Memory vanished, absent, and confined: The countermemorial project in 1980s and 1990s Germany

History and Memory

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 130-164

  Lupu, Noam ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 42549156064     PISSN: 0935560X     EISSN: 15271994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ham.2003.0010     Document Type: Review

References (89)

1. Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990 (Berkeley, 2000), 230.
2. See Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New York, 1996), 259.
3. See Saul Friedländer's critique of "Holocaust kitsch" in Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York, 1984).
4. More recently, compare Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York, 2000);
5. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London, 2001).
6. Pierre Nora, often called the father of the memory boom, suggests that even the memory boom is itself a displacement of memory, which becomes less and less experienced "from the inside." See his "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations, no. 26 (spring 1989): 7-25.
7. See Andreas Huyssen, "Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age," in James E. Young, ed., The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York, 1994), 15: "In Germany, the Holocaust signifies an absence of Jews and a traumatic burden on national identity, in which genuine attempts at mourning are hopelessly entangled with narcissistic injury, ritual breast-beating, and repression
8. See James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, 2000)
9. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993).
10. See Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 parts, 7 vols. (Paris, 1984, 1986, 1992);
11. abridged version published in English as Realms of Memory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 2000).
12. I borrow from Roger Chartier's definition of the three levels of representation: "First, on the level of collective representations that embody, within individuals, the divisions of the social world and organize the schemes of perception by which individuals classify, judge, and act; second, on the level of forms of exhibition and stylization of the identity that those individuals or groups hope will be recognized; third, on the level of the delegation to representatives (single individuals, institutions, or abstract instances) of the coherence and stability of the identity thus affirmed." On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, (Baltimore, 1997), 5.
13. Wulf Kansteiner, "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies," History and Theory, no. 41 (May 2002): 179-97.
14. A good recent survey of the "irrepresentability" argument is Thomas Trezise, "Unspeakable," The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 39-66.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, "Commitment," trans. Ronald Taylor, in idem, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ernst Bloch (New York, 1994), 189.
16. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, 1987).
17. Compare Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, 1992).
18. Hamburg-Harburg (hereafter Harburg) is an industrial, working-class suburb of Hamburg. Voting records from the rise of the Nazis in 1932-33 show that both Hamburg and Kassel were no more (nor less) supportive of the fascist party than the national average. See Alfred Milatz, Wähler und Wahlen in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn, 1968). Thus I take the reactions of working-class Harburg or Kassel citizens to the countermonument to be representative of a more general German reception.
19. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, "The Monument Vanishes: A Conversation with Esther and Jochen Gerz," in Young, ed., The Art of Memory, 69. The other five artists invited to contribute designs were Lothar Baumgarten, Jochen Hiltmann, Sigfried Neuehausen, H. D. Schrader, and Timm Ulrichs.
