, contextual learning. The visitor can integrate that learning into her personal framework and think about these events’ relationship to the present. However, in Cambodia there is little mediation and therefore no real possibility to make meaning out of the violence and to relate the past to choices and events in the present.

In terms of how sites perform, The Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, is extremely performative. Visitors literally walk the path of path of Jewish History. There are empty rooms along the path “that signify the disappearance of Jewish culture in the city and the contemporary legacies of the ‘presence of absence’ in the city and the nation” (220). Visitors are encouraged to image what might have been in the empty room and to feel and see the room’s emptiness; absence is made present.

Indeed, Sevcenko addresses specifically how to make a site perform in a way that encourages dialogue. The site needs to emphasize active rather than passive learning. How do you build dialogue into the design of a site? Rather than an auditorium or public forum, some museums have decided to “recreate the more intimate, spontaneous, and marginal places where important civic engagement happens” (61). This space at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is called “the kitchen,” with soft lighting, kitchen tables, and mismatch chairs to encourage visitors to share personal experiences in an informal way. The space performs by making the visitors feel comfortable and “at home,” by evoking the quintessential “kitchen, safe, home, food, family” space -a space that is universal and at the same time intensely personal.

Sherman in “Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France after World War I” offers another approach to memorialization. More than the memory distinct in Berlin or Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Cambodia, the post World War I memorials were for the communities themselves. They were not tourist productions, at least not in the eyes of the local community members. Indeed, the communities were vehement that they wanted the memorials and burials in the town where the servicemen had lived, not on the battlefield. Exerting local authority, communities wanted to the memorials to the dead soldiers to be in the town square rather than in the cemetery or church. While the state had aesthetic concerns about mass-produced monuments, the communities knew that the most important thing about the monument was how it functioned (for healing, commemoration etc) rather than its aesthetic qualities. It is telling that many towns decided to use the figure of the soldier rather than the figure of the woman (which often symbolized transcendent ideals). The focus was on the individual, the person. The mass-produced memorial was made personal by inscribing the dead soldiers’ names.

Reading the sites on Holocaust movie tourism on the “Modiya: Jews, Media, and Religion,” including the links about “Schindler’s List tours” and “artist’s responses” I found myself wondering why people visit the movie set concentration camp and not the real concentration camp. Is it because it is more mediated – a safe distance away from the actual camp, and therefore the hauntings. Alternatively, is it because the movie set is “realer” to them than the actual camp? (a disturbing thought) Perhaps because few survivors’ are still alive and many people do not have a personal link to the Holocaust,the experience of watching Schindler’s List is the most immediate experience people have had of the Holocaust before they went to Germany. Therefore, visiting the camp seems like getting in touch with the “authentic” experience! Indeed, one quote from the Schindler’s List tours that struck me read: “visit the actual camp built for the movie.” “The actual camp built for the movie,” seems like a contradiction of terms; you can visit the “actual” “movie set.” How far away can we get from the thing itself? In my opinion when touring the movie set of the concentration camp there is too much distance and too much mediation from the event itself for it to participate in the process of healing and civic dialogue.

Posted by Sarah Zoogman at 12:56 PM

Transitory Memorial

As of November 18, 2005, there have been 2,076 American service members who have lost their lives in the Iraq War. Already, monuments to the war and its fallen soldiers have been popping up across America. These monuments enact and give “social substance to the discourse of collective memory”(Sherman, 186). Among other functions, monuments serve to shore up memory--to prevent forgetting. Yet, the Iraq War is not yet over. Is America incapable of remembering a war that is still going on. Perhaps this is true.

A number of monuments across the country are impermanent structures. In Santa Monica, Arlington West has an Iraq War Memorial that displays crosses representing each of the dead. In San Francisco, artist Kerrie Hovey designed a temporary gray wall structure with white porcelain stars, each one representing a fallen soldier. These stars are attached by magnets, and are meant to be taken off and kept by spectators. The structure was quickly dismantled as the stars disappeared. In Washington D.C., cardboard coffins lined the reflecting pool. Makeshift cardboard tombstones, with the names of fallen soldiers, have been displayed throughout many towns in America, including St. Louis. “Eyes Wide Open” is a traveling display that presents lines of combat boots, each representing a dead U.S. soldier, as well as other pairs of men's, women's and children's shoes to represent some of the Iraqi civilian war casualties.

These monuments are not made to last. They do not inscribe the great deeds of great men in everlasting marble or metal. They make no pretense of creating history. Unlike most monuments, the memory these monuments seek to create is not a memory at all, but reality. It is a call to remember the war that is happening right now. Avery Gordon argues, “In a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are lead to believe not only that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for our consumption” (qtd. in Till 204).

Surely the Iraq War can be seen daily in the newspaper or on TV. It is always available for our consumption. Yet, the instability between monument and memory that Robert Musil sites, goes far beyond monuments. It includes most repetition, be it TV, newspaper, site, or other. When monuments are made, “forgetting comes quickly” (Breton mayor qtd. in Sherman, 206). Even when 1,000 photos of dead soldiers are shown in The New York Times, forgetting comes quickly. Hypervisibility makes everything known, but makes that knowledge unvalued.”

