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October 24, 2008
Abstract Holocaust memorials
In Germany, artists have constructed monuments that fail to capture the right meanings.
NEIL ROGACHEVSKY
In central Berlin, in the shadow of the communist-relic television tower, stands a vast perimeter of large and unevenly carved slabs of concrete. The contrast between these lumps of stone and the neoclassical glories of 18th-century Prussia on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate couldn't be sharper, but it would be difficult to say much else. My guidebook told me that I was looking at the much talked about Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin's nearly five-acre Holocaust memorial, but, without the introduction, I would have been completely lost. On their own, these nameless stones do not shout "Holocaust memorial," let alone "European Jews." With some difficulty, one might make the association with a graveyard, but graveyard for whom? For what?
The scene at the memorial, which I visited on a hot July day, did little to clarify things. Laughing children played hide and seek, while locals and tourists, weary from the sun, leaned against or sat on the stones. Under the shade of the largest rocks, situated in the middle of the memorial, one young couple polished off a three-course picnic. To the clueless passersby, this concrete park seems to be another modern art project, the type of thing that Western municipal governments finance all the time to prove that they appreciate contemporary sculpture.
The Holocaust memorial in Leipzig, the city of Bach and of Goethe's Faust, is similarly difficult to get one's head around. Before the war, Leipzig had a small Jewish population numbering around 11,000 and communal life was based around the synagogue just west of the city centre. The synagogue was totally destroyed on Kristallnacht, and Jewish life in Leipzig was totally extinguished by the war's end. How did the citizens of Leipzig choose to commemorate the Jewish community that they decimated?
Where the synagogue used to be, today one finds an elevated concrete platform on which stand several rows of empty wooden chairs, facing east. As a memorial, this six-year-old work is undeniably more effective than its Berlin counterpart. The chairs, though they do not immediately recall a synagogue, at least relate to what was actually here: their symbolism is at least immediately comprehensible.
Still, these chairs merely dumbfound or at best perplex the random onlooker. The impression one receives from the memorial is that there were people here, and now they are gone. But is "here today gone tomorrow" an adequate message for a Holocaust memorial? The rows of chairs do not evoke what actually happened in this place, the merciless Nazi destruction of the synagogue and the Jews of Leipzig. To be fair, plaques commemorating the Jews of Leipzig are prominent, and far clearer than those found at the Berlin memorial. Passersby, should they stop to consider the plaques and chairs, would get the message. Still, the abstractness of this memorial makes it fit in all too comfortably with the surroundings. The horror falls into the prosaic: these are, after all, simply empty chairs. The very vibrant nightlife on the street (some of the best restaurants in town are here) seems affected not a jot by the presence of the rows of benches. Somehow, I think that nighttime revelry might have been dampened if the memorial had offered a clear and realistic representation of Nazis torching the Leipzig synagogue.
The designers of these memorials are, of course, aware that they are working in the territory of abstractions. As the project text of the Berlin memorial notes, the architect Peter Eisenman aimed to produce an "uneasy, confused atmosphere" with his slabs of concrete, and to represent a "supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason." It is a plausible view, as far as it goes, that the events of the Holocaust defy understanding, although I myself dispute this. But, in attempting to represent unreason by unreason, the designers merely keep us from coming to terms with what happened.
The Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, who was wrong about most things, was typically wrong when he wrote that poetry after Auschwitz would be impossible. His words matter though, because they seem to typify the attitude of large numbers of people charged with teaching the Holocaust or commemorating it through art. At the root of this view lies an understandable and forgivable sentiment: the events of the Holocaust were too terrible, too unprecedented and so seemingly incomprehensible that any attempt to develop adequate symbols or reveal something about the nature of those events must inevitably fall woefully short. But the paragons of this view acknowledge that we must, after all, commemorate somehow. So, deterred at the onset by the belief in the futility of attempting to depict the Holocaust, let alone to convey its causes and its meaning, they only grapple with their own failure to understand. Meanwhile, the actual events recede further away.
This paralysis does not run through all of Germany's museums and monuments devoted to Jewish history or the Second World War. Not far north from the memorial in Berlin is the redone New Synagogue (1868) on Oranienberg Street, its gold-tinged dome restored. Inside, there is a small exhibition on the life and death of the synagogue, including a most moving photo collection of the synagogue's heroic efforts to keep active in the 1930s, running social services and even operating a museum, despite enormous pressures. Despite or perhaps because of its simplicity, this museum succeeds in conveying something of the character of the world that was lost, and of commemorating its destruction.
I believe that the Germans deserve credit for their willingness to acknowledge the crimes of their past. But we sell our intellects short when we say, in dejected voices, that the Holocaust cannot be explained or represented, that we cannot elucidate phenomena according to their true dimensions. We do violence to our moral understanding when we do not at least attempt, as far as we can, to look at evil with open eyes.
Neil Rogachevsky, a native of Toronto, is a PhD candidate in government at Georgetown University. He has written for the Jerusalem Post, Toronto Life and other publications.
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