Once, not so long ago, Germany had what it called a ‘Jewish Problem’. Now it has a Holocaust memorial problem, a double-edged conundrum: How does a nation of former perpetrators mourn its victims? How does a divided nation reunite itself on the bedrock memory of its crime? Like many others, I was satisfied – even pleased – with the insolubility of these questions. Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany, I wrote sardonically, than any single ‘final solution’ to Germany’s memorial problem. Instead if a fixed icon for Holocaust memory in Germany, the debate itself – perpetually unresolved amid everchanging conditions – might now be enshrined.

Better, I said, to take all these Deutsch Marks to preserve the great variety of Holocaust memorials already dotting the German landscape. Because no single site can speak for all the victims, much less for both victims and perpetrators, the state should be reminding its citizens to visit the many and diverse memorial and pedagogical sites that already exist: from the excellent learning centre at the Wannsee Conference House to the enlightened exhibitions at the Topography of Terror at the former Gestapo headquarters, both in Berlin; from the brooding and ever-evolving memorial landscape at Buchenwald to the meticulously groomed grounds and fine museum at Dachau; from the hundreds of memorial tablets throughout Germany marking the sites of deportation to the dozens of now-empty sites of former synagogues – and all the spaces for contemplation in between.

The monument as authoritarian art form

With this position, I made many friends in Germany and was making a fine career out of scepticism. Most colleagues shared my fear that Chancellor Kohl’s government wanted a ‘memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews’ as a great burial slab for the twentieth century, a hermetically-sealed vault for the ghosts of Germany’s past. Instead of inciting the memory of murdered Jews, we suspected, it would be a place where Germans would come dutifully to unshoulder their memorial burden, so that they could move freely and unencumbered into the twenty-first century. A finished monument would, in effect, finish memory itself.
A savvy new generation of artists in Germany brought their own profound suspicions to the monument. In their eyes, the didactic logic of monuments – their demagogical rigidity and cerntainty of history – continued to recall traits too closely associated with fascism itself. How else would totalitarian regimes commemorate their achievements except through totalitarian art like the monument? Conversely, how was it possible to remember the victims of fascism in an art form like the monument – with its self-aggrandizing delusions of eternal truth and permanence, its authoritarian propensity to reduce viewers to passive spectators?
These were persuasive arguments against the monument, and I am still ambivalent about the role a central Holocaust monument will play in Berlin. But at the same time, I have also had to recognize that this was a position of luxury that only an academic bystander could afford, someone whose primary interest was in perpetuating the process itself. As instructive as the memorial debate had been, however, it had neither warned nor chastened a new generation of xenophobic neo-Nazis – part of whose identity depends on forgetting the crimes of their forebears. And while the memorial debate has generated plenty of shame in Germans, it is largely the shame they feel for an unseemly argument – not for the mass murder once committed in their name. In good academic fashion, we had become preoccupied with the fascinating issues at the heart of the memorial process and increasingly indifferent to what was supposed to be remembered: the mass murder of Jews and the resulting void it left behind.
The self-righteous and self-congratulatory tenor of our position also began to make me uneasy. What had begun as an unimpeachably sceptical approach to the certainty of monuments was now beginning to sound just a little too certain of itself. My German comrades in scepticism called themselves ‘the secessionists’, a slightly self-flattering gesture to the Weimarera movement of artists, many of the Jewish victims of the Nazis.

