The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning
By James E. Young
Yale University Press, 398 pages, $35
In his 1988 book, “Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust,” James E. Young observed that “none of us coming to the Holocaust afterwards can know these events outside the ways they are passed down to us.” Using rhetorical analysis, which attempts to examine the practical effects of aesthetic choices, Young shed light on how fictional and non-fictional representations shape our understanding of the Holocaust.
In “The Texture of Memory,” Young picks up where he had left off. Drawing its title from the final chapter of “Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust,” this is a handsomely illustrated book in which the author takes us on a tour of Holocaust memorials, museums and commemorative events in Germany, Austria, Poland, Israel and the United States.
Young argues that these representations of a horrific past cannot be adequately explained merely by assessing their artistic merit or historical accuracy. The art of public memory is rhetorical. As such, “it also includes the activity that brought them into being, the constant give and take between memorials and viewers, and finally the responses of viewers to their own world in light of a memorialized past-the consequences of memory.”
Young illuminates both the means of shaping public memory of the Holocaust and the ends to which that memory has been used. And he also does much to achieve his broader goals: to “heighten critical awareness of all memorials, of the potential uses and abuses of officially cast memory, and ultimately of the contemporary consequences that past events hold for us in their memorial representations.”
“The Texture of Memory” begins, fittingly, with an investigation of the ambiguity of memory in Germany and Austria. The story of Munster’s monument to its missing Jews is emblematic of Germany’s ongoing struggle with its past. Installed in 1987, the large black cube “sat like an abandoned coffin amid soaring mock-baroque facades and gas lamps, a black blight squatting in the center of a sunny and graceful university square.”
Soon it was covered with graffiti; administrators’ chauffeurs complained that it was in their way; others complained that it ruined the expensive new plaza’s aesthetics. It was removed within a year. “An absent people would now be commemorated by an absent monument.”
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But the story did not end there. Eight months later, the city council invited the artist to reconstruct the monument in another location. Controversy flared again. The monument was rebuilt, in Hamburg. Young says that such ambivalence is not surprising. State-sponsored monuments traditionally function to construct a self-aggrandizing national memory; Germany, though, has had to build a new state on the memory of its horrific past.
Memorials reflect the changing, varied needs of those who seek to remember. Through his memorial “biographies,” Young illustrates the complex role of Holocaust memory in the life of each nation.
With encouragement from the West, the earliest West German memorials reflected a need for a unifying national memory. The museum at Plotzensee Prison pairs the German political prisoners and foreign resistance fighters imprisoned there during the war. Thus, the museum transforms the German prisoners-some of whom had assisted in the extermination of Jews-into an internal resistance. This eerily foreshadows Ronald Reagan’s controversial characterization of the German soldiers interred at Bitburg: “They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
East German memory took a different shape. With Soviet encouragement, they cast the end of the war as a self-liberation by socialist martyrs. They remember Buchenwald, initially an internment center for German Communists, as a place where East German identity was forged. As such, it became hallowed ground, a veritable Valley Forge.
Polish memorials bear the marks of a bitter conflict between the competing needs of Polish Catholics and the scattered remnants of Polish Jewry. The Nazi slaughter of 3.2 million Polish Jews, postwar pogroms and the ruins of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, and the Warsaw Ghetto inextricably link Poland and the Holocaust in memory. Some Poles believe that their own great suffering has been forgotten, that they unfairly shoulder Germany’s burden. In response to this and to the needs of the former Communist state, many Polish memorials nationalized the Holocaust, assimilating Jewish suffering into Polish suffering. Many Jews were offended, seeing this as an effort to deny the Holocaust’s uniquely Jewish character.
Young resists the pull to label one group’s memory as true, the other’s as self-serving. While this is likely to alienate some readers, it captures the complexity of the struggle for meaning. He only discusses memorials he has visited personally, and only as they were when he saw them. The sections on Germany and Poland, then, do not reflect changes precipitated by the fall of their Communist regimes. Though initially frustrating, as Young notes, this gap has only “made the fragile and transient nature of monuments all the more apparent.”
Young’s trip through Israeli memorializing reveals both the considerable merits of his book and its occasional flaws. Israel, too, has had an ambivalent relationship to the Holocaust. The catastrophe played a significantrole in the UN vote that established the state. It also served as evidence for the Zionist claim that Jews could be safe only in a land of their own. Yet Israel’s early leaders sought to replace victimization with heroism, defenselessness with self-determination, as the bedrock of national identity.
A remarkable chapter on Yom Hashoah Vehagvurah (Day of Holocaust and Heroism) charts these difficult waters. Young recounts years of debates about the name and nature of this memorial day, making clear that even its placement in the Jewish calendar is rhetorically significant. And he movingly recounts his experience of the day, from sundown to sundown.
Yet this section, and the book as whole, sometimes suffers from trying to do too much, from a lack of necessary analysis. For example. in introducing the section, Young calls the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann a “coming-out” for survivors in Israel. Later, he refers to negative attitudes towards survivors (and victims) in the early days of the state. But nowhere does he discuss how those attitudes came to change; what role, if any, memorials and the discourse surrounding them played in that change; or how memorials changed after the Eichmann trial.
The closing section, “America: Memory and the Politics of Identity,” promises more than it delivers. Young’s preview of the newly opened U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is a good case study of how memory of the Holocaust must adapt to national identity. But his claim that, like African-Americans and Native Americans, Jewish-Americans have turned to a politics of identity grounded in memory of mass suffering, is too broad for his study to support. Too much rests on a handful of memorial biographies and on broad assertions about the politics of identity.
Despite these flaws, “The Texture of Memory” is a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust. And it makes clear that much of who we are is shaped not qonly by what we remember but also by how we remember.