Remembering the Holocaust through Art and Architecture - Hannah Rozenberg

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Remembering the Holocaust through Art and Architecture Â

Hannah Rozenberg Supervisor: Gerry Adler

February 2014 Kent School of Architecture Dissertation AR597


8789 WORDS.


Abstract

The concept of memory has evolved, in architecture, throughout history. After the Second World War, the commitment to remembrance and fear of forgetting progressed in many countries. This was obvious as artists adopted different approaches to the representation of the Holocaust. The first part of the dissertation explores the various reactions to the Holocaust, through art and architecture. In the context of architecture, memorials emerged in order to ensure the memory of the Holocaust. After categorizing the various kinds of existing Holocaust memorials, this research is narrowed down by focusing on two types: the counter-monuments and those referred to, here, as ‘realistic monuments’. Counter-monuments are monuments or spaces which represent the effect of the Holocaust on the present day. Using absence and voids, counter-artists express the feelings of a society which witnessed or came after the loss of a people. On the other hand, realistic monuments try to represent the reality of the Holocaust by using historical documents dating from the period. The realistic artists aim to illustrate what existed before the destruction that occurred during the Holocaust. The analysis of a few case studies, representative of both categories, compares and contrasts countermonuments with realistic ones.



Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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Chapter I: Reacting to the Holocaust through art

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Chapter II: Representing objects in Holocaust Memorials

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Chapter III: Using existing structures in Holocaust Memorials

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Chapter IV: Ensuring everlasting memory of the Holocaust

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through fleeting memorials Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Illustration Credits

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the people who helped me throughout the development of my dissertation. I would like to thank my supervisor, Gerry Adler. Having worked with him in the past when he was my essay tutor, I had experienced his extensive knowledge in history and his valuable advice about research and writing. I could not have hoped for better guidance. Since the beginning of the study, he has been willing to answer my questions and counsel me on how to improve and continue my dissertation. I would also like to acknowledge the students with whom I attended the dissertation meetings. Sharing my ideas and receiving others’ insights was helpful and influenced my research. Finally, I would like to thank my close friends and family who have shown their constant interest in my research and provided advice and encouragement throughout this process.



Introduction ‘We may live without her [architecture], and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her.’ 1 -John Ruskin2

Creating buildings for a commemorative reason is one of the oldest purposes of architecture. Surviving examples, built in antiquity to commemorate someone or something can still be admired today. For example, in 312, the Arch of Constantine was built in Rome to commemorate Constantine’s3 victory over Maxentius4; the monument is now an often-visited tourist attraction. However, although these ‘intentional monuments’ have survived, the subjects which they honour are sometimes forgotten over time. This is the case of the Roman mausoleum at Glanum or the arch at Orange, both located in Provence-Alpes-Côtes d’Azur, France, which were probably built to celebrate a victory but no one is certain of the exact events that inspired their construction.5 The concept of memory in architecture developed into three main phases over time. Its first manifestation was in the eighteenth century, as an element in the aesthetics of architecture; it was considered to be a principle of idea association. According to this theory, when one uses one’s memory, an association is made between what is seen and something learned in the past. The more associations made, the more pleasure one gets from these observations.6 For instance, if a person learns the principles of the classic orders in school and later visits the Pantheon in Paris, he will get more pleasure out of the visit because of the associations made with knowledge from the past. During the nineteenth century, the concept of memory evolved within architecture. Memory was considered to be contained in the buildings; they were regarded as the trace of human endeavour, both mental and manual. Architecture did not relate just to the past but was an obligation of the present

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1849), 233. Cited in Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings, A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 206. 2 John Ruskin (1819-1900): English art critic and social reformer. He believed in the Gothic He devoted part of his life to social and economic improvements, defending the recovery of medieval piety and Christian ideals and against the scientific advancement. 3 Constantine (c. 273-337): Roman emperor from 306 to 337, he is known as Constantine the Great. He was the first Roman emperor to be converted to Christianity and made Christianity a state religion in 324. 4 Maxentius (c. 278-312): Roman emperor from 306 to 312. 5 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings, A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 206. 6 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings, A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 209-210. 1