20. Koshar, From Monuments to Traces, 245. This campaign also heavily emphasized memorialization of sites and people associated with the German underground resistance who had fought against the Nazis and had been captured and killed.
21. Gerz quoted in Achim Könneke, "An Interview with Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz in November 1993," trans. Mary Fran Gilbert, in idem, ed., Das Hamburger Mahnmal gegen Faschismus/the Harburg Monument against Fascism (Ostfildern, Germany, 1994), 20. Since Jochen Gerz is more often quoted and cited in both primary and secondary literature (perhaps because of his familiarity with the German language), I cite his intentions as representing those of both artists. This is not meant to exclude the contributions of Esther Shalev-Gerz, but is rather a result of the available sources. Indeed, both artists assert that the Harburg countermonument was a collaborative project.
22. Quoted in Young, At Memory's Edge, 130.
23. Jochen Gerz, Res Publica: Public Works 1968-1999 (Bonn, 1999), 52.
24. Gerz quoted in Könneke, " An Interview," 22.
25. Petra Kipphoff, "Das verschwundene Denkmal," Die Zeit, 19 Nov. 1993.
26. Gerz quoted in Könneke, "An Interview," 22.
27. "Harburg - Heimat der Baustelle," Harburger Rundschau, 6 Aug. 1986.
28. Quoted in Marcia Tucker, "A Monument in Reverse," in Könneke, ed., Das Hamburger Mahnmal gegen Faschismus, 49.
29. In a 1987 interview, Shalev- Gerz responded to the debates over the monument's price tag: "It seems as though people are looking for issues so that they won't have to confront the actual topic" (Schmidt-Wulffen, "The Monument Vanishes," 72).
30. Erich Eickhof, "Schlimm," Harburger Anzeigen und Nachrichten, 2 July 1986.
31. Young, At Memory's Edge, 135.
32. Fiedler, "Weg von der hastigen Meckermentalität," Harburger Rundschau, 24 Sept. 1987.
33. Tucker, "A Monument in Reverse," 49. She goes on to suggest that such a comparison "probably made sense to the citizens of a lackluster industrial suburb who might have preferred some traditional "beautification" for their immediate environment
34. Gerz quoted in Könneke, "An Interview," 23.
35. Young, At Memory's Edge, 135.
36. Adolf Brockmann, "Keine Zeit, keine Zeit!," Harburger Rundschau, 15 April 1987.
37. Tucker, " A Monument in Reverse," 52.
38. Irit Rogoff, "The Aesthetics of Post-History: A German Perspective," in Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds., Vision and Textuality (London, 1995), 133.
39. Maurice Halbwachs showed that, unlike private memory, collective memories belong to the realm of the public, the political. See his On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, 1992). They essentially lose a degree of their private individuality and the strength of their inalienability.
40. Quoted in Young, At Memory's Edge, 135.
41. The term Schmierereien was used repeatedly in local reports, the earliest of which appears to have been "Böse Schmierereien," Harburger Anzeigen und Nachrichten, 13 Oct. 1986.
42. "Wunsch eines Harburgers," Harburger Rundschau, 12 March 1988.
43. "Harburg mit Kübel ausschütten," Harburger Rundschau, 1988.
44. David Galloway, "Report from Germany: Happening in Hamburg," Art in America (May 1990): 87.
45. Erich Eickhof, untitled letter in Harburger Anzeigen und Nachrichten, 15 Sept. 1989.
46. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001), 6.
47. Claude Gintz, "'L'Anti-Monument' de Jochen & Esther Gerz," Galeries Magazine, no. 19 (June-July 1987): 87.
48. Quoted in Michael Gibson, "Hamburg: Sinking Feelings," ARTnews 86 (Sept. 1987): 105-7.
49. Young, At Memory's Edge, 96.
50. Rogoff, "The Aesthetics of Post-History," 133-34.
51. Gerz quoted in Gibson, "Hamburg: Sinking Feelings," 107;
52. Young, "The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today," Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 283.
53. Rogoff, "The Aesthetics of Post-History," 132-33.
54. "Neue Kritik am Mahnmal," Harburger Anzeigen und Nachrichten, 12 Nov. 1986.
55. Young, At Memory's Edge, 139.
56. Quoted in Michael Gibson, "Vanishing Monument against Fascism," International Herald Tribune, 7 Jan. 1988.