The intervention, then, to this hypervisible forgetfulness, seems to lie in the transitory nature of things. Monuments are supposed to last forever. Consequently, they quickly become invisible. When monuments are made to last only minutes, they too become invisible (or rather, they disappear). But in those moments, they are able to mark, not only the past, but more importantly, the present. This is something that traditional monuments are not able to accomplish. How can they, when they were made long ago, to commemorate actions completed long ago? When things are hypervisible, transitory, and new, then people take a moment to consider the message. The transitory Iraq War monuments serve not only to embody collective loss, but also to remind people that the war is still occurring. The number of boots, stars, tombstones, and crosses increase weekly on these monuments. Unlike a statue of the Winged Victory, as long as the war continues, these monuments will never be frozen in steel. They exist in the present to commemorate the present.

Posted by Lisa Reinke at 11:48 AM

Treatment of individuals in group death

The Jury statement of the LMDC competition for a 911 memorial states, “memory belongs primarily to the individual.” If ownership of memory were this easily decisive, would commemoration of group loss take such a primary position in human practice? The degree to which a memorial site can represent an individual death while paying homage to massive community loss is a consistent point of concern and often commemoration sites are criticized precisely for this inability to capture the essence of individuals. The LMDC’s mission statement further represents its goal to “never forget each individual life…or the countless individual and collective stories.” Individual vs. collective concerns often compete for representation within sites that commemorate large scale tragedy. The relationship between individual death and group death is one that permeates all articles included in this week’s readings.

In Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France After World War I, Daniel Sherman looks at the practice of erecting post WW1 monuments in France as an example of how memory is mediated by political and economic structures. Sherman describes the tensions between art and commerce, local and national commemoration practices, history and memory, illustrated in the phenomenon of marking the estimated million of French citizens who died in WW1. Sherman shows how memory transforms from an individual process to a group process when connected to historical loss. Communal loss is different from individual loss and inextricably linked to the politics that resulted in group loss. Communal memory then is also different from the process an individual goes through to remember an individual loss. When an individual loses someone, personal affects or objects left behind become memory tools. When an individual loses someone as part of a group loss, the memorial object stands in for this object, unifying the memory for those left behind and in so doing, devising a new community. Substitutions are made and bonds are formed to others who have lost by nature of the commemorative marker occupying a shared space in their healing process.

Due to the scale of French death during WW1 as well as the lack of personal identification of those who died, the desire to mark the war dead involved massive amounts of people which resulted in a contested process over how to do so. Issues arose over ownership of the memory of the dead, location of commemorating the dead, physical attributes of commemorations, and the degree to which the process of commemoration became commercialized and government regulated. In so much as the French monuments were to stand in for individual death markers, the efficacy of such monuments was limited to the inscription of individual names listed on the monuments themselves. With these French monuments, personal memory of a loved one is transferred to a collective memory of people who never met. That this satisfies human need for marking death is interesting but perhaps the location of a familiar name in a public, visible, and vocal position on a monument offers pride in place of closure.

The French monuments were also successful in spurring the traditional formats for war memorials which favored allegorical representations of human qualities in order to emphasize individual human loss. The war monuments that arose post WW1 insisted upon breaking the archetype of commemoration in favor of recognizable human soldiers. Those commemorating wanted people to mark their loss and not human metaphors which reflects a memory mood that places primacy on real humanity and not on artifice. Combining the more recognizable solider forms with the inscription of names, these monuments represent loss as something measurable and not as something symbolic, immeasurable, or un-noteworthy.

In Witnessing Genocide: Vigilance and Remembrance at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, Williams describes the uneasiness memory creates within tragedy spaces whose tragicness has not yet seen resolution outside of commemoration. Such sites are built up in order for humanity to retain memory of historical blemish (253). Memory is a flexible organ whose form can be manipulated in order to “challenge our notion of human history” (242) especially when that history involves mass murder. I feel the Cambodian genocide sites became most controversial when some of the images were appropriated, repackaged, decontextualized, and offered up to the capitalist consumerist beast of the American art world. Although Williams writes that the quantity of mug shots of the dead at the original sites creates an numbing obstacle for comprehending the reality of genocide, I feel that the reduction of the display of such photos down to only twenty-two exhibited images completely distorts the origin of such images and applies a process of judgment and choice to the artists that is frankly sickening. At the original sites, the emotional isolation of the images that Williams describes is countered by the quantity of images. Each frame is isolated, but the images stand as a community. The masses of emotional isolation represented at Tuol Sleng is undone by further isolation applied to the reduction of images displayed at the MOMA exhibit. This again points to the tension between individual representation and group loss. When the images exist as part of a group, it feels representative of what actually took place. Removing a minimal amount of individuals and holding them up to an art audience feels like an exploitative invasion of privacy. It feels voyeuristic. Let those who went to the MOMA exhibit fly to Cambodia to see such images in the space where they were found and let those negatives found by the artists, rest where they were found as gravestones to those contained in the images. In such an exhibit, memory and tragic history serves as a callous commodity of a callous community. Williams writes “if they are the luckless faces of death, our looking at them condemns them to a new death every time….the viewer becomes the executioner’s witness” (245) and in so doing mimics the executioners who felt compelled to document their killing accomplishments in the first place. Further, what allows an individual to choose who gets displayed out of those deaths by way of pure aesthetic decision making?