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towards the future.7 John Ruskin was an art critic who felt this to be true: ‘When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for the present delight, not for the present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us…’8 For example, when William Henry Barlow9 started designing St Pancras Station in 1862, he would have had in mind the effect his building would have on future generations and the memory that would be preserved by the building. Indeed, the station is part of a heritage testifying to what constituted 19th-century English architecture. The last phase of architectural memory, dating from the final third of the twentieth century, is the one which I will use to consider the concept of memory in this essay. After the Second World War, the commitment to remembrance and fear of forgetting has emerged in many countries. Indeed, enormous investments were made in the creation of museums, the analysis of archives, the undertaking of historical studies and the development of heritage programs.10 The concept of memory in architecture was made concrete in designs that reminded the public of events or people from the past. For instance, the Vietnam memorial, built in Washington in 1982 and designed by Maya Lin11, was created to keep the memory of the Vietnam War alive. The type of building which emerged during that period and that I will discuss in my writing is the memorial. From the Latin memoria, ‘memory’ and memorialis, ‘serving as a reminder’, a memorial is directly related to the concept of memory in architecture and is defined as ‘a statue or structure established to remind people of a person or event.’12 Memorials have various purposes. Besides commemorating certain events or people, they honour them and tell their stories. They can also serve as a place to go to grieve, a means of communicating a message to the visiting public and finally help to maintain awareness of historical events which, due to their nature, should never be forgotten nor ever repeated. This is the case of the Holocaust memorials which were built for various reasons; one of which is to ensure that such events will never happen again. Indeed, the Holocaust has often been represented in architecture, as well as in other types of art such as painting, cinema, literature, sculpture, etc. Using different types of media, artists from many parts of the world and at different times, have used the Holocaust as a subject in art.

Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings, A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 211. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1849), 171. Cited in Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings, A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 211. 9 William Henry Barlow (1812-1902): English civil engineer, he was particularly associated with railway and engineering projects, including St Pancras Station. 10 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings, A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 215. 11 Maya Lin (b. 1959): American architectural designer and artist, she is known for he work in landscape art and sculpture. 12 Oxford Dictionaries. ‘Definition of memorial in English’. Last modified in 2013. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/memorial 7 8

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In this essay, I will discuss the numerous reactions which artists have had towards the Holocaust. I will then limit my research to two contrasted methods that architects have used in designing Holocaust memorials.

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Chapter I: Reacting to the Holocaust through art ‘Not whether but how it [the Holocaust] should be represented.’13 -Thomas Trezise14

Different ways of reacting to the Holocaust through art have emerged since 1945. Each one of these approaches can be defended as well as criticized. The first way to react is to not react at all. Indeed, denying art after the Holocaust is an idea shared by people who think that the post-Holocaust world needs to be confronted with an artistic silence, marking a break with civilization. One of the most famous quotes on Holocaust representation is Theodor Adorno’s 15 statement that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ 16 According to the German philosopher, the Holocaust is a period in history so terrible that to try to represent it in art can only lead to a minimization of the extent and horror of the events of that time.17 Also, one definition of art is ‘the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination… producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power’18; therefore, art brings pleasure to its public. The fact that art representing historical atrocities can bring pleasure to its spectators is unacceptable to many artists who will not use the Holocaust as their subject of art. However, to ignore the representation of the Holocaust can lead to its being forgotten or worse, its repetition. A second option, which Adorno proposes in his later writings, is to represent the Holocaust by denying the link of art to beauty and instead, consider art as a mode of expression. In this case, art will serve to illustrate through words, edifices or images, terrible events from the past and will bring no pleasure to those who observe it. Adorno’s own taste gravitated towards modernism, avoiding realism in favour of abstraction. This new art form, defined as the ‘Art of suffering’, was adopted in the mid-20th

Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 43. 14 Thomas Trezise: Professor specialized in French literature, contemporary literary theory, recent Continental philosophy and Holocaust studies. 15 Theodor Adorno (1903-1969): German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist, he was a member of the Frankfurt School and argued that philosophical authoritarianism is inevitably oppressive and that all theories should be rejected. 16 Theodor Adorno, Prisms, Cultural Criticism and Society (Neville Spearman, 1953). Cited in Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 9-11. 17 Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 9-11. 18 Oxford Dictionaries. ‘Definition of art in English’. Last modified in 2013. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/art 13

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century, by abstract artists such as Morris Louis19 or Rico Lebrun20 who tried to express the feelings of horror and depict the atrocities from the past. Certain artists, survivors of the war (Samuel Bak21 or David Olere22), think that the Holocaust is absolutely unimaginable for people who did not live through it and should therefore not be represented in a realistic way. The ‘Art of suffering’ was also used by architects in the design of Holocaust memorials. For example, the deconstructivist architect Peter Eisenman23 designed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin, 2005), creating a space that deliberately provokes anxiety. The space is supposed to be ‘strange’, Eisenman insisted, noting that ‘it should be both alluring and disturbing.’24 According to these artists, the Holocaust is impossible to depict and one can only attempt to symbolize the feelings of its memory.25

Figure 1 (top left): Louis Morris, Charred Journal: Firewritten V, 1951. Acrylic resin (Magna) on canvas, 86.4 x 66cm. The Jewish Museum, New York. [Painting]. Figure 2 (top right): Lebrun, Rico, Black Golgotha, 1957. Oil on canvas, 336 x 207 cm. Galleries, New York. [Painting].