57. Quoted in Michael Gibson, "A Monument against Fascism: Hamburg City Fathers Create a New Concept," The World & I, Aug. 1987, 270.
58. Quoted in Gibson, "Hamburg: Sinking Feelings," 105.
59. Quoted in Könneke, "An Interview," 25.
60. Matthias Winzen, "The Need for Public Representation and the Burden of the German Past," Art Journal 48, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 313.
61. Aleida Assmann quoted in Miriam Niroumand, "Wettstreit der Meister- Verschwinder," 12 April 1995.
62. Young, At Memory's Edge, 97.
63. Hans Eichel, "Preface," in Horst Hoheisel, ed., Aschrottbrunnen (Kassel, 1998), 21.
64. "Der Müll - Die Stadt und Der Aschrottbrunnen" [source unknown], 14-27 June 1986 (clipping given to the author by James E. Young).
65. Hanno Loewy, "Identity and Emptiness: Reflections about Horst Hoheisel's Negative Memory and Yearning for Sacrifice," in Margot Levy, ed., Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, vol. 3 (New York, 2001), 779.
66. There is an interesting parallel between the Aschrottbrunnen and West Germany more generally in the opposition and ambivalence between the desire to remember and the desire to forget (i.e. the desire to memorialize in order to forget, the desire to memorialize in order to remember). On this, see Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA, 1997).
67. Horst Hoheisel, "Rathaus-Platz-Wunde," in Aschrott Brunnen: Offene Wunde der Stadtgeschichte (Kassel, 1989), no pagination.
68. Young, At Memory's Edge, 99.
69. Hoheisel, "Rathaus-Platz-Wunde
70. Cathrin Kahlweit, "Das unsichtbare Denkmal," Süddeutsche Zeitung, 26 March 1988 (emphasis added).
71. Petra Wettlaufer-Pohl, "Ehrfrucht gleich Abstand?" Hessisch Niedersächsische Allgemeine, 27 July 1991 (emphasis added).
72. Hiltgunde Thiele quoted in Johannes Schweikie, "Ein Trichter zur Quelle des Vergessens," Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, 13-14 June 1987.
73. Hoheisel, "Aschrottbrunnen - Denk-Stein-Sammlung - Brandenburger Tor - Buchenwald: Vier Erinnerungsversuche," in Nicolas Berg, Jess Jochimsen and Bernd Stiegler, eds., Shoah - Formen der Erinnerung: Geschichte, Philosophie, Literatur, Kunts (Munich, 1996), 255.
74. Young, At Memory's Edge, 99.
75. Eichel, "Preface," 5 (emphasis added).
76. Manfred Schneckenburger, "A Symbol Free of Empty Rhetoric," in Hoheisel, ed., Aschrottbrunnen, 29 (emphasis added), reprinted and translated from "Ein Symbol ohne tönende Rhetorik," in Aschrott Brunnen: Offene Wunde der Stadtgeschichte.
77. Eva Schulz-Jander, "Memory Invisible," in Hoheisel, ed., Aschrottbrunnen, 26.
78. Young: "They contemptuously reject the traditional forms and reasons for public memorial art, those spaces that either console viewers or redeem such tragic events, or indulge in a facile kind of Wiedergutmachung or purport to mend the memory of a murdered people" (At Memory's Edge, 96).
79. During the war, Henschel's armaments factory used slave laborers from nearby Buchenwald. Henschel was interned by American forces from 1946 to 1949 and fined 2,000 DM. He later became a prominent member of the Kassel leadership and was awarded several city medals in the 1950s (Hoheisel, "Aschrottbrunnen - Denk-Stein-Sammlung - Brandenburger Tor - Buchenwald," 253-54). It is interesting to note that Young does not mention Henschel in his accounts.
80. Wettlaufer-Pohl, "Ehrfrucht gleich Abstand?"
81. "Der Müll - Die Stadt und Der Aschrottbrunnen
82. Loewy, "Identity and Emptiness," 779.
83. Young, At Memory's Edge, 96.
84. Hoheisel, "Aschrottbrunnen - Denk-Stein-Sammlung - Brandenburger Tor - Buchenwald," 261-63.
85. Young, At Memory's Edge, 92 and 191.
86. Niroumand, "Wettstreit der Meister-Verschwinder
87. Quoted in Albert H. Friedlander, "German Identity, the Holocaust and the Year 2000," in Levy, ed., Remembering for the Future, 3:293.
88. Loewy, "Identity and Emptiness," 784.
89. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, 1998), 142: "Provocation, not consolation, is the goal of such countermonuments."