The degree to which a mass death commemoration represents individuals taps into the efforts on the part of museum staff to answer the questions of how genocide, war, death, murder, and terrorism can be displayed in ways that reflect the depth of emotion equivalent to the emotional charge of the actual event. The question seems to be how do museum designs get people to feel? Sherman notes the converse relationship between history and memory: when history strengthens by way of the present distancing itself from the historic moment, memory dissipates. Agreeing with Sherman’s sentiment that memorials, meant to be looked at are often overlooked, Williams confirms, that in the process of looking at and thinking about such things as genocidal monumentalization, the degree of tragedy is somehow trivialized or made palatable in order to be consumed. Interesting distinctions are made between viewers who are directly connected to a tragic event and those who can only relate to something by means of falling under the “family of man” umbrella. All these sites involve a categorization of man based on a potential emotional response or internalization of a message. As Williams states, experiencing a Holocaust memorial with a survivor or descendant of a survivor internalizes the experience to personal memory. Yet when international travelers visit Tuol Sleng, they are really entering a theater where “historical spectacle” is performed (243). Sites such as Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek become performative in this inability of humans to process tragedy they haven’t experienced.Is it so natural a human characteristic to obtain less, feel less, and relate less, when loss and death does not affect them directly? What is that filter? And is that filter truly recognized through the process of commemoration design?

Williams describes the lack of personal accounts and stories of the dead at the Cambodian sites as problematic. It can be conceived of, however, that this lack of personal detail is exactly what makes the sites efficacious in marking mass lost without catering to the weaknesses of human ability to relate to something only when it hits them as an individual, as something that could happen to them. What is achieved out of the lack of personal stories is community identification, and it asks the visitor not to be so jaded as to require personal details in order to be jarred. Why must there be an individual account in order to feel it? Is the individual any less mourned when they are included in the messaging of mass murder? The site doesn’t coddle human weakness but forces accountability for relating to man’s massive errs.

The flexible relationship between individual and group memory is riddled with problems. As described in The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, and Place, centralization of a massive “memory zone” in Berlin displaces previously designed commemoration spaces and allows people to resist memory outside of this delineated space. The memory stage created out of the Jewish Museum, the Holocaust memorial, and the Topography of Terror Center allows tourists to perform commemoration in a limited time and place. This space creates a tourist zone for memory that just as distinctly creates a zone outside of it, for non-memory. It risks becoming a crutch for which people can consider the effort of remembering atrocity accomplished and gives the opportunity for remembering within the zone, as well as forgetting without.

In Activating the Past for Civic Action, Liz Sevcenko configures history within the history museum as a tool for turning memory into an active, present tense figure in conceiving of the future. In describing the LESTM as well as the International Coalition of Historic Sites Museums of Conscience, Sevcenko explains it is not about the specific site but about what is done with the site, how it is interpreted and activated for social change. Memory and history then are seen as active artifacts not to be relegated to static pasts but to be communicated in order to educate and improve society. From the article, I was under the impression that a site had to prove its commitment to education and social change in order to again access to the coalition. I found it strange that one merely express interest by paying dues in order to be included. And if it is so easy, why are there so few sites included? I took issue with the tone of Sevcenko’s essay which seemed more of a marketing piece for the LESTM than a critical look at what the museum does accomplish or can hope to accomplish better. But seeing as we spent much of last week highly critical of the LESTM (which I find highly pleasant and enjoyable), I’ll let this critique rest here.

Posted by Erin Madorsky at 11:09 AM

Everybody Do The Hitler! Do It! Do It! Do The Hitler!

My friends and I have a crucial rhetorical rule when it comes to heated discussions and arguments – the moment that somebody brings up either Hitler or the Holocaust as a point of comparison, all debate must immediately cease. It’s the end of the conversation, no more comments are accepted. The reason for this is that we view the Holocaust, and its main figurehead, as a topic so monstrous, so huge, that to compare it to anything else is automatically a belittling cheap shot that renders the current conversation unimportant (I feel that I should point out that these friends and I never discuss genocide in other contexts, wherein a Holocaust analogy might be apropos). The basic point here, though, is that the Holocaust is, in the eyes of Western culture, at least, the sign of the ultimate horror, the worst depths to which humanity can possibly, conceivably sink.

As such, I find little surprise in the fact that the readings from this week consistently refer back to Holocaust memorialization as the example to which all other memorials look (well, not the memorials themselves, of course) while in the planning stages. I find it extremely interesting, then, to discover from Daniel Sherman that, “Although societies since antiquity have erected monuments to their military exploits, historians trace the origins of a new, democratic style of commemorization to the period of the Napoleonic wars, when large citizen armies began to replace mercenary troops” (187). The important thing to note here – the “citizen armies” – is the shift from the “great men” theory of history towards the viewpoint of ordinary men and women caught up in the tides of history as being just as important as king, emperors, and generals (as a sort of side note, in my own field of theater, this same movement was in the process of gearing up at around this same point in history, moving from the kings and princes of Shakespeare to the syphilitic alcoholics of Ibsen, Shaw, O’Neil, etc.). Less than a century later, in the wake of the Holocaust, it would seem that a new sort of memorialization was also required. Although Sherman does not go into the wake of World War II with his history of memorialization, following his logic we have to assume that a new mode is called for when so many civilians – twelve million in the death camps alone – were dead without even being a part of the battles. From the emperor, to the soldier, to the casualty, it would seem that memorials have moved further and further towards memorializing the common man, towards memorializing people rather than events. I can think of no better symbol of this than the inscription of names, which many of these readings point out as the central aspect of most memorials.

I do have a question to pose along these lines, though, an factual question that I simply don’t know the answer to, but somebody (BKG or Brigitte?) in the class might – are their any monuments anywhere in the world that attempt to list all known victims of the Holocaust? Or, even on a more approachable level, to list all the victims from one particular country? Or is this, rather, the perfect example of Sherman’s conception of memorials moving from national to local levels, with monuments commemorating the Holocaust victims of local townships, municipalities, etc.?

