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

JAMES E. YOUNG

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 256 pp.; 47 color ills., 56 b/w. $35.00

The study of memory is one of the most fashionable branches of scholarly inquiry in a wide variety of disciplines. The problem remains, though, that the avalanche of work in this field moves at a speed much greater than the advances registered in the conceptual framework needed to control the subject. Consequently, we have a dazzling array of inquiries into memory, postmemory, counter-memory, traumatic memory, collective memory, collected memory, national memory, testimonial memory, witnessing, repressed memory, distorted memory, underground memory, deep memory, cultural memory, and so on. No pair of these terms can be equated; indeed, there is no consensus at all on even the rudimentary elements out of which some kind of conceptual ordering of memory studies could be built.

Part of the problem is that those working in history, literature, and art history have little patience for or much familiarity with the literature arising out of research in cognitive psychology and allied disciplines. Some scholars working in the humanities offer the objection that the study of cognitive psychology takes the individual mind as the unit of analysis, and though it is important to know how an individual's memories are encoded and retrieved, our social and cultural lives are never lived in isolation, one person at a time. Facets of social psychology raise further problems. The experiments reported by some psychologists are bound to be limited to particular cultures and social milieus, and the findings of these "objective" studies of configurations of memory stiffer from all the defects of positivism. Consider but one example. A recent survey shows that memories of past events are frequently affected by our current situation; in other words, we are bound to paint our individual past as more diffi cult than it was, since this difficulty puts our current situation in a more favorable light. Perhaps this is true, but can anyone really argue that it is true everywhere? What of the notion of a "golden age"? The same objection has been made to both scientific and cultural configurations of trauma: Is it the case that those undergoing life-threatening violence for an extended period are subject to biochemical or other physical changes in their brains? The state of knowledge of neuroscience makes it unsafe to say yes, and the same can be said for research into the recovery of populations clearly injured by military action. Cultural differences matter to such an extent that we must remain skeptical of the claims of scientists about "memory' as a universal and "trauma" as a physical state shared by victims from Guatemala to the Gulag archipelago.

But this argument can be viewed from a different angle. There is an equal and opposite danger to simply rejecting scientific definitions of memory: it is to treat uncritically any and all uses of the term memory as an umbrella term for thinking about the past. We surely can do better than that. Skepticism about science must not lead to apartheid in this area of scholarly work. The best path forward appears to be a kind of tolerant pluralism, in which "memory work" of many kinds goes on with the messiness of an ill-defined but exciting field. To say. "Let a thousand flowers bloom" appears to be both inevitable and judicious, for no discipline can assert proudly that it has found the key to the meaning of "memory."

Among those who have done much to cultivate this broad field is James E. Young, a scholar of Holocaust memorials. A professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he has been a sensitive and powerful guide to the burgeoning subject of Holocaust commemoration. He is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (1988) and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (1993) and editor of the influential collection of essays The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (1994). In the volume here under review, he has gathered together a series of pieces d'orcasion, some drawn from exhibition catalogues, others from personal interventions, to examine the subject of "postmemory," or the response of those artists, writers, and architects who did not have direct experience of the Holocaust but who create sites or objects dealing with it. Like everything that Young has written, this book shows what sympathetic intelligence and acute powers of observation can offer when confronted with a subject whose emotional content threatens to overwhelm anyone who touches it. Although I have some reservations about his treatment of memory in general and about "postmemory" in particular, I want to locate these comments in a wider debate on memory and history in which Young's voice has been influential.

The general theme of this book is the rejection of aesthetic redemption in Holocaust commemoration. Whereas national political leaders, especially but not only in Germany, still seek symbols of healing and closure, artists undermine that enterprise. They offer "countermonuments," in which the key space consists not in the design or object but the space between the object and the viewer. Memory then always remains in the eye of the beholder, and the members of each generation must interrogate themselves about what memory is and what they are doing when they gaze at an object or a monument.

To Young, their presence in front of a commemorative installation, artifact, or monument is defined by absence, by a sense of loss, of a void that cannot be filled. This provides the core of the two most powerful essays in the book, on Shimon Attie's recovery of 1930s photographs of Berlin buildings, projected back onto the same facades that survived the war and its aftermath, and on Daniel Libeskind's design for the Jewish Museum extension of the Berlin Historical Museum. Both are reminders of what can never be retrieved-the rich cultural world of Jewish life in pre-1933 Berlin.

The overall emphasis in this book on self-consciousness in the commemorative enterprise extends to the author's own account of his participation in the selection of a design for a Berlin monument to the murdered Jews of Europe, which will be built adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate. He initially opposed such a monument, but then changed his mind. Why he did so is not completely evident, but there is much of value in his account of the tortuous path toward closure, at least in the decision-making process of one important site of memory. I am still unpersuaded by his argument that a national Holocaust memorial is a good idea; the federal multifaceted character of Germany's political and cultural history is evident to anyone who spends any time there; why not many memorials rather than one national one? Whether Young likes it or not, he has embedded his choice of a design in the narrative of Germany reborn, out of the ashes of World War II. All the earlier talk about insisting on nonredemptive frameworks of rememb rance seems to have faded away when the choice finally had to be made. There, a few yards from Hitler's bunker on one side and the rebuilt Reichstag on the other, will be the national memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. Can Young really believe that no one will draw a line linking the three--from evil to suffering to redemption? His presentation of Peter Eisenman's design still leaves open the question as to whether "countermonuments" adopted for national commemorative purposes convey a narrative not very different from the olderstyle monuments they were supposed to subvert and replace.

There are many views on this question, and it is good to have Young's insider story of the project. But in a more general sense, the book as a whole is important precisely because it demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the contemporary fascination, even obsession, with memory. I share Young's view that the term memory must never be taken as a fixed entity. In this book, however, the term memory becomes a metaphor, but for what is unclear. For melancholy? For nostalgia? For the "uncanny"? And what's more, the term memory does not mean the same thing in German or French as it does in English. Metaphors multiply in this field at an exponential rate.

Let me offer just a few instances. Young refers to Libeskind's design of the link between his new building, for the Jewish part of the Berlin Historical Museum, adjacent to an existing one for the rest of the museum. To get to Libeskind's building, you need to enter the older one and then go underground. The link, he says (p. 174), is "a remembered nexus that is also no longer visible in the landscape, but buried in memory." Whose memory? Later, on p. 182, he states that "Libeskind never allows memory of this time to congeal into singular, salvational meaning." Again, whose memory? And on page 183, he states that "it now seems certain that Berlin history will have to find its place in the larger haunted house of Jewish memory" (whatever that is).

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).

In the rapidly developing field of "memory studies," Young's book, despite its unevennesses, is to be welcomed. To be sure, it has blemishes that could have been avoided had the author taken more time in its preparation. His command of the historiography on the edges of his subject is unsure. Young accepts without question or even doubt the statement that World War I constituted a "perceived rupture in culture" (p. 5); most scholars in this field would not share his view here, which is not argued but simply offered without a thought. In other respects, the hallmarks of haste are evident; witness the reference in the index to an imaginary historian in the field, "Homer Bartov." But what is more important than such slips is the stimulus this book provides for further study of the nature and meanings of memory, and on the way contemporary artists contribute to the broad and growing discussion of what memory is.

COPYRIGHT 2001 College Art Association
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