The Jewish portable culture, suited to the Diaspora’s wanderings, is witnessing its own demise. No longer limited to perpetuating itself through traditional, site-unspecific rites, a new Jewish culture is being generated, cemented by way of permanently sited monuments, memorials, and museums. Understandably, most of this new hardware in Jewish culture has been dedicated to the Holocaust, due in part to the widespread belief that the preservation of its moral lesson will prevent future anti-Semitic onslaught.
The strategies applied for this purpose, however, have been for the most part misguided. For example, Washington D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum seeks to create empathy through assigning fictitious personal identifications. Each visitor is given an ID card, by means of which he or she may retrieve data from the museum’s computer and pursue the “real” story of a personalized Shoah-pal (a victim of anti-Semitic prosecution who, in 1939, was the same age and gender as is the visitor). Likewise, in a paramount example of politically correct sermonizing, the Museum of Tolerance in Beverly Hills (of all places) submerges you into flatulent environments of mock oppression so as to “make you aware” of how it feels to be on the side of the oppressed.
In aspiring to engender surrogate experiences of the horrors of the concentration camps–so that we who were born after the fact might be persuaded into following virtuous ways–the noble intentions of the people who shaped these museums remain just that. Their conviction that a kind of virtual reality will bestow a sense of presentness to a nearly inconceivable event like the Holocaust has had, for practical purposes, the very opposite effect. (It’s not incidental that similar technology has been developed and implemented by the entertainment industry, with usually banal results.) As it turns out, a virtual Auschwitz is no more tangible nor less surreal than Tomorrowland’s 3-D extravaganzas or those omnipresent aliens brought to life on the big screen.
Horror, truly life-threatening horror, cannot be experienced second-handedly, however true to life the representation might be. Indeed, prosthetic illusion should be neither the end nor the means of a memorial. How is a memorial, then, supposed to fulfill its moral and cultural responsibility, as the past’s lifeline to the public domain? Instructive in this regard is the fate of the mother of all Holocaust memorials, Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem.
Yad Vashem (in Hebrew, “a Monument and a Name”) was established in 1953 in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl following the establishment of the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority by the Israeli government, which summoned the creation of a shrine to preserve the memory of millions of Jews annihilated by the Nazis. Today, the site consists of an ad-hoc accumulation of monuments, sculptures, archives, token objects, and an historical museum as well as an art museum. Tourists and local schoolchildren are diligently bussed into these overwhelmingly solemn grounds for obvious didactic purposes–for Yad Vashem both defines and is defined by the land of Never Again, just as Disneyland defines and is defined by the land of Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Its directorate, having unveiled the last of its constituent monuments in 1992, recently declared it “complete.” However, as we shall see, the completeness of an effective memorial is not dependent upon the intentions of its creators.
To the average visitor, Yad Vashem is poignant and persuading, the weight of recent history still warranting its effect. Be that as it may, as a lasting testimony, Yad Vashem’s official aesthetics are hardly convincing. When it comes to art, it mistakenly assumes throughout that the content of an artwork amounts to whatever it is said to stand for. One paramount example is a large-scale bronze relief from the nineteen fifties portraying a group of brave, muscular men and women waving rudimentary weapons under the title The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It has been carved in the same epic mode that would have filled the bill for Mussolini or Stalin. Another relief, a composition of Picassoesque clunkiness, is said to signify From Holocaust to Rebirth, its iconography conveniently translated for the layman in a courtesy pamphlet. Minimal Art also becomes curiously handy for extorting such tropes: An elongated convex slab of stainless steel is no other than The Pillar of Heroism.
Yad Vashem’s creators presume that any work’s certification as “art” by itself will carry the edifying message. The site’s monuments are supposed to embody the dignified spirit as it overcomes its destiny. Instead, they demonstrate the capability of modern art to arbitrarily allegorize just about anything, while challenging art historians who are under the impression that style itself creates meaning.
