Here I recall being asked in several cases to help revive memorial processes in Boston, Berlin, and Buenos Aires that had gotten bogged down in what their organizers perceived as a morass of dispute, bickering, competing agendas, and politics. With the impertinence that only an academic bystander can afford, I always replied, Yes, it’ s true. You thought you were bringing a community together around common memory, and you found instead that the process is fraught with argument, division, and competing agendas. In Boston in 1988, I gently suggested that the New England Holocaust Memorial Committee stop hiding the issues that divided them and instead make them the centerpiece of a public forum on their proposed memorial. Let debate drive the memorial process forward, I advised. Let the memorial’ s“ memory-work” begin with the committee’ s own heated discussions, public symposia and community education, even in public challenges to the very idea of such a memorial in Boston.
In Berlin, when asked by the Bundestag in 1997 to explain why I thought Germany’ s 1995 international design competition for a national“ memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe” had failed, I answered that even if they had failed to produce a monument, the debate itself had produced a profound search for such memory and that it had actually begun to constitute the memorial they so desired. Instead of a fixed sculptural or architectural icon for Holocaust memory in Germany, the debate itself— perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions— might now be enshrined. And then just to make sure they grasped my own polemic, I offered the reassuring words,“ Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany than a final solution to your Holocaust memorial question.” A day later, I was invited by the Speaker of the Berlin Senate, Peter Radunski, to join a five-member Findungskommission whose mandate would be to run yet another competition for a suitable design for the Denkmal. When I asked,“ Why me? I don’ t think it can be done,” Herr Sprecher Radunski answered with an Hegelian glint in his eye,“ Because you don’ t think it can be done, we think you can do it.” Thus hoisted on the petard of my own polemic, I agreed to serve – but only on two conditions: First, that we could make the process itself publicly transparent, so that it might be regarded as part of the memorial design for which we searched; and second, that we invite artists and architects not to solve Germany’ s paralyzing memorial conundrum in their submissions, but rather to articulate the problem formally in their designs.
Aktion T4 memorial at 4 Tiedrgartenstraße, Berlin, to victims of Nazi‘ euthanasia’ | EUROM
Observing Memories ISSUE 1
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