The Strength of Remembrance: Commemorating the Holocaust During the First Decade of Israel (original) (raw)
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The politics of commemoration The Holocaust, memory and trauma
2006
Assuming that the consequences of devastating events for individuals and collectivities run different courses, why do we use the word " trauma " to explain a wide array of social and cultural phenomenon? Trauma has traveled far to become a key not only to explain, like originally conceived wounds to the body, but injuries to spirit, culture, society and politics. Trauma has proliferated into a metaphor deployed to explain almost everything unpleasant that happens to us as individuals and as members of political communities. How do we conceptualize the transition from the trauma of the individual to the traumatized community? What does trauma mean for a theoretical formulation of collective memory? What are the social, legal and political dimensions that inform representations of collective traumata? Wulf Kansteiner (2004) provides an insightful history of the metaphoric diffusion of trauma, criticizing its loose deployment as inadequate. He points out that it is misleading...
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Israeli Holocaust Memorial Strategies at Yad Vashem: From Silence to Recognition
Art Journal, 2006
Yad Vashem is the living site of Israeli national Holocaust memory, where every generation of Israelis adds another memorial to an evolving landscape. The memorials installed from 1953 until the late 1970s are either figurai or minim alist in style and focus on the fighters, heroes, and martyrs of the Holocaust. Those installed since the 1980s, in contrast, tend to be conceptual or installation oriented, often employing-visual strategies of absence and disorientation?what one may call postmodern approaches?and are dedi cated to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This essay traces the development of memorials at Yad Vashem in relation to changes in Israeli attitudes toward the Holocaust, survivors, and their traumas: from silence and shame to understanding and even sympathy. ' At stake is the potential for memorials to provide a framework for trauma in visual form.2 Thp ^tartina nninf of this srnHv is the work of James E. Young, whose research on Holocaust memorials practically has made the subject a unique category of study within the intersecting disciplines of art history, literature, Jewish studies, and Holocaust studies.3 If Young examines theories of memory and collective memory to elucidate the ways in which Holocaust memorials embody current ideas about the past, then it is suggested here that trauma opens up another set of questions that are vital to the commis sioning, building, and viewing of Holocaust memorials. This essay therefore contributes to a larger literature of "trauma studies" in general and the intersection of trauma theory and art in particular.4 Most recently, Jill Bennett contributes a transformative analysis to trauma studies in elucidating the relationship between the work of art and the viewer as one that produces "affect." She claims that "trauma related art is transactive, not communicative. It often touches us, but it does not communicate the 'secret' of personal experience. Affect is produced within and through a work, and it might be experienced by an audi ence coming to the work." The viewer neither gains knowledge of the actual trau matic event nor identifies with the victim. An emotional or conceptual link is made between the viewer and a work of art, one which foregrounds the ultimate impos sibility of a viewer experiencing anything close to lived trauma and its aftereffects.5 This conceptual engagement, in turn, is only possible when there is a poten 103 art journal 1. The differences between the early and late memorials might be seen as a transformation from modern to postmodern approaches. My argument is not, however, about a history of style, and I want to avoid a too-easy parallel between the development of trauma in the public sphere and a perhaps too-easy delineation between the modern and the postmodern. Jean Fran?ois Lyotard argues that the postmodern is "always already" there, a formulation that remains highly influential. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 2. Dalia Manor writes that while "much has been published about the Holocaust, about its impact on Israel, and about art that deals with trauma ... on the subject of Israeli art and the Holocaust very little has been added [since 1995]... there have been very few developments in Israeli art and its relationship to the Holocaust." See Manor, "From Rejection to Recognition:
Memory Studies
With the passing of the survivors of the Holocaust and the aging of the second generation, new agents and initiatives are transforming the commemorative landscape of Holocaust remembrance. This article examines the impact of this generational transition on the production of collective memory of the Holocaust with focus on a new remembrance project in Israel, known as Memory in the Living Room. While some attention has been paid to its innovative structure and anti-paradigmatic components, none has focused on its agents and their mnemonic agenda. This paper argues that an examination of this agenda and an exploration of the wider structural contexts within which it developed are crucial to a deeper understanding of its overall significance. Based on 20 in-depth interviews the article argues that the emergent commemorative agenda is a hybrid version of transnational memory informed by concepts and practices drawn from a global digitalized culture.