Memory, Countermemory,

and the End of the Monument

Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel 1M l-.-i +0

and Renata Stih and Frieder

"The sunken fountain is not the memorial at all. It is only history turned into a

pedestal, an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in

their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found."

-Horst Hoheisel, "Rathaus Platz Wunde"

AMONG THE HUNDREDS OF SUBMISSIONS IN the 1995 competition fora

national "memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe;' one seemed an eSI)ecia:llly
canny embodiment of the impossible questions at the heart of Germany's
process. Artist Horst Hoheisel, already well known for his negative-form m<)flULn
in Kassel, proposed a simple, if provocative antisolution to the memorial
tion: blow up the Brandenburger Tor, grind its ston.e into dust, sprinkle the
over its former site,' and cover the entire memorial area with granite plates. How
ter to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument?
Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with the
tion of yet another edifice, Hoheisel would mark one destruction with an()therc
struction. Rather than filling in the void left by a murdered people with a
form, the artist would carve out an empty space in Berlin by which to recall a
absent people. Rather than concretizing and thereby displacing the memory Of
rope's murdered Jews, the artist would open a place in the landscape to be filled
the memory of those who come to remember Europe's murdered Jews. A

90
 ~~er the course of the twentieth century. As intersection between public art and PQ:-
htIcal memory, the monument has necessarily reflected the aesthetic and political
revolutions, as well as the wider crises of representation, follOwing all of the century's
major upheavals-including both World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, the rise
and fall of communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European
satellites. In every case, the monument reflects both its sociohistorical and its aes-
thetic context: artists working in eras of cubism, expressionism, socialist realism,
earthworks, minimalism, or conceptual art remain answerable to the needs of both
art and official history. The result has been a metamorphosis of the monument from
the heroic, self-aggrandizing figurative icons of the late nineteenth century celebrat-
ing national ideals and triumphs to the antiheroic, often ironic, and self-effacing con-
ceptual installations that mark the national ambivalence and uncertainty of late
twentieth-century postmodernism.

Horst Hoheisel, Blow Up the Brandenburger Tor. Proposal for the 1995 competition for "Berlin's
Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe."

celebrating Prussian might and crowned by a chariot-borne Quadriga, the Roman

goddess of peace, would be demolished to make room for the memory of Jewish vic-
tims of German might and peacelessness. In fact, perhaps no single emblem better
represents the conflicted, self-abnegating motives for memory in Germany today
than the vanishing monument.!
Of course, such a memorial undoing will never be sanctioned by the German
government; and this, too, is part of the artist's point. Hoheisel's proposed destruc~
tion of the Brandenburg Gate participates in the competition for a national Holo-
caust memorial, even as its radicalism precludes the possibility of its execution. At
least part of its polemic, therefore, is directed against actually building any winning
design, against ever finishing the monument at all. Here he seems to suggest that the
surest engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany may actually lie in tts per-
petual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process can guarantee the life
of memory. For it may be the finished monument that completes memory itself, puts
a cap on memory-work, and draws a bottom line underneath an era that must always
haunt Germany. Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in
Germany than any single "final solution" to Germany's memorial problem.2 Horst Hoheisel, Blow Up the Brandenburger Tor. Proposal for the 1995 competition for "Berlin's
Like other cultural and aesthetic forms in Europe and North America, the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe."

