Holocaust Commemoration: New Trends in Museums and Memorials

Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London, 2020

Art Journal, 2006

Yad Vashem is the living site of Israeli national Holocaust memory, where every generation of Israelis adds another memorial to an evolving landscape. The memorials installed from 1953 until the late 1970s are either figurai or minim alist in style and focus on the fighters, heroes, and martyrs of the Holocaust. Those installed since the 1980s, in contrast, tend to be conceptual or installation oriented, often employing-visual strategies of absence and disorientation?what one may call postmodern approaches?and are dedi cated to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This essay traces the development of memorials at Yad Vashem in relation to changes in Israeli attitudes toward the Holocaust, survivors, and their traumas: from silence and shame to understanding and even sympathy. ' At stake is the potential for memorials to provide a framework for trauma in visual form.2 Thp ^tartina nninf of this srnHv is the work of James E. Young, whose research on Holocaust memorials practically has made the subject a unique category of study within the intersecting disciplines of art history, literature, Jewish studies, and Holocaust studies.3 If Young examines theories of memory and collective memory to elucidate the ways in which Holocaust memorials embody current ideas about the past, then it is suggested here that trauma opens up another set of questions that are vital to the commis sioning, building, and viewing of Holocaust memorials. This essay therefore contributes to a larger literature of "trauma studies" in general and the intersection of trauma theory and art in particular.4 Most recently, Jill Bennett contributes a transformative analysis to trauma studies in elucidating the relationship between the work of art and the viewer as one that produces "affect." She claims that "trauma related art is transactive, not communicative. It often touches us, but it does not communicate the 'secret' of personal experience. Affect is produced within and through a work, and it might be experienced by an audi ence coming to the work." The viewer neither gains knowledge of the actual trau matic event nor identifies with the victim. An emotional or conceptual link is made between the viewer and a work of art, one which foregrounds the ultimate impos sibility of a viewer experiencing anything close to lived trauma and its aftereffects.5 This conceptual engagement, in turn, is only possible when there is a poten 103 art journal 1. The differences between the early and late memorials might be seen as a transformation from modern to postmodern approaches. My argument is not, however, about a history of style, and I want to avoid a too-easy parallel between the development of trauma in the public sphere and a perhaps too-easy delineation between the modern and the postmodern. Jean Fran?ois Lyotard argues that the postmodern is "always already" there, a formulation that remains highly influential. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 2. Dalia Manor writes that while "much has been published about the Holocaust, about its impact on Israel, and about art that deals with trauma ... on the subject of Israeli art and the Holocaust very little has been added [since 1995]... there have been very few developments in Israeli art and its relationship to the Holocaust." See Manor, "From Rejection to Recognition:

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015

In contrast to twentieth-century Holocaust Denial, the most recent assault on the narrative of the genocide of European Jewry has emanated from a sophisticated revisionist model known as Double Genocide, codified in the 2008 Prague Declaration. Positing ‘equality' of Nazi and Soviet crimes, the paradigm’s corollaries sometimes include attempts to rehabilitate perpetrators and discredit survivors. Emanating from pro-Western governments and elites in Eastern Europe in countries with records of high collaboration, the movement has reached out widely to the Holocaust Studies establishment as well as Jewish institutions. It occasionally enjoys the political support of major Western countries in the context of East-West politics, or in the case of Israel, attempts to garner (eastern) European Union support. The empirical effects to date have included demonstrable impact on museums, memorials and exhibits in Eastern Europe and beyond.

NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences, 2021

In 2010, Claus Leggewie, a German professor of Political Science, tried to define what he called “the seven circles of European memory”, common memories shared, in theory, by all Europeans: - European unification as a success story which, however, has had little impact on European self-confidence; - the notion of Europe as a continent of immigrants; - European colonialism and colonial massacres, such as the Herero massacre, as forerunners of the Holocaust; - War and wartime memories, specially about World Wars I and II; - Population transfers and ethnic cleansings as pan-European traumas (for example, the Armenian genocide or the Ukranian Holodomor); - Soviet communism; - The Shoah as Europe’s negative founding myth. At that time, he saw the possible problems caused by the imposition of the Holocaust as “the matrix for dealing with communist state crimes against humanity across the whole of Eastern Europe” (Leggewie 4), which might lead “these nations to exploit this consensus [Eastern European countries having been victims of the Soviet empire] in order to relativize or conceal their participation in the murder of the Jews” (Leggewie 5).

Lithuanian Historical Studies

Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, 2000

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Amy Sodaro, Adam Brown & Yifat Guttman, eds., Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics, and Society (London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).