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The Holocaust and Representation: Whose Memory?

The Holocaust and Representation: Whose Memory?. Metal/Stone Browning Young. METAL shiny, bright, shaped with heat Hard western beauty cold/hot strong, flexible clean, powerful, simple/pure Rust, liquid changeable conducts heat. STONE dull/calming hard, shaped by nature

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The Holocaust and Representation: Whose Memory?

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  1. The Holocaust and Representation:Whose Memory? Metal/Stone Browning Young

  2. METAL shiny, bright, shaped with heat Hard western beauty cold/hot strong, flexible clean, powerful, simple/pure Rust, liquid changeable conducts heat STONE dull/calming hard, shaped by nature Japanese beauty breakable, erodes smooth, rough long lasting/constant usually cool security Comparing …

  3. Genocide Define: • A deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. • The word was first used in 1944. Why? • Fear – Ideology? The Other: • Why do we need an “other”?

  4. Genocide happens through a combination of factors: • ethnic prejudice, racism, and other forms of hatred; • fear of the other; • extreme forms of nationalism; • radical and absurd ideas of social change;

  5. Genocide happens through a combination of factors: 5. myth-making—just simply the idea of creating mythologies around a group, constructing the group as the embodiment of all evil; 6.And the desire on the part of the state to engage in extreme propaganda against the group that motivates large numbers of people to go out and destroy that particular group.

  6. I: Browning asks …How do ordinary men become mass murders? • “Can one recapture the experiential history of these killers • the choices they faced, • the emotions they felt, • the coping mechanisms they employed, • the changes they underwent?”

  7. II: Browning asks …How do ordinary men become mass murders? • Not only are memories potentially false, but they are different based on the individual’s pre-existing schemas.   • Everyone had a different perspective on the same events • everyone has their “own ways of seeing” • Therefore would these accounts be a valid  representation of the Holocaust?

  8. III: Browning asks …How do ordinary men become mass murders? • Browning admits that he is only human and could’ve been in either group of the Battalion- killers or evaders. • What makes a killer/evader?   • Should we have written accounts if not to represent the Holocaust but to better understand humans and the power of situations? 

  9. Young: Texture of Memory • Relation of Memory & Monument • The quotes: Baudrillard/Améry, p. 1 • Memory is never shaped in a vacuum. • The traditional Jewish injunctions to remember. • A government’s need to explain a nation’s past to itself. • eg. US – liberty, pluralism, immigration. • Memorials take on a life of their own.

  10. 'Oddali zycie abys Ty mogl zyc godnie.' 'They sacrificed their lives so you could live with dignity.' Solidarity Monument Gdansk, Poland -- 1970

  11. Young: Texture of Memory Are monuments to remember and memorials so we never forget? • Washington Monument/Lincoln Memorial • Beginnings/Endings? • Young considers all memory sites memorials, the objects inside as monuments. • A memorial need not be a monument • But a monument is always a kind of memorial.

  12. Young: Texture of Memory Function of a monument? • Bury events rather than remember? • Displaces memory, substitutes “memory work” with an object. • Memorial = forgetting • Institutions of a society are automatically geared towards creating a shared memory – or the illusion of one.

  13. Young: Texture of Memory Site & Monument • First memorials were the Yizkor Bikher – memorial books • The site of reading would become the memorial space • Monuments – “better to provoke the space” Why? • Often placed to maximize symbolic meaning

  14. Young: Texture of Memory The Art of the Monument • Tied to national & communal remembrance as well as designer’s own time and place. • Survivors want a literal expression of their experiences. p. 9 • Abstractions encourage private visions – defeats public/communal aims • Problems: • How refer to events in a medium that refers to itself? • How can remembering a person or event be done abstractly?

  15. Warsaw Memorial

  16. Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial: Washington, D.C

  17. Young: Texture of Memory The Consequences of Memory • Two questions: • What role monument plays in current history? • What the consequences of public memorial art for people?

  18. Young: Texture of Memory The Consequences of Memory • Two quotes: p. 13 • “The public monument has a responsibility apart from its qualities as a work of art.” Doezema • “There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument.” Musil

  19. Young: Texture of Memory ”It is not enough to ask whether or not our memorials remember the Holocaust, or even how they remember it. We should also ask to what ends we have remembered.” p. 15

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