Of course, this begs the question of the sort of memorial that is appropriate for such an extreme example of humanity at its worst. Is it, as the writer of the Vortex article argues, only appropriate to use gardens, since, “Plant life has a natural cycle of growth, fertility, decay, and death which is assiduously avoided in the conventional iconography of martial memory”? Is it a socially active museum along the lines of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, which “view stimulating dialogue on pressing social issues and promoting humanitarian and democratic values as a primary function” (Sevcenko 58). Or could it even be Holocaust movie tourism, visiting the sites filmed for such movies as Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful (although some would argue this as complete commercial whorism, I think there is something important to say here about the fact that movies have an ability to impact and touch people on an intimate level, and that connecting a site to that emotionality by referencing the movie can engender a deeper feeling of connectivity than might otherwise be possible at even a space like Auschwitz)?

As the British playwright Alan Bennet writes in his recent play, The History Boys (during a wonderful scene wherein a teacher brought in to get a group of high school students into Oxbridge tries to get the boys to see that the Holocaust can and should be viewed as objectively as anything else when writing an essay, to surprise the essay reader’s with the lack of semi-religious sanctity normally given to the Holocaust, all of which offends the one Jewish boy in the class), “This is history. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don’t see it and because we don’t see it this means there is no period so remote as the recent past and one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be . . . even on the Holocaust” (74). After a stern talking-to from the school’s headmaster (“Mr. Irwin. Fuck the historian. I have two angry Jewish parents threatening to complain to the school governors. I have explained to them that you are young and inexperienced and that your anxiety that the boys should do well has perhaps outrun your sense of proportion” (78)), the teacher, Irwin, admits that, “I was too . . . dispassionate, I suppose. The Holocaust is not yet an abstract question. Though in time, of course, it will be” (79).

One has to wonder, as more and more survivors of the Holocaust, and even their children, are passing away, is it becoming that time when it can be an abstract question? To look at it form a more contemporary perspective, when will the event of September 11th be able to looked at as an abstract question? In the rest of the world, that time has come and gone years ago, to the point where many nations are angered by the current administration using 9/11 as an excuse for any policy they so desire, even though the tragedy of that day pales in comparison to ongoing campaigns of war and genocide occurring every day all over the world. For us, though – for America, and particularly for New York – there is still something of a sacrosanct quality to 9/11, and one almost wonders if this the purpose, or at least the subconscious reason, behind all of the many delays and debates about how to properly memorialize Ground Zero. So long as the question of memorialization of 9/11 is a process, rather than a product, so long as there is an on-going debate and conversation, then 9/11 can’t be conveniently forgotten. Perhaps what a memorial does is allow us to file away a tragedy somewhere in the rear of our brains, to be reactivated and re-experienced only when we visit the memorial – I never get choked up thinking about the Vietnam War, which was over before I was born, for example, except for the two times I visited the memorial, when I openly wept. If there is a Ground Zero memorial, we can do the same in the case of 9/11, and forget the tragedy of the day rather than reliving it every day to reenergize ourselves for our ongoing global conflicts (I think of this as an unconscious collaboration between victims’ families, who don’t want their loved ones forgotten, and the government, which doesn’t want the symbolic reason for its symbolic war forgotten). Perhaps the best way to remember 9/11 is to never memorialize it, and merely remain engaged in an eternal conversation about how to memorialize it. I don’t necessarily personally propose this course of action, but it certainly seems to be the most actively pursued one at the moment.

Posted by Andrew Friedenthal at 9:46 AM

Michelle responds to memorials

While reading these articles, I realized that whether it is a museum, monument, or memorial being constructed or erected, many persons seem to manifest a desire of a legitimizing of experiences. To build a monument, museum, or construct a memorial offers legitimization, or in other words, this says, I recognize or am aware that this experience happened and, therefore, it should be remembered. Legitimization of experience constitutes legitimization of me.

It is imperative to keep in mind, however, the limitations of these historic sites. Williams’s article situates memorials in the role of an aide in enabling the understanding of events that challenge our views of history (Witnessing Genocide: Vigilance and Remembrance at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek , 242). Before reading this piece, I was somewhat ignorant of this genocide in Cambodia from 1975-1979. For these purposes alone, such as education and conscious-raising, I believe that these sites are effective. However, these historic sites, I believe, can never capture the most complete and pure essence of atrocities. Again, as previously stated, they are aides in the construction of public memory.

While attending class in Peru this summer, much of our work focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the construction of public versus private memory following the Dirty War of Peru from 1980-2000. The political theater group we had the pleasure of working with, Yuychakani, aided in the construction of public memory of the violence of Peru during this time. Many accounts of the “disappeared” were given voice through their performances. Much like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s objective to create active learners, the work of the “Yuyas” in Peru enabled active listening and opened up a space for dialogue concerning the fragmented nature of memory, both public and private. Many who visit Peru (tourists) come and view the political theater in Lima. Although personally many have no connection to the violence in Peru, there interaction as active listeners during performances can mark them as constructors of memory, as well.

Posted by Michelle Brown at 3:08 AM

Theatrical Monuments and Museums that Stutter

Shoes, Auschwitz. See also The Holocaust Shoe Project. "We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses," Moses Schulstein.