2 Memory, Countermemory Memory, Countermemory 93

 In tact, the monument as DOm InstltuTIon ana concepl nau aueauy \..U1111:: in aU art evolves over time. In this way, monuments have long sought to provide a
under withering attack well before the turn of the century. ''Away with the monu- naturalizing locus for memory, in which a state's triumphs and martyrs, its ideals and
ments!" Friedrich Nietzsche declared in his blistering attack on a nineteenth-century founding myths are cast as naturally true as the landscape in which they stand. These
German historicism that oppressed the living with stultified versions of the past, what are the monument's sustaining illusions, the principles of its seeming longevity and
Nietzsche called "monumental history:'3 To which, a chorus of artists and cultural power. But in fact, as several generations of artists-modern and postmodern alike
historians have since added their voices. "The notion of a modern monument is ver- - have made scathingly dear, neither the monument nor its meaning is everlasting.
itablya contradiction in terms;' Lewis Mumford wrote in the 1930s. "If it is a monu~ Both a monument and its significance are constructed in particular times and places,
ment it is not modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument:'4 Believing contingent on the political, historical, and aesthetic realities of the moment.
that modern architecture invites the perpetuation of life itself, encourages renewal The early modernist ambivalence toward the monument hardened into out-
and change, and scorns the illusion of permanence, Mumford wrote, "Stone gives a •. right hostility in the wake of World War 1. Both artists and some governments shared
false sense of continuity, a deceptive assurance of life:'5 Indeed, he went on to suggest· a general distaste for the ways the monument seemed formally to recapitulate the ar-
that traditionally it seems to have been the least effectual of regimes that chose to chaic values of a past world now discredited by the slaughter of the war. A new gen ~
compensate their paucity of achievement in self-aggrandizing stone and mortar. eration of cubists and expressionists, in particular, rejected traditional mimetic and
More recently, the German historian Martin Broszat suggested that in their heroic evocations of events, contending that any such remembrance ~ould elevate
references to history, monuments may not remember events so much as bury them and mythologize events. In their view, yet another classically proportioned Prome-
altogether beneath layers of national myth and explanation. As cultural reifications, theus would have falsely glorified and thereby redeemed the horrible suffering they
in this view, monuments reduce or, in Broszat's words, "coarsen" historical under- were called upon to mourn. The traditional aim of war monuments had been to val-
standing as much as they generate it. 6 In another vein, art historian Rosalind Krauss orize the suffering in such a way as to justify, even redeem, it historically. But for these
finds that the modernist period produces monuments unable to refer to anything be- . artists, such monuments would have been tantamount to betraying not only their ex-
yond themselves as pure marker or base. After Krauss, critics have asked whether an perience of the Great War but also their new reasons for art's existence after the war:
abstract, self-referential monument can ever commemorate events outside of itself to challenge the world's realities, not affirm them.
or whether it only motions endlessly to its own gesture to the past.? As Albert Elsen has noted, modern and avant-garde sculptors between the
Still others have argued that rather than preserving public memory, the mon" wars in Europe were thus rarely invited to commemorate either the victories or losses,
ument displaces it altogether, supplanting a community's memory-work with its battles or war dead of World War I.1O And if figurative statuary were demanded of
own material form. "The less memory is experienced from the inside;' Pierre Nora them, then only antiheroic figures would do, as exemplified in the pathetic heroes of
warns, "the more it exists through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs:'8 In German sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbrtick's Fallen Man and Seated Youth (both 1917). As
fact, Andreas Huyssen has even suggested that in a contemporary age of mass mem- true to the artists' interwar vision as such work may have been, however, neither pub-
ory production and consumption, there seems to be an inverse proportion between lic nor state seemed ready to abide memorial edifices built on foundations of doubt
the memorialization of the past and its contemplation and study.9 instead of valor. The pathetic hero was thus condemned by emerging totalitarian
It is as if once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to sOIl)e de~ regimes in Germany and Russia as defeatist for seeming to embody all that was worth
gree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember. In the eyes of modern critics forgetting-not remembering-in the war. Moreover, between the Nazi abhorrence
and artists, the traditional monument's essential stiffness and grandiose pretensions of abstract art-or what it called entartete Kunst (decadent art)-and the officially
to permanence thus doom it to an archaic, premodern status. Even worse, by insist~ mandated socialist realism of the Soviet Union, the traditional figurative monument
ing that its meaning is as fixed as its place in the landscape, the monument seems even enjoyed something of a revival in totalitarian societies. Indeed, only the figura-
oblivious to the essential mutability in all cultural artifacts, the ways the significance tive statuary of officially sanctioned artists, like Germany's Arno Breker, or styles like

Memory, Countermemory Memory, Countermemory 95

 the Soviet Union's socialist realism, could be trusted to embody the Nazi ideals of more recent installations to the discussion. In this way, I might both rehne ana au-
"Aryan race" or the Communist Party's vision of a heroic proletariat. In its COltlS()rt; umbrate the concept of countermonuments in Germany, the ways they have begun
with two of this century's most egregiously totalitarian regimes, the m()ll1LlIl'JLent'sj to constitute something akin to a "national form" that pits itself squarely against re-
credibility as public art was thus eroded further still. cent attempts to build a national "memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe" in the
Fifty-five years after the defeat of the Nazi regime, contemporary artists .. center of the country's reunited capital, Berlin. As before, I find that the ongoing de-
Germany still have difficulty separating the monument there from its fascist p bate in Germany has been especially instructive in my own considerations of the
German memory-artists are heirs to a double-edged postwar legacy: a deep dis-tru:st monument's future in this decidedly antiredemptory age.
of monumental forms in light of their systematic exploitation by the Nazis and a
found desire to distinguish their generation from that of the killers through
ory.ll In their eyes, the didactic logic of monuments-their demagogical rigidity Horst Hoheisel's Negative Forms and Memorial Spielerei
certainty of history-continues to recall too closely traits associated with fascism
self. How else would totalitarian regimes commemorate themselves except Some ten years before Horst Hoheisel proposed blowing up the Brandenburg
totalitarian art like the monument? Conversely, how better to celebrate the fall of Gate in Berlin, the city of Kassel had invited artists to consider ways of rescuing one
talitarian regimes than by celebrating the fall of their monuments? A m(mllmleil of its own destroyed monuments-the "Aschrott Brunnen:' This forty.!foot-high
against fascism, therefore, would have to be monument against itself: against the n~~o-ILJo!tnJ'Lc pyramid fountain, surrounded by a reflecting pool set in the main square
ditionally didactic function of monuments, against their tendency to displace front of city hall, was built in 1908. It was designed by the city hall's architect, Karl
past they would have us contemplate-and finally, against the authoritarian Roth, and funded by a local Jewish entrepreneur, Sigmund Aschrott. But as a gift
sity in monumental spaces that reduces viewers to passive spectators. from a Jew to the city, it was condemned by the Nazis as the "Jews' Fountain" and so
As I have suggested in the Introduction, one of the most intriguing results was demolished during the night of 8-9 April 1939 by local Nazis, its pieces carted
Germany's memorial conundrum has been the advent of what I would call its by city work crews over the next few days. Within weeks, all but the sandstone
termonuments": memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of base had been cleared away, leaving only a great, empty basin in the center of the
monument. For a new generation of German artists, the possibility that memory "'s(lua.re.Two years later, 463 Kassel Jews were deported from the central train station
events so grave might be reduced to exhibitions of public artistry or cheap pathos to Riga, followed in the next year by another 3,000, all murdered. In 1943 the city
mains intolerable. They contemptuously reject the traditional forms and reasons . filled in the fountain's basin with soil and planted it over in flowers; local burghers
public memorial art, those spaces that either console viewers or redeem such then dubbed it ''Aschrott's Grave:'
events, or indulge in a facile kind of Wiedergutmachung or purport to mend During the growing prosperity of the 1960s, the town turned Aschrott's Grave
memory of a murdered people. Instead of searing memory into public co:ns(:ious~ •. back into a fountain, sans pyramid. But by then, only a few of the city's old-timers
ness, they fear, conventional memorials seal memory off from awareness altoglethLerj . could recall that its name had ever been Aschrott's anything. When asked what had
instead of embodying memory, they find that memorials may only displace memctrw happened to the original fountain, they replied that to their best recollection, it had
These artists fear rightly that to the extent that we encourage monuments to , been destroyed by English bombers during the war. In response to this kind of fad-
memory-work for us, we become that much more forgetful. They believe, in . ing memory, the Society for the Rescue of Historical Monuments proposed in 1984
that the initial impulse to memorialize events like the Holocaust may actually " that some form of the fountain and its history be restored -and that it recall all the
from an opposite and equal desire to forget them. founders of the city, especially Sigmund Aschrott.
In the pages that follow, I would like both to recall a couple of the co tinter- In his proposal for "restoration;' Horst Hoheisel decided that neither a preser-
monuments I have discussed at much greater length elsewhere and to add several vation of its remnants nor its mere reconstruction would do. For Hoheisel, even the

