Memorializing the Holocaust

n The Texture of Memory: HolocaustMemorials and Meaning, James Young convincingly demonstrates the plurality of meanings hidden in many Holocaust memorials. Indeed, to read his text is not only to discover the wide range of forms imagined by artists to honor the memory of victims of the Holocaust but to see the meaning of these forms become denaturalized. Through a topological and semiological analysis of the ways the Holocaust is memorialized in countries close and far from what he calls "the topography of terror," Young deconstructs "the physical and metaphysical qualities of the memorial texts, their tactile and temporal dimension"(p. ix). He questions the validity of memorials, their capacity to preserve the truth. His thesis is that since memorials are so untrustworthy, the best way to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive is through the countermonument, a conceptual artwork showing the impossible task of objective memorization. Were it not for the multiple meanings that can be read into artistic productions, this publication and the discipline of art history would not exist. Memorial texts in the form of monuments encountered in public spaces are often thought to be an exception to the ideal of artistic polysemy; for monuments to the heroes of revolutions, the dead soldiers of world wars, the victims of the Holocaust-to take the most obvious examplesare commissioned to communicate a specific moral message: to prevent new generations from forgetting the sufferings endured by their forebears, and to teach lessons of courage, of toleranc , of vigilance. But, as President Ronald Reagan unwittingly revealed when he laid a wreath at the German war memorial atthe Bitburg cemetery, a "lieu de m6moire"1 intended to preserve in the public mind the memory of those who died to save their country can contain alarming subtexts. At Bitburg, Young reminds us, Waffen SS men, Hitler's closest lieutenants and cruelest agents of his racist policies, are buried next to regular German soldiers, including Jews from World War I, thus erasing the singularity of the sinister SS from collective German memory. The SS are represented as universal victims of war on a par with those they sought to annihilate. Young approaches memorials to the Holocaust in the same mood of suspicion. In Poland, where the Nazis built most of the extermination camps after they had taken over the country, the former extermination camps have been turned into memory sites of martyrdom for Jewish and non-Jewish Poles alike. The unembellished ruins of former death camps, together with symb lic though nonspecific abstract artistic monuments, such as Wiktor Tolkin's giant and somber "gat of hell" at Majdanek, and Adam Haupt and Franciszek Duszenko's installation of seventeen thousand tombstonelike granite shards around an obelisk at Treblinka, serve this purpose. In Germany and Austria, two countries part cularly reticent to face their past-Germany f r obvious reasons, and Austria because Hitler's entry there in 1938 met acclaim and the Jewry of that country was wiped out-ambivalence reigns. Unable to erase the traces of the few death camps erected n their soil, governments have turned them int impeccably neat public parks with reconstitutions of some of the structures, making them landmarks like any other attraction for the tourist trade. Because these camps were primarily for politica prisoners, and some Jews were transported there from elsewhere late in the war, the twe ty sculptural monuments at Mauthausen eac memorialize the deeds of political prisoners of a differ nt nationality, with one monument for Jewish victims. Thus the importance of resistance to fascism during the Hitler years is stressed, the enormity of the crime against Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals is silenced, and the singularity of the Holocaust is denied. Young correctly diagnoses the refusal of those countries fully to atone for the Shoah, and he reveals the subtle construction of a self-serving memory in Poland, Germany, and Austria.