IN 1997, Prof. James E. Young chaired Berlins five-member Findungskommission to explore ways of accomplishing an improbable goal commemorating six million Jews murdered under the Nazi regime.
The process was nearly paralyzed, and understandably so, Young told the IJN a few hours before his keynote speech at the Fred Marcus Holocaust Memorial Lecture sponsored by DUs Holocaust Awareness Institute.
His talk was entitled The Stages of Memory in Berlin and New York.
The Berlin commission was charged with finding an appropriate aesthetic voice for Germanys Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, eventually dedicated in 2005.
The country was faced with a double-sided conundrum: how to reunite itself on the bedrock memory of its crimes, says Young, chair of the University of Massachusetts Judaic and Near Eastern studies department.
How do you remember a people murdered in the national name? It had never been done before.
Where are our national memorials in Washington to the slave auctions? Young asks rhetorically. Not even a rock, not even a pebble. Wheres the memorial commemorating the genocide of native American Indians?
No country builds a memorial to the injustices it has perpetrated to its triumphs or its martyrdom, of course but never in memory of its crimes.
Yet Germany was trying to do this.
Rather than telling the commission what to do, he elucidated the ethical challenges inherent in the precedent-setting enterprise.
I said, heres your problem. Youre trying to do something thats never been done before.
And you have a whole generation that hates memorials and monuments because they equate them with Nazi architecture. They see it as heresy to commemorate the victims of fascism with fascist architecture.
The last thing you want to do is redeem the memory of the Jews: So you kill them, and then find some sort of redemptive beauty in their memory? It doesnt work.
German artist Christine Jacob-Marks initially won the design competition, which attracted 526 submissions from architects around the world.
Jacob-Marks vision incorporated stones imported from Masada, where Jewish slaves committed mass suicide in 74 CE, and included 4.2 million names of Jews murdered in the Holocaust because thats all they could assemble.
It had every bad, mindless quirk possible built into it, Young says.
The five jurors embarked upon new deliberations.
In 1999, they selected American architect Peter Eisenmans design pillars of varying sizes arranged to resemble a slightly disorienting field of wheat blowing in the wind.
We liked the fact that he took a traditional form, using the pillars like a matzevah (memorial) tombstone, Young says. Instead of a frozen, fossilized thing, it looks like waving wheat from a distance.
YOUNG, who has researched the meaning, expression and transmission of Holocaust memory throughout his academic life, was asked to join the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial at Ground Zero in 2003.
He says the mayors and governors office called me in and asked, Whats this memorial going to be? They were feeling pressured from all sides, including politically.
I said, take a deep breath and step back, Young smiles. I told them to look at the Jewish mourning rituals: seven days for shiva, 30 days for shloshim, holding the unveiling ceremony a year after the death.
This gives you time to absorb the loss, integrate it and live with it.
He also pointed to the candlelight vigils in Union and Washington Squares; wreathes laid at fire stations; fliers pleading, Have you seen my daughter, son, wife, husband?
The memorial process began immediately after the attacks, he says.
Although it may seem obvious, Young suggests that the act of commemorating Sept. 11 is actually multidimensional.
The families of the victims are clearly thinking of their loved ones. They were the only ones to lock the meaning of Sept. 11 in their memory. But others also suffered.
What about the people in the city who didnt lose anyone but felt personally attacked? They were mourning the loss of a skyline, a landscape, which sounds shallow but its real.
For 22 years, the lights of the Twin Towers shined into my apartment, he says. I went to sleep with them every night.
The entire country mourns a war that was launched upon it and inaugurated the war on terror.
Not everyone knew what they were commemorating, but they all felt their own sense of loss and violation, Young says.
Although Daniel Libeskinds original design has been ameliorated by the architects forced collaboration with Peter Childs, Young feels the finished result will be exceptional.
They expect four to six million visitors a year to the new memorial, Young says. Its a great museum.
The two immense spotlights that rise like eerie apparitions from Ground Zero will continue shining every year on the anniversary of Sept. 11.
YOUNG admires the way Libeskinds Jewish Museum in Berlin utilizes void and absence to communicate a decimated people. Profoundly disturbing, it reflects a new conceptual trend in Holocaust memorials.
Libeskind used what he called voids that would bisect and intersect all parts of the building, Young says. One of them was the Holocaust void, which you enter underground. This represents the missing Jews.
He never wanted you to follow a nice neat narrative of the Jews without a slash Young makes a corresponding gesture across his throat the interruption that stops you in your tracks.