A Jewish eye

So when, suddenly, last June, I was invited to descend from my lofty perch as commentator above the fray into the muddy design-battle itself as one of five members of a newly reconstituted Findungskommission, I had already begun to suspect my own scepticism. I now asked myself a series of simple, but cutting questions: did I want Germany to return its capital to Berlin without publicity and visibly acknowledging what had happened the last time Germany was governed from Berlin? With its gargantuan, even megalomaniacal restoration plans and the flood of big-industry money pouring into the new capital in quantities beyond Albert Speer’s wildes dreams, could there really be no space left for public memory of the victims of Berlin’s last regime? How, indeed, could I set foot in a new German capital built on the presumption of inadvertent historical amnesia that new buildings always breed? As Aderno had corrected his well-intentioned but facile (and hackneyed) ‘Nach Auschwitz…’ dictum, it was time for us to come down from our perch of holy dialectics.
But as one of the newly appointed arbiters of German Holocaust memory, the only Jew and foreigner on the Findungskommission, I also found myself in a strange and uncomfortable predicament. The sceptics’ whispered asides echoed sop to authority and so-called expertise. I asked myself: was I invited as an academic authority on memorials, or as a token American and foreigner? Is it my expertise they want, or are they looking for a Jewish blessing on whatever design is finally chosen? If I can be credited for helping arbitrage official German memory, can I also be held liable for another bad design?
In Jewish fashion, I can answer such questions only with more questions: How is Germany to make momentous decisions like this without the Jewish sensibility so mercilessly expunged from its national consciousness? When Germany murdered half of its Jewish population and sent the rest into exile, and then set about exterminating another 5 million or so European Jews, it deliberately – and I’m afraid permanently – cut the Jewish lobe of its culture from its brain, so to speak. As a result, Germany suffers from a self-inflicted Jewish aphasia. Good, sensible Jewish leaders like Ignatz Bubis counsel wisdom and discretion. But even that is not a cure for this aphasia. A well-meaning German like Lea Rosh takes a Jewish name and initiates a monument. Neither is this a cure. No, the missing Jewish part of German culture remains a palpable and gaping wound in the German psyche – and it must appear as such in Berlin’s otherwise re-unified cityscape.
Uwe Schmitt tartly observes the crippled response in Germany now to anything a Jew says or does (referring here to George Konrad’s own interesting views on the memorial).1 The problem is that in voiding itself of Jews, Germany has forever voided itself of the capacity for a normal, healthy response to Jews and their ideas. Instead, it is all a tortured bending over backwards, biting one’s tongue, wondering what ‘they’ really think of you. It is a terrible, yet unavoidable consequence of the Holocaust itself, this Jewish aphasia, a legacy of mass murder. Thus, I have begun to understand just this need for a foreigner and a Jew on the Findungskommission. Without a Jewish eye to save it from egregiously misguided judgements (like the winner of the first competition), anything is possible. This turns out to be a practical matter, as well as political.
So when asked to serve on this Findungskommission for Berlin’s ‘memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe’, I agreed but only on the condition that we write a precise conceptual plan for the memorial. We would be clear, for example, that this memorial will not displace the nation’s other memorial sites, and that a memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews would not speak for the Nazis’ other victims, but may, in fact, necessitate further memorials to them. Nor should this memorial hide the impossible questions driving Germany’s memorial debate. It should instead reflect the terms of the debate itself, the insufficiency if memorials, the contemporary generations sceptical view of official memory and its self-aggrandizing ways.

Palpable void

After all, I had been arguing for years that a new generation of artists and architects in Germany – including Christian Boltanski, Norbert Radermacher, Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ulmann, Stih and Schnock, Jochen Gerz and Daniel Libeskind – had turned their scepticism of the monumental into a radical counter-monumentality. In challenging and flouting every one of the monument’s conventions, their memorials have reflected an essential German ambivalence toward self-indictment, were the void was made palpable yet remained unredeemed. If the government insisted on a memorial in Berlin to ‘Europe’s murdered Jews’, then couldn’t it too embody this same counter-monumental critique?
Rather than prescribing a form, therefore, we described a concept of memorialization that took into account: a clear definition of the Holocaust and its significance; Nazi Germany’s role as perpetrator; current reunified Germany’s role as rememberer; the contemporary generation’s relationship to Holocaust memory. Instead of providing answers, we asked questions: What are the national reasons for remembrance? Are theyu redemptoru, part of a mourning process, pedagogical, self-aggrandizing, or inspiration against contemporary xenophobia? To what national and social ends will this memorial be built? Will it be a place for Jews to mourn lost Jews, a place for Germans to mourn lost Jews, or a place for Jews to remember what Germans once did to them? These questions are part of the memorial process, I suggested, so let them be asked by the artists, even if they cannot finally be answered.
Here I also reminded organizers that this was not an aesthetic debate over how to depict horror. The Holocaust, after all, was not merely the annihilation of nearly 6 million Jews, among them 1.5 million children, but also the extirpation of a thousand-year old civilization from the heart of Europe.
To this end, I also asked organizers to encourage a certain humility among designers, a respect for the difficulty of such a memorial. It is not surprising that a memorial such as Jackob-Marks’s was initially chosen2: it represented very well a generation that felt oppressed by Holocaust memory, which would in turn oppress succeeding generations with such memory. But something subtler, more modest and succinct might suggest a balance between being oppressed by memory and inspired by it, a tension between being permanently marked by memory and disabled by it. As other nations have remembered the Holocaust according to their founding myths and ideals, their experience as liberators, victims or fighters, Germany will also remember according to its own complex and self-abnegating motives, whether we like them or not.