Memory, Countermemory Memory, Countermemory 97

 Horst Hoheisel, artist's
Aschrott-Brunnen Mt~m()'rial,',
1987.

fragment was a de'COI:atI

suggesting itself as the
of a destruction 110 one
much about. Its pure.
struction would have
less offensive: not only
self-congratulatory
of Wiedergutmachung
an irreparable violence,
artist feared that a
structed fountain would
encourage the public to
what had happened to the Hoheisel, model for the Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial, Kassel, 1987.

countermonument, 12 meters deep into the ground water.

Hoheisel proposed a "nlf'O"::ltlVf!~ The pyramid will be turned into a funnel into whose dark-
form" monument to ness water runs down. From the "architektonischen Spielerei:' as
what had' once been the City Hall architect Karl Roth called his fountain, a hole emerges
" Platz - Wunde Aschrottbrunnen n
chrott Fountain in Kassel's which deep down in the water creates an image reflecting back the
Hall Square. entire shape of the fountain.l2
On being awarded the proj-
ect, Hoheisel described both does one remember an absence? In this case, by reproducing it. Quite literally,
the concept and the form underlying his negative-form monument: the negative space of the absent monument now constitutes its phantom shape in the
) ground. The very absence of the monument is now preserved in its precisely dupli-
I have designed the new fountain as a mirror image of the old one, cated negative space. In this way, the monument's reconstruction remains as illusory
sunk beneath the old p lace in order to rescue the history of this place as memory itself, a reflection on dark waters, a phantasmagoric play of light and
as a wound and as an open question, to penetrate the consciousness image. Taken a step further, Hoheisel's inverted pyramid might also combine with
of the Kassel citizens so that such things never happen again. the remembered shape of its predecessor to form the two interlocking triangles of the
That's why I rebuilt the fountain sculpture as a hollow con- Jewish star-present only in the memory of its absence.
crete form after the old plans and for a few weeks displayed it as a In his conceptual formulations, Hoheisel invokes the play of other, darker as-
resurrected shape at City Hall Square before sinking it, mirror-like, sociations as well, linking the monument to both the town's Jewish past and a tradi-

Memory, Countermemory Memory, Countermemory 99

 tional anti-Semitic libel. "The tip of the sculpture points like a thorn down .
water:' the artist writes. "Through coming into touch with the ground water,
tory of the Aschrott Fountain continues not over but under the city?' As an
of the Holoca1,lst, the history of the Aschrott Fountain becomes the SU1)telrrane~lllJ
tory of the city. In Hoheisel's figure, the groundwater of German history may
poisoned-not by the Jews but by the Germans themselves in their murder
Jews. By sinking his inverted pyramid into the depths in this way, Hoheisel
tap this very history. "From the depth of the place;' he says, "I have attempted to
the history of the Aschrott Fountain back up to the surface:'
Of course, on a visit to City Hall Square in Kassel, none of this is n'nrrlediatl
evident. During construction, before being lowered upside down into the
the starkly white negative-form sat upright in the square, a ghostly reminder
original, now absent monument. Where there had been an almost forgotten
tain, there is now a bronze tablet with the fountain's image and an inscription
tailing what had been there and why it was lost. As we enter the square, we watch
water fills narrow canals at our feet before rushing into a great underground
which grows louder and louder until we finally stand over the "As,chr'otl:-BrUIlll~~n
Only the sound of gushing water suggests the depth of an otherwise invisible
morial, an inverted palimpsest that demands the visitor's reflection. Through an
grate and thick glass windows we peer into the depths. "With the running water;'
heisel suggests, "our thoughts can be drawn into the depths of history, and there
haps we will encounter feelings of loss, of a disturbed place, of lost form?'
In fact, as the only standing figures on this flat square, our thoughts

neath our feet, we realize

that we have become
memorial. "The
fountain is not the m(~mIDri;al
at aU:' Hoheisel says. "It
only history turned into
pedestal, an invitation
passersby who stand upon it
to search for the memorial Nazis demonstrate at the Aschrott-Brunnen Monument, Kassel, 1997.
in their own heads. For only
Horst Hoheisel, negative-form, Aschrott-Brunnen Monument, there is the memorial to be
Kassel, 1987. found?' Hoheisel has left