More to the point, as if the documents gathered in its archives over the past fifty years do not suffice to demonstrate the magnitude of the Nazi-implemented genocide, Yad Vashem provides a troubling example of the all-too-common notion that artworks have intrinsic healing power: A rotating display of art produced by inmates at concentration camps is meant to express the rise of the human spirit even in the most humiliating circumstances. As might be expected, the works displayed are as saddening for their subject matter as for their unremarkable mannerisms.
Much of the problem posed by Yad Vashem has to do with its conflation of the aesthetics of art with that of monuments and memorials. The meaning of a monument or memorial is almost always clear-cut, at least on the surface; it is officially established and refers to facts that have occurred in the world. In contrast, an artwork originates within an artist’s subjectivity, and its significance is forged through complex relationships with the public domain. The Statue of Liberty, L’Arc de Triomphe, and the Monument to Vittorio-Emanuelle are intended to perform as stand-ins for the professed significance of a principle, an achievement, a group, or an individual. In this sense, “to monumentalize” means to distort and exaggerate for maximum glorification. Indeed, some subjects may try to spin history in their own favor merely through having a monument built (e.g., Saddam Hussein’s monument to Iraq’s performance in the Gulf War.) More often than not, whether the meaning of a monument is supported by its form remains largely a matter of interpretation–a condition that is corroborated even by artistically and intellectually sophisticated edifices such as Daniel Libeskind’s much-celebrated Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Sometimes, however, monuments are not just instruments of political or cultural advertising but the end product of a culture. For example, Pharaoh Cheops’s unparalleled power and the technological knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilization are embodied in the massiveness and advanced engineering of the Great Pyramid of Giza. In its presence, an awe-inspiring effect is engendered by the awareness that mere mortals were able to achieve such a magniticent feat. In this case, the monumentalizing agent is itself the monumental act of building it, and the monument thereby bridges the gap between the representation and the represented.
Michelangelo’s David is another case in point. The Medici declared it a monument to Florence, as they sympathized with its calculated balance of pragmatic strength and cultivated delicacy, or so the story goes. But while the huge arms and head of the David placed against his boyish body may well embody the Florentine’s fancies, the sculpture in fact monumentalizes their progressive and independent spirit, substantiated by their adoption of Michelangelo’s unprecedented aesthetics–his rejection of idealized classical proportion in favor of distortions that allow for expressive tensions in the work’s configuration. Apart from having become a milestone in the development of Western art, David is particularly interesting as a monument because it is simultaneously an allegory of Florence’s self-image, an instantiation of its progressive spirit, and a representation of the city’s most glorious epoch.
Memorials also attempt to anchor their subject’s memory to the public domain by concretely conveying some aspect of their bygone presence. A conventional gravestone is a metaphor for an individual in that it recalls, albeit subtly, the human body’s organically unified mass. (This may partly explain the otherwise senseless vandalism that takes place in cemeteries.) More elaborate memorials seek to materialize a richer gamut of the deceased’s attributes. In Ptolemaic Egypt, a coffin would be adorned with a faithful portrait of its inmate. In sixteenth-century Italy, a true aristocrat would have no less than his noble physique, along with his virtues and achievements, represented in detail on his tomb–not as mere symbols, but as indisputable testimony of his taste and sophistication. Even more assertively, Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square does not limit itself to depicting aspects of the political leader: It incorporates the deceased himself. Asceptically embalmed, Lenin is revealed to us in meatless skin and bone.
When it comes to effectively memorialize the Holocaust’s six million dead, the monumental void that Hitler’s perverse design produced can hardly be conveyed in concrete aesthetic form. Consequently, for this visitor, the most overpowering display at Yad Vashem is neither a monument nor an artwork–neither allegory nor metaphor. Amid the sea of multimedia shows in Yad Vashem’s historical museum stands an unpretentious glass case containing a small number of yellow stars, actual remnants and paradigms of Nazi stigmatizing. Having been infused with the Holocaust so completely, these almost ephemeral objects radiate all the pain Yad Vashem’s grandiose concoctions with to conduct. The effect of these scraps of cloth is like that of the ruins of the concentration camps. It is metonymic in the most direct sense, with no fanfare or explanation necessary.
