Just what makes a memorial memorable and worthwhile?

TALI FEINBERG

It was proposed by a team of French architects and artists, but eventually fell through due to complications. This was just one of the fascinating stories shared by Professor James E Young at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre’s recent Stern Visiting Scholar Lecture to mark its 18th anniversary.

In a talk entitled “The Stages of Memory”’ Young shared his expertise in the building of memorials and his experiences being on the jury panels to decide both the Berlin Holocaust Memorial and the September 11 Twin Towers Memorial.

Young described how in 1995, when Germany began to broach the idea of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, one artist suggested blowing up the Brandenburg Gate, as he saw the only way to symbolise such destruction was by destroying. “An edifice can never be adequate,” he said.

Indeed, how was Berlin going to build something “to reunite Germany on the bedrock of its crimes”? asked Young. Hardly any other countries had to accomplish such a task – for example, is there a memorial to the slave auctions that took place in front of the White House? “Not a pebble,” he said.

Thus, when the design for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial was finally chosen, it was always going to be controversial. Architect Peter Eisenman filled the 19 000 m² site (formerly a “no-man’s land”) with 2 711 concrete slabs or “stelae”, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. An attached underground “place of information” holds the names of approximately three million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from Yad Vashem, and takes visitors through Holocaust history.

Young described how in the original design, some of the concrete pillars were up to eight metres high, but the jury requested that they be scaled down due to the risk of  accidents or anyone literally getting lost. “We wanted them to be ominous, but didn’t want anyone literally falling!” he said.

The site is also surrounded by trees to provide “shade, refuge and life”, while the space between the slabs only allows one person to walk at a time. The museum underneath is vital to anchor the abstract design in “hard history”, he said.

According to Eisenman’s project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.

Wolfgang Thierse, president of Germany’s parliament, described it as a place where people can grasp “what loneliness, powerlessness and despair mean”. He also talked about the memorial as creating a type of mortal fear in the visitor.

The Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’s official English website, states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, and Professor Young agrees. “How do you articulate a void without filling it? How do you formalise a wound without repairing it? And how do you memorialise a national shame?” he asked.

In answering these pressing questions, Young explained what he calls a “counter-monument” or “counter-memorial” – something that involves the viewer and forces them to question their own role in acting against injustice, that demonstrates emptiness, a void and a disruption, and a memorial that does not look like a typical edifice.

For example, he explained that the ground-breaking Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial is a simple, feminine and darkly-coloured structure, as opposed to the tall, phallic and white memorials that came before it. Instead of listing the names of the soldiers in alphabetical order, it lists them in the order that they fell, forcing the viewer to consider this series of events.

The only human figures are the reflections of the visitors, which brings the past and present together and shows the visitor that they need to play a role in ensuring such a monument is never needed again.

Meanwhile, in 1997 in Hamburg, an artist erected a memorial against fascism that was another counter-monument. It invited viewers to scrawl their names in its marble, and as they did, it would slowly sink into the ground. It eventually disappeared into the earth.

Many other artists of this generation were preoccupied with trying to show a void while memorialising it. A memorial to the book burnings in Germany simply has a plaque describing the event, another plaque with the foreboding quote “where books are burned so people will be burned too”, and below the ground, through glass, we see rows of empty bookshelves. “Those books are gone, those authors are gone, and they can never be replaced,” explained Young.

He describes another project where an artist found photos of Jews going about their daily lives before the Holocaust. He turned these into slides and at night he projected them onto the buildings where they occurred, without telling people he was going to do this. Hauntingly, he brought back memory to “an amnesic site, scraping the cover off”, said Young.

Another excellent example of a “counter-monument” is the Stolpersteine that scatter Europe’s streets – tiny “stumbling stones” outside homes, listing the names of Jews who had lived there before the Holocaust and where they had been killed.

Returning to the final choice for the September 11 memorial, Young describes it as “a void within a void”, as water falls into two pools 30-feet deep (the largest man-made waterfalls in North America). These are surrounded by trees, and as these grow, the voids grow deeper, but life also regenerates. In fact, he says there are more people living in the area now than on September 11, 2001.

The memorial reflects “absence and missing”, which were key themes that emerged in the days after the tragedy, where “Missing” posters wallpapered the city.

The jury received 5 200 entries from 63 nations, a reminder that a third of those who were killed on September 11 were not American. When visiting the memorial, Young says he hardly ever hears New Yorkers there.

When he asked a New York friend who developed lung cancer after being caught in the toxic dust cloud as the Twin Towers fell, why this was, he said: “Make a place where we can go to forget.”

This is just part of the ongoing conversation on the making of memorials, and it is something in which we can all play a role. One audience member described a Jewish fundraising dinner that had been planned before 9/11 and went ahead in the days after.

Many who were supposed to attend had died, but their places were still laid, a yartzeit candle burning where they should have been.