Memorials to war, genocide and other atrocities assert that memory is necessary, and in particular calls for or attempts to cultivate a social, and in most cases national memory of a particular event or period from the past. Different sites reference (intentionally and not) different modes of remembering, and different relationships between remembering and forgetting. Sherman, quoting Musil in his essay on World War 1 memorials in France, says “there is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments”(206), suggesting that one of the functions of these memorials is precisely to be forgotten, to be passed by, almost a placeholder for actual contemplation and commemoration of the deaths of countless soldiers in WW1.

I think this is particularly true of monuments that are located in heavily trafficked public spaces, and it is particularly true today, with generations that have no connection to the events commemorated in the monuments. I have been thinking a lot about theatricality because of something I’m working on for another class, and I can’t help but try and classify the WW1 memorials as modernist in Michael Fried’s sense; automous, self contained, and the more contemporary memorials and museums as more theatrical, in the sense (which Fried writes of disparagingly) that they are not autonomous, they require the activation of the viewer, are more sensitive to the site on which they are based. I sense that contemporary monument architects have attended to this, and while the form of monuments and memorials has changed a lot, there is nonetheless an anxiety about the ability of more recent memorials (to the Holocaust, for example) to ensure a continuation of social memory once the generation who actually remembers it is gone. The contemporary sites, both those which are site specific (like the “decentralized” concentration camp memorials (Till) or the relatively “unmediated” memorials in Cambodia (Williams)), or more abstractly removed and constructed (like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, or the Jewish Museum in Berlin, or the Vietnam War Memorial) concern themselves with the process of continuation of memory. I think the term “process” is important because these contemporary sites recognize the instability of social memory, and the theatrical structuring of these sites is an attempt to address this, by addressing the body and the experience of the visitor.

Much of the controversy surrounding these sites has to do with the relationship of the site to the larger national context. In the case of the Berlin “Memory District”, there is the issue of centralization, both geographically and in terms of resources, which threatens both the symbolic weight and the economic livelihood of the numerous, diffuse holocaust memorials all over Germany. The centralization (seen as American by many critics, as Sevcenko notes) is a double-edged sword: on one hand, it allows Germany to make a clear acknowledgement of guilt and admission of responsibility for the atrocities of the Holocaust which was not possible on a decentralized level, and on the other hand, it threatens to render the decentralized memorial sites, many of which are concentration camps, obsolete through a lack of funding. The Tuol Sleng and Choeng Ek sites are controversial because there has yet to be a reconciation, the memorials have not been incorporated into a national social history because the events have yet to be dealt with - the assigning of guilt is controversial in a country where many of the government officials once had ties with the Khmer Rouge, who have not yet been brought to justice in international courts (Williams 247). Clearly, there are many political factors that influence to what extent a site can be understood as part of a ‘national’expression. What does it means for a nation to admit to its culpability in the form of a museum or monument? How does it do so responsibly? Does such an admission neutralize the sites which have historically been situated outside and perhaps even in opposition to the sphere of the national - as the sphere of denial?

There is another kind of controversy as well, that has to do with the production and marketing of these sites of atrocity for tourist consumption. What are the ethics involved here? Why would someone want to visit a place like this? Is it because horror and atrocity are sufficiently “flashy” to attract people to historical sites? When reading Sevcenko’s article, I read “Berlin’s memory district will be the first cultural space internationally that publicly acknowledges national guilt, commemorates the suffering of victims, and represents the history of the perpetrators in a national capital” (197) but I misread the meaning of capital - and I thought well, the memory district ALSO employs national guilt, the suffering of victims, and the history of the perpetrators as national CULTURAL CAPITAL ... Which, despite the undeniable importance of the memorials and museums, still gives me the creeps. What are the rules here? Does a country have to be “reformed” before they can reap the economic benefits of their previous generations’ atrocities in the form of tourism? In the case of Cambodia, apparently not, despite the fact that the memorials there are not aligned politically with a nationalist project, that is to say, centralized. I do not know whether the museums and memorials in Berlin charge admission or are public - and if they do ( I imagine the museum does, but the memorial doesn’t ... Brigitte?) I don’t know where the money goes. However, the tourists that visit do not only spend money at the specific sites, but also on transportation, food, and accomodations, and so the economy profits indirectly from the popularity of these sites.

The oft-repeated mantra of Holocaust memorials is “never again”, but as Williams pointed out, the memorials to the Holocaust did not prevent subsequent genocides in other parts of the world (Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur). The Hiroshima Peace Museum also has the message “never again”, but the message here seems much more global than other memorials commemorating different events from the same war. The museum promotes peace and above all, nuclear disarmament. Probably because the event that is commemorated, the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima, was so sudden, it does not have the same drive to contextualize as other memorials depicting “slower” atrocities. Questions of complicity seem out of place. Instead, there is an apparent attempt at collecting and memorializing everything that can be collected, remembered or memorialized. At least that’s how it appears to me. I am thinking of two separate things: the park with its many many small monuments, and the interior of the West part of the museum, which contains a very large collection of objects retrieved from the hypocenter or from victims and their families. The sheer number of things is in itself affecting, in a similar way to the anonymous shoes in the Washington holocaust memorial or the anonymous skulls at Tuol Sleng. However what is truly shocking here is that the items are not, for the most part, anonymous: each item’s story has been somehow collected along with the item, which may vary in its specificity. The seemingly endless collecting and cataloguing of burnt and melted objects, where in many cases no bodies remained, appears to be an attempt both to collect evidence and to present a reality of horror that cannot be represented. Context, as I said, seems irrelevant, as everything comes down to this one moment in time. Similarly, in the park surrounding the museum, there are many different monuments, bridges, and statues built by different groups, commemorating different people or places, most of which are quite mundane. But as the mundanities pile up one on top of the other, the horror can begin to be perceived. Again, there is something different about this site because it was destroyed so quickly, the memory of what it was like before remained fairly intact. I wonder what it would be like if there were more historical context about Japanese-German and American relations during WW2? Would it be appropriate in this site? Is the anti-nuclear message the univocal message of the site? I think it is. The almost obsessive repetition of the word “peace” in naming almost every aspect of the museum and its grounds, like the long lists of objects collected or diffuse mundane memorials, they all seem to be manifesting the trauma of the site - and again, (just from looking at the website,) what seems like an oddly almost-jovial stutter really affected me. It may seem like just another part of the traumatized repetitive stutter to say NO to nuclear weapons, but maybe listening to the voice of trauma is worthwhile.