Memory, Countermemory 101

100 Memory, Countermemory
 Horst Hoheisel, Denk-Stein-Sammlung invited each student to research the life of one of Kassel's deported Jews: where they
Memorial Project, Kassel, 1988-1995. had lived and how, who were their families, how old they were, what they had looked
like. He asked them to visit formerly Jewish neighborhoods and get to know the Ger-
man neighbors of Kassel's deported Jews.
After this, students were asked to write short narratives describing the lives
nothing but the visitors tht~m~;elv'es , and deaths of their subjects, wrap these narratives around cobblestones, and deposit
standing in remembrance, left them in one of the archival bins the artist had provided at every schooL After several
look inward for memory. dozen such classroom visits, the bins had begun to overflow and new ones were fur-
Neo-Nazi demonstrators nished. In time, all of these bins were transported to Kassel's Hauptbahnhof, where
testing an exhibition critical of they were stacked on the rail platform whence Kassel's Jews were deported. It is now
Wehrmacht when it came to a permanent installation, what the artist calls his Denk-Stein Sammlung (memorial
in June 1998 were granted oeImiiF stone archive).
sion by the mayor to hold their protest in the Aschrott-Brunnen plaza, in front This memorial cairn-a witness-pile of stones-marks both the site of de-
Kassel's city hall. Here they stood atop the original fountain's foundation ston portation and the community's education about its murdered Jews, their absence
that had been salvaged by Hoheisel to mark the perimeter of the original formt:lin; now marked by the evolving memoriaL Combining narrative and stone in this way,
Skin-headed and tattooed, wearing black shirts and fatigues, the neo-Nazis
black flags and taunted a crowd of counter-protesters who had assembled outsic:!le
police barricades surrounding the neo-Nazis. In a press release, Hoheisel re(:otl11te.(
the history of the site, from the donation of the fountain to Kassel by Sigmund
rott, to its demolition at the hands of the Nazis in April 1939, to the memorial's
ication in 1987, and finally to the neo-Nazis' demonstration there in June 1998.
Hoheisel, the neo-Nazis' "reclamation" of the site, their triumphal striding atop'
ruins of the fountain that their predecessors had destroyed in 1939, seemed to
out his dark hope that this would become a negative center of gravity around
all memory-wanted and unwanted-would now congeal.
By this time, Hoheisel had initiated several other memorial projects, In(;lU<l~
ing another in Kassel. One more pedagogically inclined project turned to the
generation. With permission from local public schools, the artist visited the .
rooms of Kassel with a book, a stone, and a piece of paper. The book was a copy·
Namen und Schicksale der Juden Kassels (The names and fates of Kassel's J
memorial book for Kassel's destroyed Jewish community. In his classroom
Hoheisel told students the story of Kassel's vanished Jews, how they had once
there, lived in the very houses where these schoolchildren now lived, how they
sat at these same classroom desks.He then asked all the children who knew any
to raise their hands. When no hands appeared, Hoheisel would read the story of
of Kassel's deported Jews from his memory book. At the end of his reading, Ho,hellsel Hoheisel, Denk-Stein-Sammlung Memorial Project, installed at train station, Kassel, 1988-1995.

102 Memory, Countermemory Memory, Countermemory 103

 AprIl r10nelsel proposea not a resurrectlOn ot the ongmal monument but
l~'±:),

'·l;..,;~,.."
alternative. In collaboration with architect Andreas Knitz, the artist de-
a concrete slab with the names of fifty-one national groups victimized here
engraved with the initials K.L.B. (Konzentrationslager Buchenwald) that had
the prisoners' original wooden memorial obelisk. And as that obelisk had
constructed out of the pieces of barracks torn down by their former inmates-
is, enlivened by the prisoners' own hands-Hoheisel built into his memorial
of concrete a radiant heating system to bring it to a constant 98.6 degrees
lrellhelt (36.5 degrees Celsius) that might suggest the body heat of those whose
it would now enshrine. Visitors almost always kneel to touch the slab, some-
in~:tb:eywould not do if it were cold stone, and they are touched in turn by the
warmth embodied here. Dedicated in April 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary
prisoners' own memorial (which lasted only two months), this warm memo-
reminds visitors of the memory of actual victims that has preceded their own,
ibseqlllerlt memory of this time. In winter, with snow covering the rest of the
this slab is always clear, an all-season marker for the site of the prisoners'
attempt to commemorate the crimes against them.
Temporary memorial at Buchenwald built by former inmates, May 1945.

the artist and students have thus adopted the most Jewish of memorial forms as
own - thereby enlarging their memorial lexicon to include that of the abseIlt
pIe they would now recall. After all,
only they are now left to write the epi-
taph of the missing Jews, known and
emblematized primarily by the void
they have left behind.
Similarly, when invited by the
director of the Buchenwald Museum,
Volkhard Knigge, shortly after its
postreunification revisions to memori-
alize the first monument to liberation
erected by the camp's former inmates

Horst Hoheisel, "Warm memorial" to com-

memorate the former inmates' memorial at
Buchenwald, 1995. Horst Hoheisel, "Warm memorial" at Buchenwald, detail, 1995.