Then again, in order to perceive them as I did, the yellow stars are somehow well-served by the monumental failures framing them. Yad Vashem’s most recent additions offer fresh evidence of the evocative limitations of monuments. The Children’s Memorial is an underground darkened hall covered entirely by mirrors. Five burning memorial candles at the center of the room are reflected into an infinite number of flickers, symbolizing the souls of children who perished in the war. Completing the theatrics, names of victims and their ages are recited through a sound system against spooky yet “meditative” new-age sounds. This patently manipulative and sentimentalizing technique is particularly repulsive when applied to a subject that, being so monstrously tragic in itself, demands the utmost solemnity in its commemoration. Indeed, through its mirror-images, one experiences only the illusion of millions of souls–an effect with which revisionists who bark that the Holocaust is a fabrication might sympathize.
The Valley of Destroyed Communities is Yad Vashem’s last official component. Spread over six acres like a high-walled labyrinth of Minoan-sized blocks of simulated rock, it gives the impression of manicured ancient ruins. Carved sporadically upon them are the names of the five thousand Jewish communities annihilated by the Nazis. While the Valley attempts to convey the magnitude of the atrocity through the appearance of massive devastation, viewers are taken much more by its creators’ grand showmanship and the exploits of its harmonious spatial play.
In order to assure the public survival of a memory, a memorial needs to be supported by rituals that members of a community share. Religion usually provides the framework for these rituals. Still, at times, the aesthetic effect of a memorial may actually do the trick. Washington D.C.’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial is notable in this regard. By listing each one of the names of the fallen chronologically on an otherwise austere, black granite wall, the memorial gives concrete form to the amount of bloodshed that the war produced, while acknowledging each individual life lost to it. Limiting itself to declaring a sorrowful fact without resorting to allegory or metaphor, people may perform their own little passions and leave unrequested offerings in front of it. These honest displays of grief infect those who didn’t lose a relative or acquaintance in that war, or aren’t even American, for that matter. If a memorial is to function successfully, it must fashion a relationship with the participating audience–and it must perpetuate through that audience a form of life.
Furthermore, a dynamic public response may itself produce a compelling memorial, as is the case with the tragically spreading AIDS Memorial Quilt. Its monumental size is directly proportional to the growing number of victims, and it thus concretely conveys the epidemic’s magnitude. Curiously, there is in Yad Vashem a little visited mini-memorial that works in much the same way. At the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in 1981, participants brought a few hundred memorial stones in honor of their murdered relatives and placed them in The Memorial Cave. Of diverse materials and sizes, the slabs are inscribed in different languages, sometimes stating a name or two, at other times indicating the country of their origin, and occasionally providing an elaborate text or dedication. Haphazardly mounted on the walls of a small cave, these stones express the individuality of the commemorated as well as the separate acts of remembrance of those who placed them there. Their differences invite us to inspect each one and participate in the Cave’s memorializing as we do so. Sadly, given its potential for growing into an ever-evolving memorial, The Memorial Cave today remains confined behind an iron grate, anticipating the troubling official promulgation of Yad Vashem’s completion.
Yad Vashem’s original aestheticizing attempt at honoring the victims of the Holocaust was fundamentally misconceived. Nevertheless, when understood as a quiltlike composite, Yad Vashem instantiates (in deed, if not in word) the unfulfilled desire of a culture attempting to convey what perhaps cannot be conveyed, to imagine what perhaps cannot be imagined, and to mememorialize what perhaps cannot be memorialized. As such, Yad Vashem had monumentalized our memory of the victims, and the moral imperative to fuel such persistence remains. Hence, declaring Yad Vashem “complete” turns out to be as immoral as it is aesthetically wrong. In fact–and this point cannot be made often enough–its completion is immoral because it is aesthetically wrong.