From Explosion to Erosion:Holocaust Memorialization in America since Bitburg

Abstract

In the decade since the 1985 Bitburg Affair the United States has become the preeminent nation of official Holocaust remembrance. Widely publicized as evidence of Europe's amnesia about the Holo caust, Bitburg and its intellectual aftershock, the 1986 German histori ans' controversy (Historikerstreit), dramatically heightened the conviction among many U.S. Jews that the mande of guardianship of Holocaust memory had fallen to America.1 Those events occurred during what might in retrospect be called the decade of the memory wars, a decade in which struggles over memory seemed to dominate cultural debates in both the American media and academic culture. During that decade, Holocaust resource centers, educational programs and memorials were being established throughout the United States, and plans were going forward to design and build the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum which symbolically located the epicenter of Holocaust memorialization in Washington D.C.2 By 1987 Michael Berenbaum, then Deputy Director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, could confidendy conclude: Within the American Jewish community, the Holocaust has entered the domain of shared sacrality.3 Nonetheless, despite the surge in public commemoration of the Holocaust, culminating in the April 1993 opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the popularity of Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, success has been accompanied by a sense of unease