Memory, Countermemory
 nameplates hung on the white-plastered wall of the building next door to identify the
now missing inhabitants, Jews and non-Jews-leaving the lot empty. The Missing
House project became emblematic for Boltanski of the missing Jews who had once
inhabited it; as its void invited him to fill it with memory, he hoped it would incite
others to memory as well.
In two other installations, one realized and the other as yet only proposed,
artists Micha Ullman and Rachel Whiteread have also turned to both bookish themes
and negative spaces in order to represent the void left behind by the "people of the
book:' To commemorate the infamous Nazi book-burning of 10 May 1933, the city
of Berlin invited Micha Ullman, an Israeli-born conceptual and installation artist,
to design a monument for Berlin's Bebelplatz. Today the cobblestone expanse of the
Bebelplatz is still empty of all forms except for the figures of people who stand there
and peer down through a ground-level window into the ghostlywhi\e, underground
room of empty bookshelves Ullman has installed. A steel tablet set into the stones
simply recalls that this was the site of some of the most notorious book-burnings and
quotes Heinrich Heine's famously prescient words, "Where books are burned, so one
day will people be burned as well:' But the shelves are still empty, unreplenished, and
it is the absence of both people and books that is marked here in yet one more empty
memorial pocket.
Horst Hoheisel and Henning Langenheim, "Arbeit macht frei" projection onto the Brandenburger
Indeed, the English sculptor Rachel Whiteread has proposed casting the very
Tor, 27 January 1996. spaces between and around books as the memorial figure by which Austria's miss-
ing Jews would be recalled in Vienna's Judenplatz. In a competition initiated by Nazi-
hunter Simon Wiesenthal in 1996, a distinguished jury of experts appointed by the
Christian Boltanski, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread city chose a brilliant, if abstract and controversial, design by the Turner Award-
While taking a walk in Berlin's former Jewish Quarter, the artist Christian' . winning British artist Rachel Whiteread. Her winning proposal for Vienna's official
Boltanski found himself drawn curiously to the occasional gaps and vacant lots be- Holocaust memorial-the positive cast of the space around books in an anonymous
tween buildings. On inquiring, he found that the building at Grosse Hamburger- . library, the interior turned inside-out-thus extends her sculptural predilection for
solidifying the spaces over, under, and around everyday objects, even as it makes the
strasse 15 and 16 had been destroyed by Allied bombings in 1945 and never rebuilt,
In a project he mounted for the exhibition Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit in October book itself her central memorial motif. But even here, it is not the book per se that
constitutes her now displaced object of memory but the literal space between the
1990 called Missing House, the artist thus set to work retracing all the lives of people
who had lived in this "missing house" between 1930 and 1945-both the Jewish Ger7 book and us. For as others have already noted, Whiteread's work since 1988 has made
mans who had been deported and the non-Jewish Germans who had beeJl given brilliantly palpable the notion that materiality can also be an index of absence:
whether it is the ghostly apparition of the filled-in space of a now demolished row
their homes.B
Boltanski found family photographs and letters, children's drawings,. ra~, house in London (House launched Whiteread to international prominence) or the
proposed cast of the empty space between the book leaves and the wall in a full-size
tioning tickets, and other fragments of these lives, photocopied them, and put
all together with maps of the neighborhood in archival boxes. At this point, he library, Whiteread makes the absence of an original object her work's defining pre-

Memory, Countermemory 107 .

)6 Memory, Countermemory
 occupation.14 Like other artists of
her generation, Rachel Whiteread
is concerned less with the Holo-
caust's images of destruction and
more with the terrible void this
destruction left behind.
Given this thematic edge in
her work, it is not surprising that
Whiteread was one of nine artists
and architects initially invited to
submit proposals for a Holocaust
memorial in Vienna. Other invi:..
tees included the Russian instal-
lation artist Ilya Kabakov, Israeli
architect Zvi Hecker, and the
American architect Peter Eisen-
man. As proposed, Whiteread's
cast of a library turned inside-out
measures approximately 33 feet
by 23 feet, is 13 feet high, and re- Despite the jury's unanimous decision to award Whiteread's design first place and to
sembles .a solid white cube. Its. beginjts realization immediately, the aesthetic dialogue it very successfully sparked in
outer surface would consist en- this place so "replete with history" eventually paralyzed the entire memorial process.
tirely of the roughly textured For like many such sites in Vienna, the Judenplatz was layered with the invis-
negative space next to the edges·. memory of numerous anti-Semitic persecutions-a synagogue was torched
Above, be1ow, an dfia...Mngpaue'
, '" . Micha Ullman, "Bibliotek" in a pogrom in 1421, and hundreds of Jews died in the autos-da-fe that fol-
~emorial to the Nazi book-burnings, Bebelplatz, Berlin, 1996. of book leaves. On the front
facing onto the square Though Whiteread's design had left room at the site for a window into the ar-
would be a double-wing door, also ch~leolo~~ic,ll excavation of this buried past, the shopkeepers on the Judenplatz pre-
cast inside out and inaccessible; that these digs into an ancient past also be left to stand for the more recent
its formalization of absence of Austrian Jews as well. And although their anti-Whiteread petition of two
one hand and of books on h01:lSand names refers only to the lost parking and potential for lost revenue they
other, it found an enthusiastic this "giant colossus" will cause, they may also have feared the loss of their own
ception among a jury looking ~hristian memory of this past. For to date, the sole memorial to this medieval mas-

design that "would combine was to be found in a Catholic mural and inscription on a baroque facade over-
nity with reserve and spark an the site of the lost synagogue. Alongside an image of Christ being baptized in
thetic dialogue with the past in River Jordan, an inscription in Latin reads: "The flame of hate arose in 1421,
place that is replete with through the entire city, and punished the terrible crimes of the Hebrew dogs:'

