Young, James. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Nature of Monuments and Memorials

Bridge between formal analysis and as objects of art

• Form of artistic inspiration
• How they talk to other works of art

• Using monuments as a stepping stone to understanding history

• "For the purposes of this book, I treat all memory-sites as memorials, the plastic objects within these sites as monuments. A memorial may be a day, a conference, or space, but it need not be a monument. A monument on the other hand is always a type of memorial." (Young, 4)

• Lodz cemetery, Gestapo headquarters vs. Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument
• Monuments do not always come in the form of carefully planned and constructed objects. They can also develop from the associations of a collective memory with a certain place.
• the "found" monument, the Berlin Wall

• Does a monument need to be an ever present physical object in order to keep its meaning?
• Monument at Majdanek designed by Wiktor Tolkin is crafted to be permanent
• the Majdanek memorial is the huge stone balanced on two small pillars designed as a gateway to the gas chamber and crematorium complex of the Nazi concentration camp once built there
• The Harburg Monument Against Fascism designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz is designed to disappear, literally
• designed as the tall obelisk type monument that had scheduled lowerings with the eventual intention that it would disappear from the landscape
• In these two cases the permanence of the monuments signify their purposes. The Majdanek monument was meant to be a memorial to concentration camp victims that were never to be forgotten. In the case of the Harburg monument, the designers intended that it signify the disappearing presence of Nazism in the German culture, a counter-memorial

• How to Categorize?
• Young categorizes them by nationalities, but are there other ways to separate the monuments presented?
• ie. counter-memorials built to forget, victim memorials that express rememberance and consolation, heroic memorials to glorify deeds and champions, etc.
• National identities shape the types of monuments built
• Counter-memorial a phenomenon only in Germany due to the fact that only the Germans hold the kind of blame and guilt that inspires such kinds of monuments. No other country in the wake of World War II was forced to accept the extent of unquestioned censure that the Germans faced. They had to rethink what it meant to be German
• Polish monuments reflect the lack of a Jewish population. Their monuments to the Holocaust concentrate on Jews as Poles who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, alongside the other Poles who suffered. In recent times, there has been an attempt to reinstate a collective Jewish memory even though a Jewish population does not exist. Perhaps this is a way to try and negate guilty feelings for actions done to the Jews, both before, during and after the war by Poland.
• Israeli monuments attempt to express deep consolation for its victims because monuments represent sites of mourning for them. Also Israeli monuments reflect a heroic aspect to them perhaps to glorify the survival of the Jews and their success of building a homeland.
• American monuments reflect a strong and vocal Jewish populationís need to remember, but in a landscape that is devoid of actual locations which to link them to. Perhaps an American need to recall tradition and a past.
• Artistic Differences in Monuments
• German monuments tend to be more harsh a pessimistic
• Dachau sculpture by Nandor Glid of the bodies entwined in barbed wire
• American monuments tend to be more explanatory and blatant in expression
• Holocaust Museum in Washington, also the need for authentic objects since the physical locations connected with these memories are so far away

• Does the public stay true to the artists’ intentions?
• Harburg monument was defaced by the public instead of designers assumption that everyone would just add their name
• Interpretation in the symbolic form of art can always be understood differently by the individual
• Do the Monuments’ meaning change as times progresses?
• Interpretations become generational
• Munster monument, The Black Form, becomes an eyesore as the population feels less and less direct connections with the memories of the war and Nazism that it attempts to evoke. It begins to represent a constant reminder of the blight of Nazism on the landscape of German history, just as the monument is a blight on the contemporary landscape it occupies.
• Can a Monument Die?
• Babi Yar monument in Denver shows how a monument can disappear from the mental landscape if not the physical one when the need for it has receded
• without what Nora calls "the will to remember" monuments have no significance

• Why build monuments to the Holocaust?
• Is the need for memory diminishing or increasing?
• Difference between public and private memory
• Survivors vs. non-survivors, sites of mourning or sites of memory
• Fear of sanitization and emptying of meaning
• "Disneyfied"
• Something is need to activate tension
• How do artists convey meaning and memory as actual memories die with generations of survivors of the Holocaust?
• This is unclear as evident on the numerous unbuilt monuments due to arguments over form, style, location, and content
• Is it a question of form?
• Geography plays a role, the farther away from the actual sites the more it is necessary to have evocative memorials
• Good art often doesn’t make good monuments
• Non-figurative vs. Figurative styles
• Do abstract images lose some of their impact as time progresses?

• Construction of memory and the conflicts between designers, etc. . .
• Different levels of dynamics, problems, etc. . .
• Different artistic styles evoke different feelings
• Nora—understanding the past through spaces
• Texture is the combination of different layers of meaning in the memorial—past, present future

Jin Claggett
Tony Wagner