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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