George-Henri Pingusson’ s“ Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation”( 1962), Paris.
With Maya Lin’ s design for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in mind, these German artists would set out on their own quest to express their nation’ s paralyzing Holocaust memorial conundrum: How to commemorate the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in the national name without redeeming this destruction in any way? How to formally articulate this terrible loss without filling it with consoling meaning? The resulting counter-monuments and negative-form designs of the 1980’ s and 1990’ s in Germany commemorating the Holocaust may have taken their initial cue from the Vietnam Veterans’ Monument, but they also extended Maya Lin’ s implicit critique of the conventional monument’ s static fixedness, bombast, self-certainty, and authoritarian didacticism.
Of all the dilemmas facing post-Holocaust memorial artists and designers, perhaps none is more difficult, or more paralyzing, than the potential for redemption in any representation of the Holocaust. Some, like Adorno, have warned against the ways poetry and art after Auschwitz risk redeeming events with aesthetic beauty or mimetic pleasure( Adorno, 125-27). Others like Saul Friedlander, have asked whether the very act of history-writing potentially redeems the Holocaust with the kinds of meaning and significance reflexively generated in all narrative( Friedlander, 61). Unlike the utopian, revolutionary forms with which modernists hoped to redeem art and literature after World War I, the post-Holocaust memory artist, in particular, would say,“ Not only is art not the answer, but after the Holocaust, there can be no more final solutions.”
Some of this skepticism has been a direct response to the enormity of the Holocaust— which seemed to exhaust not only the forms of modernist experimentation and innovation, but also the traditional meanings still reified in such innovations. Mostly, however, this skepticism has stemmed from post-Holocaust artists’ contempt for the religious, political or aesthetic linking of redemption and destruction that seemed to justify such terror in the first place. In Germany, in particular, once the land of what Saul Friedlander has called“ redemptory anti-Semitism,” the possibility that public art might now compensate mass murder with beauty( or with ugliness), or that memorials might somehow redeem this past with the instrumentalization of its memory, continues to haunt a postwar generation of memory artists( Friedlander, 3). For this generation, the shattered vessel of European Jewry cannot be put back together again; the rupture in human civilization represented by the Shoah cannot be mended. The traditional religious dialectic of“ from destruction to redemption” would come to be regarded not as an answer to the history of the 20th century, but as an extension of the redemptory cast of mind that made such destruction possible in the first place.
Observing Memories ISSUE 1
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