Posted by Sarah Klein at 1:53 AM

November 19, 2005

What's so seductive about murder sites?

In order to answer some of the questions in the guidelines, we have to look at the evolution of memorials and consider their shift in content (what is commemorated) and their shift in purpose (what is a memorial for?).

Until World War II, memorials commemorated mostly soldiers who had died on duty. As Sherman shows, heroism, bravery, and other positive allegories constituted the core of the message. The (military) dead were honored by locals on Veteran’s Day or Armistice Day, and has no other purpose, besides being a landmark in a town or village.

The Holocaust marks a shift because it wasn’t about soldiers anymore, but civilians, murdered massively for racist reasons, and whose bodies could never be recovered. The Holocaust pushed memorialization to two extremes: extreme abstraction (in order to reflect the hugeness and un-representability of the tragedy, for example the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr in Paris) or extreme personalization (an anti-Nazi position that claims to remember each victim, such as the tower of faces at the new Yad Vashem).
Then came the Vietnam War… and Maya Lin’s design that dealt with an ugly war, no victory, lots of casualties, and other difficulties. Her memorial acquired new functions, from a political statement about the failure of the war, to an esthetic statement in favor of minimalism, to a destination for remembrance and tourism through its location on the Mall.

I contend that contemporary memorials dealing with major tragedies (I can’t include natural disasters at this point, for lack of research) are still focused in their content (one specific event), but have consciously include a number of other functions that are typically not associated with traditional memorials: from the need to hire a celebrity-architect to marking a legacy left by a politician, from generating revenue through tourism to being included in school curricula, from being used all year round as a public place, playground, meeting point, etc.

This opening-up of the memorial faces difficulty: how can a memorial be less austere, more welcoming to the living, and keep its solemn quality? Rules of conduct were never written on a memorial, because “proper” behavior was so obvious (silence, reverence, contemplation, dress code). With the promotion of memorials to public places, we face a paradox: should rules of conduct of a memorial be visibly expressed? Or should the rules of conduct that relate to public places prevail (no littering, e.g.)? Or should there be no rules of conduct at all, given the conflicting activities that take place at the same location and that can’t be policed? The Eisenman memorial expressed this ambiguity by asking people not to sunbathe, barbecue or drink alcoholic beverages, while at the same time, the architect himself refuses all form of regulation. This is one of the reasons for controversy. In the Park of Memory in Buenos Aires, everything is open to all, and the memorial is understood as a public space with full enjoyment of the area given to all. It reflects the idea that the memorial is not only about remembering and mourning, but also about meeting, socializing, sightseeing and playing. And perhaps, the memorialization process needs other forms of embodied practices in order to be active. As much as a shock it seems for some, wouldn’t we prefer that kids play hide and seek in Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial rather than in any anonymous park?

This leads to the question of the visitors’ identity: For what type of audience are memorials built? And what brings tourists to sites of murder, death and tragedy?

The answer to the first question is inspired by the functionality assigned to contemporary memorials. Nowadays, public art involves thinking about children, foreign tourists, seniors, all social classes, which forced architects and artists to create memorials according to parameters beyond esthetics: security, cost, recreation, maintenance, mass tourism, public events, among others.
I’ve been asking myself the question of thanotourism for a number of years, probably when I organized my first trip to a Nazi concentration camp. While I can explain my own interest in the topic, I have been unable to find any research that tries to explain the attraction to death sites. I’ve tried to put together a number of categories, probably not exhaustive:

- Those who have a family, ethnic, or geographical relation to the site (relatives of plane crash victims; Jews and the Holocaust; French residents in the area of Resistance activity)
- A sense of experiencing the contemporary, History unfolding before one’s eyes: the tragedy was such a milestone-trauma, that visiting the original site cements the identity of the “witness”
- A sense of guilt that needs to be healed by a kind of pilgrimage, even if the guilt is remote in time and space, passivity can’t be repeated: you can’t go to Berlin and not visit the Holocaust memorial or another Nazi-era site, you can’t go to NY and ignore Ground Zero.
- An attraction for the spectacular (even if the spectacle equals a hole, ruins or a deserted landscape), reinforced by the expected stories to tell family and friends at home who will invariably ask, “did you see it?”
- A learning experience, just like going to a museum or a landmark building, in order to understand history and to remember the past (that’s for nerds)
- An attraction for death, blood, crime. I’m no psychologist but I wonder if this is not the same fascination that makes people cheer for blood in a fight, attend bull’s fights and act with shameless cruelty in Milgram’s experiments. Maybe battlefields, prisons and other sites of torture speak to our lower instincts, and, at the same time, help us dominate the horror and atrocity for which we were once—and not so long ago—responsible.
Maybe it's all of the reasons above, maybe it's something else. I'm still on the discovery path...