Memory, Countermemory 109

08 Memory, Countermemory
 Rachel Whiteread,
model for the
Judenplatz with
inserted Holocaust
Memorial,
Vienna, 1997.

Rachel Whiteread, scale model of the Judenplatz Holocaust Memoria~ Vienna, 1997.

In the end, the reintroduction into this square of a specifically Jewish narrative
have been just as undesirable for the local Viennese as the loss of parking places.
In fact, unlike Germany's near obsession with its Nazi past, Austria's rel'1tioID,
to its wartime past has remained decorously submerged, politely out of sight.
tria was a country that had (with the tacit encouragement of its American and
viet occupiers) practically founded itself on the self-serving myth that it
Hitler's first victim. That some 50 percent of the Nazi 5.S. was composed of
trians or that Hitler himself was Austrian-born was never denied. But these
also never found a place in Austria's carefully constructed postwar persona. In a ~ndbwilas resigned, she told me, to the likelihood that her memorial would
e u t.
that seemed to have little national reason for remembering the murder of its
But then suddenly, in early 1998 the city oEV'
the entire memorial project was soon engulfed by aesthetic and political Sturm h db r.' ' lenna announced that a com-
Drang, and the vociferous arguments against the winning design brought the ~romil,e. a een ound that Would allow Whiteread's memorial to be built after all
cess to a halt. Maligned and demoralized, Whiteread soon lost her stomach for movmg the great cube three feet within the plaza itself, the city found th t th .
be room for both the excavations of the pogrom of 1421 a d th a ere
n enewmemo-

110 Memory, Countermemory

Memory, Countermemory 111
 Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, '~t the
rial to Vienna's more recently murdered Jews. Nonetheless, the debate in Austria has
Bayerische Platz, Jews may sit only on
remained curiously displaced and sublimated. Lost in the discussion were the words
yellow park benches.» Part of the memo-
one of the jurors and a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Robert Storrs,
rial installation at the Bayerische Platz,
had used to describe what made Whiteread's work so appropriate in the first place. Berlin, 1993.
"Rather than a tomb or cenotaph;' Storrs wrote,

Whiteread's work is the solid shape of an intangible absence-of a

Rather than monumentalizing only
gap in a nation's identity, and a hollow at a city's heart. Using an
the moment of destruction itself,
aesthetic language that speaks simultaneously to tradition and to
Whiteread's design would recall that
the future,-Whiteread in this way respectfully symbolizes a world
which made the "people of the
whose irrevocable disappearance can never be wholly grasped by
book" a people: their shared rela-
those who did not experience it, but whose most lasting monu-
tionship to the past, through the
ments are the books written by Austrian Jews before, during and in Juden durfen am
book. For it was this shared relation-
the aftermath of the catastrophe brought down on them. Bayerischen Platz nur ship to a remembered past through
die gelb markierten the book that bound Jews together,
and it was the book that provided
Sitzbanke benutzen. the site for this relationship.
Though Whiteread is not Jewish,
she has-in good Jewish fashion-
cast not a human form but a sign of
humanity, gesturing silently to the acts of reading, writing, and memory that had
once constituted this people as a people. If it is really true that Vienna has chosen to
go ahead with Whiteread's allusive and rigorously intellectual design, then the city
and its Jewish community must both be congratulated: the Jewish community for
~he courage and audacity of its aesthetic convictions, and the city for finally bring-
illg boldly to the surface its previously subterranean shame.

Renata Stih and Prieder Schnack

As did the American artist Shimon Attie during his stay in Berlin, the Berlin
artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock find their city essentially haunted by its
own lying beauty, its most placid and charming neighborhoods seemingly oblivious
to the all-to a-orderly destruction of its Jewish community during the war. Tree-lined
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Memorial to the Deported Jewish Citizens of t~e Bayerische Viertel,
and with its nineteenth-century buildings relatively unscathed by Allied bombs
Bayerische Platz, Berlin, 1993.
Memory, Countermemory 113
12 Memory, Countermemory
 . Renata Stih and Prieder schlusse von Juden werden von der Post gekundigt" {29.7. 1940'1i
,e1ep h one l'lnes to