An unwelcome guest

Would such a précis justify going forward with the search? On the great strength of the submissions we received, I can answer emphatically, Yes. Of the artists we invited, including some of the most radically sceptical, nearly all agreed to participate. Their designs ranged across the entire spectrum of contemporary aesthetic sensibilities – from the conceptual to the figurative, from minimalist to landscape art, from constructivist to deconstructivist architecture. Indeed, we found the designs of all four finalists to have painstakingly worked through the most difficult of these memorial questions. But in weighing the power of concept against formal execution and design, the members of the Findungskommission unanimously agreed that the two designs by Gesine Weinmiller and Peter Eisenman/Richard Serra far transcended the others in their balance of brilliant concept and formal execution.
Though equally works of terrible beauty, complexity and deep intelligence, the proposals by Weinmiller and Eisenman/Serra derive their brilliance from very different sources. The choice here is not between measures of brilliance in these two works but between two very different kinds of memorial visions: Weinmiller’s is the genius of quietuce, understatement and almost magical allusiveness; Eisenman/Serra’s is the genius of audacity, surprise and dangerously imagined forms. One is by a young German woman of the generation now obligated to shoulder the memory and shame of events for which she is not to blame; the other is by two well-known Americans, architect and artist, one of whose Jewish family left Germany two generations ago. Together, these designs offer the public, government and organizers of the memorial an actual and stark choice. Their cases are equally strong, but in the end one will gather the force of consensus over the other.
Are these designs really ‘graceless and didactic kitsch’, as George Konrad suggests?3 No. The hand with people crawling on it and rising from a pond in Miami is graceless and didactic kitsch. These are not. What about the children’s garden proposed by Konrad? In fact, it’s a wonderful idea – for a Jewish memorial to the Holocaust. In fact, visitors will find a beautiful garden like this outside Daniel Libeskind’s breathtaking Jewish Museum on Lindenstrasse. There is also a garden and play space in Amsterdam at the former ‘Joodsmarkt’, as well as several others in Israel and America. To my mind, the best Jewish memorials to the Holocaust always remember the children murdered by creating play space for those now living blessedly free and unharmed. But a place that takes such happy relief in the squeals and laughter of living children will not suffice as a German memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews. As Jews, we do our best to bring joy into our children’s lives. As Germans, you must recognize the impossibility of compensating murder with such play.
The decision to go forward, even if it is made for wrongheaded reasons, has also created its own set of political realities, no less consequential for all their political logic. The only thing worse than making the monument now would be to reverse course and deliberately choose not to make it. The unwelcome guest of Holocaust memory has already been invited to Germany’s millenial party. To disinvite this guest now, as unpopular as he may be, would give grave offence to the memory of all whom this guest represents.
Instead, I strongly urge the organizers to choose between the extraordinary designs of Gesine Weinmiller and Peter Eisenman/Richard Serra. Build the memorial and give the public a choice, even an imperfect choice: let them choose to remember what Germany once did to the Jews of Europe by coming to the memorial or by staying at home, by remembering alone, or in the company of others. Let the people decide whether to animate such a site with their visits, with their shame, their sorrow, or their contempt. Or let the people abandon this memorial altogether, making it a victim of their not-so-benign neglect. Then let the public decide just how hollow or how substantial a gesture this memorial is, whether of not any memory can ever be more than a ritual gesture to an unredeemble past.
James E. Young is Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and author, most recently, of The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New York (Yale University Press) 1993.

This text was first published in German in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeiting, 2-1-1998.