At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. . - book review

The same metaphorical confusion attends discussions of emptiness, absence, and void. What is referred to is clear enough, but then a kind of postmodern poetry takes over that leads in directions that at least this writer cannot follow. For instance, Young writes of "contemporary German culture coming to terms with the self-inflicted void at its center-a terrible void that is at once all too secretly familiar and unrecognizable, a void that at once defines a national identity, even as it threatens to cause such identity to implode" (p. 183). The only implosion I can see is in Young's imagery here; German identity has many facets and contradictions, but "implosion" is not one of them.

An important issue arises here. When the term memory becomes a metaphor for art, poetry, architecture, or any other representation of the past, the term loses most of its analytic power. And when the past to be addressed is that of the Holocaust, understood as a void or as the source of an absence in contemporary life, then metaphors obscure at least as much as they illuminate.

To be sure, Berlin's pre-1933 Jewish culture has been destroyed. But the city is not judenrein today; it has a rich and complex Jewish culture, in a metropolis whose ethnic character is entirely different from that of the 1930s. One striking feature of Libeskind's remarkable building is its cultural environment. It is located in a neighborhood that has been transformed through immigration; Kreuzberg is a major center of Kurdish population and cultural life. This is where Libeskind's "countermonument" stands; the inhabitants of this district are the people who will live with it on a day-to-day basis. Nothing can bring back the Jewish booksellers in Attie's photographs, projected onto the walls of buildings they once frequented. Families did disappear from Christian Boltanski's missing houses; children did vanish from playgrounds in the heart of Berlin. But the present is not just a space defined by a void; it is a space in which Jewish life has returned, albeit in modified forms. Even the Ostjuden are back, th is time fleeing from the ruins of the Soviet empire. Remembering the crime need not obscure those facets of the Jewish world that survived it, and that have their own stories to tell. Indeed, what Young terms postmemory is precisely evidence of what remains and what has grown and developed in the half century since the Holocaust.

In the exploration of "postmemory," cultural studies can profit from cognitive approaches. The notion that memory is plastic, that it reflects current circumstances as well as prior experience, is central to much scientific discussion of the subject. The idea that the brain is a computer with memories stored and retrieved just as they were when first recalled is no longer tenable. We are all in search of ways of approaching this protean subject; neither metaphor alone nor purely mechanistic interpretations take us very far. Working on a broad front, memory studies can be greater than the sum of their parts. A good example of what can be done is the collection of essays edited by Elaine Scarry and Daniel Schacter, Memory, Brain, and Belief (Harvard University Press, 1999).