Posted by Brigitte Sion at 9:04 PM

Bearing witness through the imagination

The readings this week show obvious linkages from last week’s class on history. Liz Sevcenko’s article picks up on the new (or was it new new?) museum and its mission as articulated through our discussion: “More than places for passive learning, we could re-imagine museums as centres of active exchange on issues that matter outside their walls.” (57) Hence the LESTM’s ‘kitchen.’ But how exactly do history and memory relate? From Sevcenko, we begin to understand the relationship through the connection between past and present – past memory, through the “site of conscience”, becomes history (a production of the present). In the example of the memory mapping project of the District Six Museum, memory is used to activate a new history, a shaping of the future through land reclamation. Similarly, in the Sherman essay, memory (with its proclivity for disappearance) journeys into history in the names inscribed on war monuments; in Sherman’s words, “the names constitute themselves as part of a signifying process that seeks to transcend memory and its limitations by assigning it, in its constructed ‘collective’ form, a historical role.” (206)

This “passage of memory from private to public trust” (http://modiya.nyu.edu/modiya/handle/1964/191 ¶1) in the guise of the site of conscience or memorial, however, is not without its problems. As Karen Till writes, “places of memory are always located in international, moral, and economic spaces.” (197) Money inevitably is an issue – both in terms of funding (on page 206, the Sachsenhausen director questions “that money must not be the measure of commemoration” in terms of his small(er) museum being on the margins of financial support), and profits. Which leads to the evils of tourism and the booming trends of dark tourism…

In Sevcenko’s “site of conscience” the visitor/tourist is the point – it is about stimulating active public dialogue. And Till says, “ultimately, it is the visitors who assess, create, and validate the authenticity of places of memory.” (215) (Back to authenticity again!) On the other hand, there can be, as Paul Williams points out in his article on Tual Sleng and Choeung Ek, the possibility of tourist attraction and place of local memory being at odds with one another: “If a site is to uphold local significance in most cases, it will contain elements that are incompatible with a hospitable tourist ‘product’.” (251) The unchanged appearance of the two Cambodian sites (very different in approach to the hypervisibility mode adopted by many Holocaust memorials and museums) succeeds in creating a chilling sense of adventure for dark tourists, but at the same time stands as a reminder for the Cambodian people, for the need for government action. (247) He goes on to write that this conflict between sacred space and the desire for public access is particularly the case at sites that are politically or culturally sensitive. More than this, he presents that genocide – its interpretation, explanation, and memorialisation – poses a particular philosophical problem: “the enormity of the systematic destruction of so many lives seems to defy comprehension.” (241) How to memorialise it then? How to avoid making it “just another historical event” or no more than a “gesture toward atrocity”? Williams suggests that what is required is a baseline that acknowledges the inadequacy of museums and memorials, and the limits of historical comprehension – that is, that the memorial can only ever be an aide.

I have been thinking about the Ground Zero Memorial Soundwalk while reading all this week’s material – partly because I just did it last week and found it a terribly unsatisfying experience, and partly because it is perfect to serve as my fieldtrip for this week! There is, I think, supposed to be a performative aspect to this walk – through walking the walk, you experience the memorial. There is a supposed social process – that through this walk we are interpellated into a collective memory, and into a particular way of mourning. But I missed it. Or I was hailed, but couldn’t respond because I was too busy cringing at ‘freedom’ towers and ‘freedom’ fries (ok, the fries weren’t actually part of the walk), and the firefighters posing for pictures with their truck, and the merry-go-round of trauma consumption, and… (I wrote more in the comments section of Brynn’s project proposal). The Sherman essay proposed some interesting things for me in trying to unravel my aversion to this experience: he posits collective memory “not as something inherent to a group or groups, reflected unproblematically in objects like monuments, but as a socially constructed discourse… Similarly, what we conventionally call ‘commemoration’ I take to be the practice of representation that enacts and gives social substance to the discourse of collective memory.” (186)

Interestingly, there are two versions of memorial presented by the soundwalk – the sonic memorial, and the exhibit of the proposed memorial site in the Winter Garden. The proposed (holes in the ground) memorial itself incorporates several layers of memorial – the above ground grove of trees which I suppose could be used by anyone (if you get through immigration) for any purpose, the next layer down which is for reflection (and I think a museum?), and a still lower, bedrock layer which is private, for families only or special occasions.

I am still left with lots of questions though – what is the work that is supposed to be performed by memorials? And who is allowed to mourn? And just whose memory becomes collective?

**********************
I just found this in Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks' 'Theatre/Archaeology': "Memory is not inventory, but is the act of memorising." (42)

food for thought...

Posted by Justine Shih Pearson at 6:20 PM

How do you Squeeze Love from a Piece of Stone? Horror?

The analysis of the importance of each of the sites mentioned in today’s readings varies slightly from article to article, but there are consistencies running through all of them. I summarize these consistencies as follows. The importance of remembering these sites and the atrocities that took place at them has a dual bearing in both the present and future. It’s important for the victims, perpetrators, and members of the present generation to recall and understand these events, that they might better come to terms with their grief, acknowledge their guilt and degree of responsibility, and begin discussions towards avoiding the reoccurrence of such atrocities in the future on both personal and national levels. Primary sites are essential as they can generate a depth of understanding unparalleled by photos, films, historical records, or discussion.

