The Allure of Material ObjectsFetishization Reconsidered Laura Levitt for James Young author note: In May of 2016, I traveled to Berlin and, for the first time, went to visit a concentration camp. My partner and I boarded a train that brought us to a station within walking distance of Sachsenhausen. This was my first and my only visit to a concentration camp, belated and fraught. I was obsessed with travel arrangements, unusually taking charge of these matters. The train was, I thought, strangely running late. As we arrived at the stop I was struck by the beauty of the town, the pristine gardens and well-appointed homes along the pilgrimage route. Once at the camp complex I spent a great deal of time fiddling with the audio device, unable to get it to play without returning to the opening segment over and over again. It seemed everything was frustrating and uneasy. Once we slowly wound our way toward the official entrance, I was already stressed and exhausted. I remember vividly just outside the gates, in a cemetery across from the Sachsenhausen Museum, an East German construction where in the lobby the first thing visitors see is a stained-glass window, a triptych reverentially honoring the liberating Red Army. I became especially uncomfortable. In the museum the soldiers are depicted in the central panel—a place one might expect to see Jesus or Mary—with their red flag waving. We did not make it farther inside the museum, since we were eager to enter the gates of the camp. Yet already in that cemetery I had found myself clinging to all that I had learned about monuments and memorials from James Young.1 And, despite my critical knowledge of this work, I realized that deep down, what I most wanted at that very moment, poised outside the official gates of the camp, was to believe that James Young knew how to do memorials and that all this was, already, [End Page 639] not quite right. I wanted certainty and was overwhelmed by what I found instead. In this horrible place what I discovered were traces of so many layers, so many versions of what this place was, what it meant, and what it continues to mean. Seeing and appreciating these layers did not feel like enough, and the idea of any one of them serving as the official story I did not find particularly satisfying. The irony in all of this was that I wanted certitude, a definitive position, and I looked for this by appealing to the very scholar who had taught me that such desires are impossible. In that moment entering that place, I came to appreciate that I too had harbored this desire. Being in these places is difficult. The challenges are visceral and even those of us who think we know better are not immune to their allures. In what follows, I resist certitude and ask what happens when we reconsider the power of material objects and their fetishization in sites of Holocaust memory. collected evidence A sudden death is one way—a terrible way, I suppose—of freezing the details of a life. While writing Jane I became amazed by the way one act of violence had transformed an array of everyday items—a raincoat, a pair of pantyhose, a paperback book, a wool jumper—into numbered pieces of evidence, into talismans that threatened at every turn to take on allegorical proportions.2 The poet Maggie Nelson asks what happens to everyday objects—a raincoat, a paperback book, a pair of pantyhose—when an act of violence turns them into something else entirely? How does the arresting of once ordinary possessions make them into both numbered pieces of criminal evidence and talismans? What does it mean to appreciate these doubled qualities of once ordinary belongings? Nelson's aunt Jane Mixer's case is both exceptional and strangely familiar—a story about criminal evidence collected, stored, retrieved, and eventually brought to court. It is the exception that proves the rule. Most of the time such cases never make it to court. Evidence is rarely retrieved or deployed in this manner. This...