Morris Louis (1912-1962): American painter, he formed an art movement with other Washington painters, that is known today as the Washington Color School. 20 Rico Lebrun (1900-1964): Italian-American painter and sculptor. 21 Samuel Bak (b. 1933): Israeli-American Jewish painter, he survived the Holocaust and uses that subject to create his paintings. 22 David Olère (1902-1985): Polish-born French painter and sculptor, he bases his paintings on his concentration camp experiences. 23 Peter Eisenman (b. 1932): American architect, author and art critic. 24 Peter Eisenman, ‘The Silence of Excess’ in Holocaust Memorial Berlin: Eisenman Architects (Baden: Lars Müller, 2005). Cited in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Building after Auschwitz, Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 176. 25 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Building after Auschwitz, Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 46-47. 19

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Figure 3 (top left): Bak, Samuel, The Family, 1974. Oil on canvas, 450 x 353 cm. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. [Painting]. Figure 4 (top right): Olere, David, Gassing, 1989. Oil on canvas, 131 x 162 cm. A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York. [Painting].

Figure 5: Eisenman Peter, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2005. Berlin. [Photograph of m emorial].

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On the other hand, many artists share the opinion that using abstraction to represent the Holocaust does not convey the magnitude of the horror of these events and may not communicate any particular meaning to the viewer. This is the reason why certain artists represent the Holocaust by portraying it in the most realistic way possible, using testimonies, documents and pictures from that time.26 This is the case, for example, of Shimon Attie27 who used period photographs for his installation ‘The Writing on the Wall’28, Claude Lanzman who interviewed survivors for his film ‘Shoah’29 or Margaret Bourke-White whose photographs of the extermination camps have been extensively exhibited and published.30

Figure 6 (left): Attie, Shimon, Joachimstrasse 11a 1933, 1992. Berlin. [Photograph of Memorial]. Figure 7 (right): Bourke-­‐White, Margaret, Inside Dormitories, Buchenwald, 1945. [Photograph].

However, the risk with this type of art is that it could result in a passive reaction from the public because the artist has already undertaken the work of narration. Another danger of realism is the production of images so extreme that they could lead to pornography of violence, giving pleasure to people who enjoy

Ernst Van Alphen, ‘Deadly Historians: Boltanski’s Intervention in Holocaust Historiography’ in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), 45-46. 27 Shimon Attie (b. 1957): American visual artist, he uses a variety of media, including photography, site-specific installation, performance, etc. 28 ‘The Writing on the Wall’, Berlin, 1991. 29 ‘Shoah’, New Yorker Films, 1985. Berel Lang ‘Second-Sight, Shimon Attie’s Recollection’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 25-28. 30 Mariane Hirsh, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’ in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), 217-218. 26

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images of horror.31 To avoid this, certain artists have decided to represent the holocaust in a metaphoric way. Indeed, like Art Spiegelman32 who produced a book, ‘Maus’,33 in which he tells the story of his parents using the metaphors of Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, some artists preferred to symbolize the facts of the Holocaust rather than represent them realistically.34

Figure 8: Spiegelman, Art, Breakdowns of Maus, 1991. [Strip cartoon].

A final way to react to the Holocaust through art is by using the absence, the void. Artists who adhere to this feel that the best way to remember the destruction of a people and mark their loss is to create a similar void in art.35 They do not aim to engender aesthetically pleasing art but do want to compel the public to remember, often by engaging them directly in their work.36 For instance, artists like Rachel Whiteread37 -who designed the Holocaust Memorial for the Judenplatz in Vienna, 2000- use the void,

Janet Wolff, ‘The Iconic and the Allusive, The Case for Beauty’ in Post-Holocaust Art in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 159-160. 32 Art Spiegelman (b. 1948): American cartoonish, editor and comics advocate. 33 ‘Maus’, Pantheon Books, 1991. 34 Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz ‘Introduction’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 3. 35 James Young ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 62. 36 Facing history and ourselves. ‘Counter-monuments’. Last modified in 2013. http://www2.facinghistory.org/campus/memorials.nsf/0/0e862768014d1fe985256e3e004f50e6 37 Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963): English artist, she produces a lot of sculptures, made from casts. 31