'~
Schnock, Memorial to the Jewish households will be cut off).l7 ;,'t',
",
Deported Jewish Citizens With the approval of the Berlin Senate, which had sponsored the memo-
of the Bayerische Viertel, Arischen und rial c~mpetition, the artists put their signs up on lampposts throughout the quar-
Bayerische Platz, Berlin, nichtarischen t~r WIthout anno~ncem~nt, provoking a flurry of complaints and calls to the po- ~
1993. Kindem wird hce that neo-NaZIS had Invaded the neighborhood with anti-Semitic signs. Thus
das Spielen reassured that the public had taken notice, the artists pointed out that these same
miteinander laws had been posted and announced no less publicly at the time-but had pro-
untersagt. voked no such response by Germans then. At least part of the artists' point was
that the laws then were no less public than the memory of them was now. Indeed
one sign with the image of a file even reminds local residents that "all fIles dealin '
with anti-Semitic activities [were] to be destroyed" (16.2.1945); and anothe;
. image of interlocking Olympic rings recalls that "anti-Semitic sigl1s in Berlin
during the war, the Bayerische Viertel (Bavarian Quarter) of Berlin's Schoneberg [were] temporarily removed for the 1936 Olympic Games:' That is, for the artists,
trict is particularly peaceful these days and off the tourist track. It had also even the absence of signs was an extension of the crime itself. Stih and Schnock
home to some sixteen thousand German Jews before the war, many of them profes~ recognize here that the Nazi perse-
sional and well-to-do, including at different times Albert Einstein and Hannah cution of the Jews was designed to
Arendt. But with nary a sign of the war's destruction in evidence, nothing in the be, after all, a self-consuming Holo-
neighborhood after the war pointed to the absence of its escaped, deported, and· caust, a self-effacing crime.
murdered Jewish denizens. The only "signs" of Jewish life in
. Haunted precisely by this absence of signs, and skeptical of the traditional this once Jewish neighborhood are
memorial's tendency to gather what they thought should be pervasive memory into now the posted laws that paved the
a single spot, Stih and Schnock won a competition in 1993 for a memorial to the way for the Jews' deportation and
neighborhood's murdered Jews with a proposal to mount eighty signposts on the murder. As part of the cityscape,
corners, streets, and sidewalks in and around the Bayerische Platz. Each would in- these images and texts would "infil-
clude a simple image of an everyday object on one side and a short text on the trate the daily lives of Berliners:' Stih
other, excerpted from Germany's anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s and 1940s. On one has explained, no less than the pub-
side of such a sign, pedestrians would see, for example, a hand-drawn sidewalk. licly posted laws curtailed the daily
hopscotch pattern, and on the other its accompanying text: ".i\rischen und lives ofJews between 1933 and 1945.
nichtarischen Kindem wird das Spielen miteinander untersagt" (1938; Aryan and And by posting these signs sepa- Die in Berlin aufgestellten
non-Aryan children are not allowed to play together). Or a simple red park bench rately, forcing pedestrians to happen judenfeindlichen Schilder
on a green lawn: "Juden durfen am Bayerischen Platz nur die gelb markierten werden 1936 wahrend der
Sitzbanke benutzen" (1939; On the Bavarian Place, Jews may sit only on yellow park. Renata Stih and Prieder Schnack, Olympischen Spiele
benches). Or a pair of swimtrunks: "Berliner Bademanstalten und Schwimmbader Memorial to the Deported Jewish Citizens voriibergehend entfemt.
durfen von Juden nicht betreten werden" (3.12.1938; Baths and swimming pools in . of the Bayerische Viertel, Bayerische Platz,
Berlin are closed to Jews). A black-and-white rotary telephone dial: "Telefonan- Berlin, 1993.

4 Memory, Countermemory
Memory, Countermemory 115
 Renata Stih ana Fneder ;:,cnnoclC,
lUI a Ilunswp tnp Dom to SUCh well-known sites as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and
Memorial to the Deported Jewish
Telefonanschliisse Dachau and to the lesser known massacre sites in the east, such as Vitebsk and
von Juden werden Citizens of the Bayerische Viertel,
von der Post Baverische Platz, Berlin, 1993. Trawniki. A central steel-and-glass waiting hall flanking the 426-foot-long boarding
gekiindigt. platform would provide travelers with computer-generated histories and bibliogra-
29.7.1940
phies of all the sites listed at the terminal, a kind of memorial travel office that would
Benutzungsverbot
offentlicher upon them one or two at a time, extol history and memory over the usual forgetfulness, the attempt at forced amne-
Femsprecher. sia, that drives leisure vacations. Buses would leave hourly for sites within Berlin and
21.12.1941
the artists can show that the laws
daily'for sites outside the city. Not so much a "central memorial" as a "centrifugal"
incrementally "removed Jews from
the social realm;' from the protec- memorial, Bus Stop would thus send visitors out in all directions into a European-
wide matrix of memorial sites.
tion of law. These "places of re-
membrance" would remind local With twenty-eight buses making local Berlin runs every hour and another
Berliner Bade- sixty or so branching out daily for sites throughout Germany and Europe, this would
anstalten und citizens that the murder of the
also be, quite literally, a mobile memorial that paints its matrix of routes with mem-
Schwimmbader neighborhood's Jews did not hap-
durfen von Juden pen overnight, or in one fell swoop, ory. By becoming such a part of everyday life in Berlin, these red buses emblazoned
nicht betreten but over time-and with the tacit with destinations like Buchenwald and Sobibor would, the artists hope, remind every-
werden.
acknowledgment of their neigh-
3.12.1938
bors. Where past citizens once nav-
igated their lives according to these
laws, present citizens would now
navigate their lives according to the memory of such laws. .. .
In keeping with their vision of decentralized memory, of mtegratmg memory
of the Holocaust into the rhythms of everyday life, Stih and Sc~~ock proposed an
·
aud aclOUS "nonmonument" for the 1995 international competltlOn. for Germany's .al
national memorial to Europe's murdered Jews. Taking as their premIse the essent~,
impossibility and undesirability of a "final memorial" to commemorate the Naz~
"final solution" to the Jewish question, they submitted a design called Bus Stop - T
Non-Monument. Rather than filling the designated space of nearly five acr~s for t~e
national memorial between the Brandenburger Tor and Potsdamer Platz m B~rllIl'
th uld keep it desolate as a reminder of the destruction brought upon Berhn by
~~ . . d
the Nazis and turn it into an open-air bus terminal for coaches depa~tmg to an re-
turning from regularly scheduled visits to several dozen concentr~tlOn(camps a~d
other sites of destruction throughout Europe. "There is not o~e sI~gle bus st~; m
central Berlin from which you can take buses to the places listed m thIS schedule, the
artists tell us in a foreword to their precis for the project.t s Therefore, they call f~ra
single place whence visitors can board a bright red bus at a regularly scheduled time· Renata Stih and Prieder Schnock, Bus Stop-The Non-Monument. Proposal for the 1995
competition for Berlin's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe."

