Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre

Abstract

AHR Forum Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre HAROLD MARCUSE in: American Historical Review, 115(Feb. 2010), 53-89 T HE EVENT WE NOW KNOW as the Holocaust has been widely represented in a variety of media, from autobiographical and scholarly books; to literature, photography, and film; to art, music, and museums. 1 There has even been an extensive discussion about whether it can be represented at all: Saul Friedlander has described it as being “at the limits of representation.” 2 Even before the event itself was defined, however, it was being commemorated in monuments and memorials. Today there are many thousands of memorials marking sites of Nazi persecution and mass murder, and dozens more in cities around the world, with additional monuments being erected each year. 3 In order to investigate how the Holocaust has been memorialized, we must first delimit what we mean by the term. Not until the 1970s did “Holocaust” become the most widely used word to denote the Nazi program to systematically exterminate all Jews; since the 1990s, it has expanded to include Nazi programs to decimate or eradicate other groups as well. 4 In fact, an awareness of Nazi genocide as a program 1 The works of Lawrence Langer on Holocaust literature and testimony are standard-setting: Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 1975); Langer, Holocaust Tes- timonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn., 1991). See also James E. Young, Writing and Re- writing the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, Ind., 1988). For art, music, and museums, see, for example, Philip Rosen and Nina Apfelbaum, Bearing Witness: A Re- source Guide to Literature, Poetry, Art, Music, and Videos by Holocaust Survivors (Westport, Conn., 2002). 2 Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1992), 3. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has been one of the most outspoken proponents of the view that the Holocaust cannot be adequately portrayed. 3 See Ulrike Puvogel, Gedenksta ¨tten fu ¨ r die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus: Eine Dokumentation, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1995). Puvogel’s location indexes list more than 3,000 sites for Germany alone. The equiv- alent publication for Poland, Council for the Preservation of Monuments to Resistance and Martyrdom, Scenes of Fighting and Martyrdom Guide: War Years in Poland, 1939–1945 (Warsaw, 1966), lists more than 1,200 sites. Similar books have been compiled for Austria and the Netherlands: Erich Fein, Die Steine Reden: Gedenksta ¨tten des o ¨sterreichischen Freiheitskampfes, Mahnmale fu ¨ r die Opfer des Faschismus, eine Dokumentation (Vienna, 1975); Wim Ramaker, Sta een Ogenblik Stil . . . : Monumentenboek, 1940–1945 (Kampen, 1980). A front-page New York Times article from January 29, 2008, “Germany Confronts Holocaust Legacy Anew,” lists seven major projects in progress for Germany alone. I do not distinguish rigidly between “monuments” and “memorials,” although the choice of terms can be used to reflect objects that may be more heroic versus those that are more contemplative, as in the Washington Monument versus the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 4 See Jon Petrie, “The Secular Word ‘Holocaust’: Scholarly Myths, History, and 20th Century Mean- ings,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 31–63. See also David Engel, “What Is The Ho- locaust?” in Gordon Martel, ed., A Companion to Europe, 1900–1945 (Malden, Mass., 2006), 472– 486. Peter Novick discusses the emergence of an awareness of the Holocaust in the United States in The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999), 133–134.