Today’s readings demonstrate a number of performative modes at work in the sites discussed. The monuments of France after WWI demonstrate the development of both artistic and commercial industry, community solidarity, communal remembrance, and an increased national pride and identity. Liv Sevcenko presents the Gorée Island slave house as playing a pivotal role in the struggle against Apartheid, after the meeting of the African National Congress there in 1987 at Mandela’s behest. She further shows the positive future political potential of the LESTM as garment industry CEO’s meet there along with families and school children to discuss labor issues and come face to face with tenement living conditions.

The Topography of Terror in new Berlin not only provides a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, but a tangible expression of Germany’s initiative towards coming to terms with and taking responsibility for their countries history. Furthermore, in addition to “official” expressions of the matter, the unofficial displays on construction walls act as a forum for any visitor to reflect and contribute to the far-reaching discussion. Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, and as I shall elucidate below, Auschwitz, provide opportunities for visitors to come face to face with the indescribable magnitude of the ghastly atrocities that took place there. More so than Auschwitz, Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek also serve to preserve a record of atrocities that could conceivably go unheard of or forgotten by those not affected by them directly. The Auschwitz website does a fine job of presenting the necessary facts for a visit to Auschwitz, listing directions, nearby hotels, hours of operation, information on obtaining guides, and a brief history of the camp itself. This history is notable for its “objective” tone, and a lack of emphasis on or myopic treatment of the deaths of Jews in the camp, as it at least equally acknowledges the significant numbers of Poles, Soviet prisoners, and Gypsies that also met their deaths there.

In this way, the website serves to counter the commonly held belief that it was only the Jews that suffered at the hands of the Third Reich. Interestingly, the site also both magnifies and diminishes the horrors of Auschwitz. Having visited the camps myself in 1999, I was struck by how poorly the massiveness of the site was conveyed by the website. Here was a perfect example of Sevcenko’s acknowledgement of the power of primary sites. On the other side of the coin, I noted how the website portrayed the camp in the majority of its photos. Images were largely in somber black and white, and almost all taken during the winter, emphasizing the bleakness of life in the camp and the horror of the living conditions there. The virtual tour is the exception to this, the photos taken on a sunny spring day. My own visit was somewhere in the middle, Auschwitz being disconcertingly park like, with manicured lawns and blooming roses in abundance, and Birkenau suited more to the photos, run-down with looming thunderheads in the sky above.

All the sites discussed above are controversial in that they represent some of the most negative aspects of recent human history. Some people wish only to forget, and see the preservation of these sites as a hindrance to that. For those that think remembrance is necessary, there remains the question of how the sites should be handled. Should they be refurbished, curated, or altered? If a new site is being created, how can these histories be abstractly represented in an appropriate manner? We see this at play the most with the WWI memorials and Daniel Libeskind’s design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Building new structures also raises the question of money. How much can be spent, and how much should be spent? How much is enough? In addition, how is the site to perform? Is it in remembrance or in shame? Is its audience those involved (at least indirectly) in the events represented, or an international tourist community, or both?

Tourism appears to have a strange relationship to these sites. In most cases, the sites have not been created and promoted to attract tourists to the same extent as many others. It could be argued that tourists almost seek these sites out in spite of a lack of promotional effort. An interesting hallmark of nearly all of these sites is the attempt to immerse the tourist in the world of the site represented. The slave chambers, the torture rooms, Libeskind’s tunnels, and the identity assignments of the National Holocaust Museum in D.C. are all examples. This appears efficacious in helping tourists to identify with the plight of the people actually there, but it also limits their orientation to the site and the events. Certainly people come for many different reasons, fascination with the macabre, personal identification, pilgrimage, and historical curiosity, to name only a few. How fair is it to limit or severely structure tourists’ interactions at these sites? What might some guidelines for this be?

The Holocaust has become paradigmatic for memorializing other traumas, largely because of the magnitude of events, the world’s involvement in WWII, and the abundance of sites and evidence. I find it difficult to see it serving as a model for catastrophes such as Katrina or the Tsunami, in that these were isolated natural disasters, rather than consciously employed acts of inhumanity. Certainly there are parallels to Darfur and Rwanda, but here I foresee the problem of a lack of specific sites, except perhaps razed villages. Furthermore, from what I know, these horrors sadly seem somehow less pertinent in the eyes of the world as they happened within a single non first-world country, and there was a lack of Global involvement even when they were taking place. If these places were to learn something from the Holocaust, I would hazard to suggest that it would be not in the constructing of memorials, (though that could perhaps be useful as well) but in learning how to raise awareness of their catastrophes and prove the significance of their remembrance to the world. Whether or not they have the desire, the money or the infrastructure to do so, I don’t know.

In closing, I pose a few questions. Is it always important to remember and preserve? Is this a necessary part of dealing with trauma collectively? When might there be exceptions? What might some alternative methods be? I also question the efficacy of educational programs like that at the LESTM. The educational and dialogue-generating aspects of our tour there certainly didn't impress me. Even if a session went as Sevcenko describes, would that be enough? Will kids really remember? What else can be done? It seems that discussion is a start, but only a start, and we need to translate discussion and remembrance into actions that can be sustained beyond a trip to the museum.

Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 4:46 PM

November 18, 2005

"Lights, Camera, Tourism"

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Posted by Siobhan Robinson at 7:34 PM