Dr. Ruth Kluger on Memorialization

“The camps are part of a worldwide museum culture of the Shoah, nowhere more evident than in Germany, where every citizen, not to

mention every politician who wants to display his ethical credentials, feels the need to take pictures at these shrines or, even

better, have his picture taken” (63).

“Do we expect that our unsolved questions will be answered if we hang on to what’s left: the place, the stones, the ashes? We don’t honor the

dead with these unattractive remnants of past crimes; we collect and keep them for the satisfaction of our own necrophilic desires” (64).

• “Perhaps we are afraid they [the ghosts] may leave the camps, and so we insist that their deaths were unique and must not be compared to any other losses or atrocities. Never again shall there be such a crime” (64).

• “In our hearts we all know that some aspects of the Shoah have been repeated elsewhere, today and yesterday, and will return in new guise tomorrow; and the camps, too, were only imitations […] of what had occurred the day before yesterday” (64).

“The museum culture of the campsites has been formed by the vagaries and neuroses of our unsorted, collective memory. It is based on a

profound superstition, that is, on the belief that the ghosts can be met and kept in their place, where the living ceased to breathe…” (66)

“Or rather, not a profound, but a shallow superstition. A visitor who feels moved, even if it is only the kind of feeling

that a haunted house conveys, will be proud of these stirrings of humanity. And so the visitor monitors his

reactions […] admires his own sensibility, or in other words, turns sentimental. For sentimentality […] means looking

into a mirror instead of reality” (66).

Questions to consider while looking

• Aesthetics - why are certain materials, shapes and colors chosen? What do the varying degrees of realism and abstraction and symbolism do or represent?

• Affect - How do the space and its objects make you feel?

• Staging - How does the space work in relationship to the human body and the spectator?

• Do you agree with Kluger? If yes/no (or both), why?

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of EuropeDenkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas

• Designed by architect Peter Eisenman and Engineer Burro Happold

• 4.7 acre site with 2,711 concrete slabs

• Finished in 2004; cost approximately 25 million euro

• Monument has been criticized for commemorating only the Jews

• Novelist Martin Walser has cited the monument as part of his broader critique of Germany’s “Holocaust Industry.”

Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation

• Architect: G.H. Pingusson

• 1962

• Memorializes 200,000 people (Jews, communisits, homosexuals and résistants) deported from France to German Concentration Camps

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

• Museum Building designed by James Ingo Freed (a survivor)

• Dedicated in 1993• Nearly 30 million

people have visited the museum

Yad VashemHolocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem

• Name from Biblical Verse: "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (Yad Vashem) that shall not be cut off." (Isaiah, chapter 56, verse 5)

• Established 1953• 45 acre complex containing

various memorials• One of Yad Vashem's tasks is to

honor non-Jews who risked their lives, liberty or positions to save Jews during the Holocaust.

“Torah,” cast bronze sculpture by Marcelle Elfenbein Swergold

Holocaust Memorial - Miami, Florida

• Memorial opened in 1990

• Designed by Kenneth Triester

• Controversy: Daniel Pearl’s name added to the monument in 2007

Budapest Memorials: “Tree of Life”“Whose Agony is greater than mine”

“Shoes on the Danube Bank,” 2005Gyula Pauer and Can Togay

George Segal’s memorial (1984)in Lincoln Park, SF

“[…] art and literature can be a home for those without citizenship, because they remind us of our common race, the human race, and the sop you up, yet simultaneously feed you, like a magic sponge. They make you

part of what you see and hear and yet let you stand back and choose” (198).

“The various Shoah museums and reconstituted concentration camp sites do the exact opposite. That’s why I find them hard to take: They don’t take you in, they spit you out. Moreover, they tell you what you ought to think, as no art or science museum ever does. They impede the critical

faculty” (198).