There is no such thing as a seamless narrative of the Jewish people. They are now broken stories, broken narratives.
Jewish space, Young says, is traditionally associated with what happens inside that space prayer, community, ritual. Its not really defined by formal building design. Libeskind had that in mind.
In a 1998 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Young said that a new generation of German artists and architects envisioned what they called the counter-monumental or counter-memorial.
It disappears instead of standing for all time, he said in the interview. It is built below the ground instead of above it. And that returns the burden of memory to those who come looking for it.
The IJN asks Young to comment further on the burden of memory.
Instead of a big stone, which you kind of hit against and is supposed to take the place of memory, you now stand there, he says. It returns the responsibility of memory to you, and in that responsibility is also a call to action.
Contemporary memorial designers are just horrified that everyone is spending all their time making memorials instead of doing anything about contemporary genocide.
While its natural for groups to focus on their own historical tragedies, Young says emphasizing the Holocaust to the exclusion of everything else might limit Jewish self-perception to a nightmare.
Every group knows itself through its own experience, he says. What happens is that you set up a culture of competing catastrophes. When these catastrophes dominate, it sets up a horrible dynamic.
The Holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened. But it becomes hermetic when the only memorials you have are by Jews, for Jews.
Proportionately, more Jews were killed in the Holocaust than any others. This is a sad fact. But we cant deny other groups who suffered genocide in the name of racial purity.
YOUNG, who has authored several books including The Texture of Memory, winner of the 1994 National Jewish Book Award, says the inchoate field of Holocaust memory congealed in his consciousness in 1976.
There was a revelatory moment when I went to Europe to research my dissertation on Holocaust literature, says the father of two who belongs to a Reconstructionist synagogue in Amherst.
I was doing research in museums, archives and at memorial sites when I realized that I needed to study both what happened, and how it has been passed down to me, the next generation.
There are two historical facts: the events, and their transmission. If Im going to understand what happened and how it unfolded, I needed to understand how that event was shaped by other mediums.
He read Holocaust diaries, memoirs, fiction; studied Holocaust films, photographs and video testimony; listened to audio accounts of survivors.
Young compared how Jews from different countries communicated their Holocaust experiences the difference between Yiddish and Polish diaries; similarities between the Dutch-language diary of Anne Frank and the Hebrew narrative written by Moshe Flinker.
He returned to YIVO to do more research for his dissertation and then lived in Israel from 1981-1983, studying and taking classes at Yad Vashem. One of his mentors was Saul Friedlander, the famed Israeli historian.
The brilliant student embarked on a literary history of the Holocaust that examined the historical narrative in a revolutionary way.
Young, who earned his PhD from UC-Berkeley in 1983, has since taught at NYC, Bryn Mawr College, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Washington.
He also consulted with the Argentinean government on its memorial to the desaparacidos who disappeared under the countrys brutal dictatorship from 1976-1983.
In an aside, Young says that his sons Asher and Ethan far outshined my own Bar Mitzvah.
Although we suspect this statement is based firmly on pride rather than objective academic proof, we say nothing.
AS survivors die, interest in the Holocaust will face the ultimate challenge the fickleness of human memory.
But Young says there is an antidote to forgetting.
Holocaust memorials and museums will have to adapt new strategies to accommodate and engage shifting demographics.
I dont know what people will remember about the Holocaust when they visit the US Holocaust Museum in 50 years, Young says, but I do know it wont be what we remember now.
The problem with too many memorials and museums is that they fix themselves for all time, confident that they can remember in perpetuity only one thing. Those are the ones that will disappear and become obsolete.
Yad Vashem recently remade itself into a very contemporary space, Young says. When it was first built, it reflected the understanding and ethos of its founding fathers. It concentrated on Jewish deaths only.
Today Israel is a country of immigrants, many who fled oppression in their native lands.
We have to enlarge the context of the Holocaust, Young insists.
Individuals must also do their unrelenting best to ensure that the Holocaust survives times indifference.
The richest way to remember and understand the Holocaust is by reading personal stories and memoirs, visiting commemorative sites and studying good, hard, well-researched histories, Young says.
The Holocaust wasnt an aberration. But neither was it something that had to happen.
Even under the iron fist of the Nazi regime, people had choices.
Its very difficult to imagine something that has never happened before, Young says. But the Holocaust was not unimaginable. Someone had to imagine it to make it happen.
It was carefully, deliberately planned and imagined.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
