Yes, some of these tributes are repulsive.
“It was this drought, this tearlessness that brought those who could afford it to Schmuh’s Onion Cellar, where the host handed them a little chopping board–pig or fish–a paring knife for eighty pfennigs, and for twelve marks an ordinary, field-, garden-, and kitchen-variety onion, and induced them to cut their onions smaller and smaller until the juice – what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it?”
– Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
It is time to step back and take an accounting: Where does all this history and its telling lead, to what kinds of knowledge, to what ends?
-James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture.
(My September 11, 2001 story, by the way: I was sitting in Italian class. Our teacher came in, late, and told us that New York had been attacked. Class was canceled. We all walked around campus, looking for televisions, and then we received the official announcement that classes were canceled for the day. I called my parents, and I remember asking them if they knew what had happened. A non-story, in other words–it took a long, long time for the scope of the attack to sink in.)
I’m of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I wish we saw this kind of mass mourning around disasters like Katrina; maybe then the survivors wouldn’t still be homeless. It’s good that people have empathy, and good that they grieve the loss of a bunch of people they never met.
On the other hand, the weeping meercat is less of a credit to the strength of human generosity. Kyso K is right about the tendency to overidentify with tragedies, particularly tragedies that don’t raise nagging questions of complicity or moral failure in the aftermath–at least, not in the eyes of the secondhand mourner. Grief removed from the messiness of pain can be deeply satisfying.
One of the other catastrophes–if it’s not euphemistic to call it that–whose memorials are so fraught are Holocaust memorials, particularly the ones raised in countries that were complicit to some degree. How do you memorialize the dead without appropriating their grief? How do you admit your complicity and perform an elegiac rite at once? How do you admit your distance without insulating the viewer? Is it possible to memorialize a hideous crime through a piece of artwork? How do you communicate chaos, brutality, and destruction? How do you perfect a symbol without confusing the symbol with reality?
As James E. Young puts it,
Moreover, what further distinguishes these [post-Holocaust] artists from their parents’ generation is their categorical rejection of art’s traditional redemptory function in the face of catastrophe. For these artists, the notion that such suffering might be redeemed by its aesthetic reflection, or that the terrible void left behind by the murder of Europe’s Jews might be compensated by a nation’s memorial forms is simply intolerable on both ethical and historical grounds. At the ethical level, this generation believes that squeezing beauty or pleasure from such events afterwards is not so much a benign reflection of the crime as it is an extension of it. At the historical level, these artists find that the aesthetic, religious, and political linking of destruction and redemption may actually have justified such terror in the killers’ minds.
The question of memorial becomes more complex when the builders are the perpetrators (Slight digression, I know, but I love this man. Go read the rest of the article):
Nonetheless, Holocaust memorial-work in Germany today remains a tortured, self-reflective, even paralyzing preoccupation. Every monument, at every turn, is endlessly scrutinized, explicated, and debated. Artistic, ethical, and historical questions occupy design juries to an extent unknown in other countries. Germany’s ongoing “Denkmal-Arbeit” simultaneously displaces and constitutes the object of memory. Though some might see such absorption in the process of memorial-building as an evasion of memory, it may also be true that the surest engagement with memory lies in its perpetual irresolution. In fact, the best German memorial to the Fascist era and its victims may not be a single memorial at all–but simply the never-to-be resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to do it, in whose name, and to what end. Instead of a fixed figure for memory, the debate itself–perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions–might be enshrined.
Young goes on to make the point that we memorialize success and martyrdom, but virtually never complicity, culpability or failure. Those tragedies we prefer not to think about.
Young was actually part of the September 11 memorial committee, and he had this to say about–
Okay, first he had this to say:
There were probably 30 or 40 I thought were really interesting, though none jumped out right away as ‘the one.’ And there were some that obviously weren’t going anywhere, that had crashing planes, big apples, a big telephone with 911 on it. Some were drawn at people’s kitchen tables, and I love that idea.
But he also had this to say:
[The families] wanted a place where they could mourn personally, as opposed to publicly. That was a tension built into the process – and I’m not saying a bad tension – between the personal side, of families needing to mourn, and the nation’s need to tell a story about this event. Where does one end and the other begin? For many family members to this day, this site is only a big cemetery and they would like to leave it that way…I say, and I did say, that cities are built on regeneration and renewal. Not to diminish the scale of 3,000 people killed, but if you set aside space for every person ever killed, you’d have no city left. We won’t bury it, but we’ll build back into it the recognition of what happened here, and the terrible loss. Otherwise you leave this huge gaping hole, which is to leave it as the hijackers gave it to us, and I think then you end up memorializing their deed.