116 Memory, Countermemory

Memory, Countermemory 117
 'I. .,
the place of the memorial in the viewer's mind, heart, and conscience. To this end,
one of the "thorough integration of the terror machinery [itself] within everyday life
they have attempted to embody the ambiguity and difficulty of Holocaust memori- "

in Germany from 1933 to 1945:'l9 At night the rows of parked and waiting buses, with
alization in Germany in conceptual, sculptural, and architectural forms that would
their destinations illuminated, would become a kind of "light-sculpture" that dis-
return the burden of memory to those who come looking for it. Rather than creating
solves at the break of day into a moving mass to reflect what Bernd Nicolai has called ':1
self-contained sites of memory, detached from our daily lives, these artists would
"the busy banality of horror:'2o
force both visitors and local citizens to look within themselves for memory, at their
Possibly the most popularly acclaimed of all entries in the 1995 competition,
actions and motives for memory within these spaces. In the cases of disappearing, in-
Bus Stop placed eleventh among the 528 submissions from around the world. The
visible, and other countermonuments, they have attempted to build into these spaces
competition's organizers, intent on concentrating memory of Europe's murdered
the capacity for changing memory, places where every new generation will find its
Jews into a single site in Berlin, felt that Bus Stop dispersed memory too far and
own significance in this past.
wide, implicitly spreading the blame for the murder onto the re'gimes of conquered
In the end, the countermonument reminds us that the best German memo-
nations during the war. In response, the artists self-published a 128-page Fahrplan,
rial to the fascist era and its victims may not be a single memorial at all-but sim-
or timetable, of actual departure times of buses, trains, and planes in the public
ply the never-to-be-resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to
transportation sector for all the sites in their original memorial plan. Unlike a con-
do it, in whose name, and to what end. That is, what are the consequences of such
ventional timetable, however, Stih and Schnock added concise histories of the sites
memory? How do Germans respond to current persecutions of foreigners in their
themselves to accompany the hours of departure and return. The schedule to Lodz
midst in light of their memory of the Third Reich and its crimes? Instead of a fixed
tells us both how to get there and how many Jews lived there before the war, how the
sculptural or architectural icon for Holocaust memory in Germany, the debate itself-
ghetto there was established, when it was liquidated, how the deported Jews were
murdered, and who did the killing. Similar histories accompany schedules to perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions-might now be enshrined.
The status of monuments in the twentieth century remains double-edged
Lublin, Stutthof, Riga, Drancy, Babi Yar, and the other ninety or so destinations, in-
and is fraught with an essential tension: outside of those nations with totalitarian
cluding dozens in Germany alone.
Like other countermemorials, Bus Stop would, in effect, return the burden of pasts, the public and governmental hunger for traditional, self-aggrandizing mon-
memory to visitors themselves by forcing visitors into an active role. Though the bus uments is matched only by the contemporary artists' skepticism of the monument.
As a result, even as monuments continue to be commissioned and designed by gov-
rides might recall the deportations themselves, these would be deportations not to
actual history but to memory itself. Indeed, the ride to and from the sites of de- ernments and public agencies eager to assign singular meaning to complicated
struction would constitute the memory-act, thereby reminding visitors that memory events and people, artists increasingly plant in them the seeds of self-doubt and im-
permanence. The state's need for monuments is acknowledged, even as the tradi-
can be a kind of transport through space in an ongoing present moment, as well as
tional forms and functions of monuments are increasingly challenged. Monuments
a transport through time itself. In this way, the memorial remains a process, not an
answer, a place that provides time for memorial reflection, contemplation, and learn- at the end of the twentieth century are thus born resisting the very premises of their
birth. Thus, the monument has increasingly become the site of contested and com-
ing between departing and arriving.
For an American watching Germany's memorial culture come to terms with peting meanings, more likely the site of cultural conflict than one of shared national
values and ideals.
the Holocaust, the conceptual torment implied by the countermonument holds im-
mense appeal. As provocative and difficult as these monuments may be, no other me-
,,/ 0 vt Vi-:J i J Cuvl...Q... S t.=:.
morial form seems to embody so well both the German memorial dilemma and the jV t? \.-Jt-\ (l \J-et\
limitations of the traditional monument. The most important "space of memory" /-:\~ VV\QMO~'S ~~j~
for these artists has not been the space in the ground or above it but the space be- 'I (A \ ~ u f; L 00 l) - pr ~o-llC1 -
tween the memorial and the viewer, between the viewer and his or her own memory:

Memory, Countermemory 119

Memory, Countermemory