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the temporary and the notion of positive-negative in their designs of memorials to represent the emptiness resulting from the Holocaust.38 To summarize, five ways of responding to the Holocaust through art can be distinguished: the denial of art, the use of abstract art to create an ‘art of suffering’, the incorporation of historical documents in art in order to produce ‘realistic art’, the use of symbols to create ‘metaphoric art’ and finally, the integration of voids and absence, creating art that can be labeled ‘counter art’. In my discussion, I will develop the methods which are the most contrasted and interesting when considering the subject of architecture: realistic art and counter art. Indeed, these two approaches are represented in much of the architecture of the Holocaust memorials yet are very different from one another. However, certain memorials from the two different categories have characteristics in common; therefore, I will attempt to contrast and compare a few examples of each.

James Young ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 59-61. 38

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Chapter II: Representing objects in Holocaust Memorials ‘By definition there must be a difference between a representation and its object un-represented, with the former adding its own version to the ‘original’ it represents.’39 -Berel Lang40

The artists Micha Ullman41 and Rachel Whiteread have used the themes of books and negative spaces in order to express the void left after the Holocaust. Shaping and spatializing the absence, both memorials are considered, in this dissertation, to be counter monuments. Other types of objects were chosen by the artists Renatah Stih 42, Frieder Schnok43 and Shimon Attie who created more ‘realistic’ memorials using historical texts and pictures, from that period, in their commemoration of the Holocaust. The city of Berlin invited the Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman to design a monument commemorating the Nazi book burning of May 1933, for Berlin’s Bebelplatz. In response to this demand, the artist designed the Bibliothek (Library) also called The Empty Library, which was built in 1995. It is an underground room filled with empty shelves (meant to hold twenty thousand volumes) visible through a ghostly-white glass panel on the ground level of the Bebelplatz. The cobblestone square is otherwise completely empty except for the people who stand there and peer down to admire the sculpture. The buildings around the square are reflected in the glass below. Some of these buildings harboured certain perpetrators of this terrible event such as the professors of the Frederick William University (now called Humboldt University). The sculpture is brought to the viewer’s attention by the light emanating from its neon fixtures, day and night. This illumination calls to mind the fires that destroyed the books and reflects the spectator who peers into the library window. Therefore, one sees oneself in the monument, drawn into the actions of the past and confronted by the emptiness of the present.44 Ullman expressed

Berel Lang, Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers Inc, 2000), 51. Berel Lang: Professor of Philisophy Emeritus, author and editor. 41 Micha Ullman (b. 1939): Israeli sculptor and professor of art. 42 Renatha Stih: German artist, Professor at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences and curator at the Museum of Art Ford Lauderdale. 43 Frieder Schnock: German artist, art historian, lecturer, curator and art consultant. 44 James Young ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 69. 39 40

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Figure 9: Ullman Micha, Bibliothek, 1995. Berlin. [Photograph of Memorial].

this intention in an interview with the author Werner Zellien: ‘I create places that are empty and allow self-encounter. They force us to remember.’45 A simple steel tablet tells of the events that took place there and quotes Heinrich Heine’s46 famously prescient words: ‘Where books are burned, so one day will people be burned as well.’47 Rather than representing the destruction of the Holocaust, Micha Ullman’s memorial expresses the void resulting from the genocide. The representation of the missing, burned books can be understood literally as the commemoration of the event of May 1933, but can also be read metaphorically to be the memory of the extermination of the ‘people of the book’.

Interview by Werner Zellien, Micha Ullman, Die Bibliothek: August-Bebel-Platz, Berlin (Verlag Der Kunst, 2000). Cited in James Young ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 70. 46 Heinrich Heine (1797-1856): German poet, journalist and literary critic, he is famous for his early lyric poetry and his radical political views. 47 Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A tragedy [Translated as True Religion, Graham Ward] (Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 142. Cited in James Young ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 70. 45

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This was the idea expressed in Rachel Whiteread’s memorial Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, built in 2000 in Vienna. According to this English artist, the Jewish people shared a relationship through the book (the Bible) which is why she used the same object as Ullman for her monument.48 As does the Empty Library, Whiteread’s counter-monument expresses the void and the absence caused by the Holocaust. These two memorials are similar yet different. Whiteread’s monument replaces the depth of Ullman’s sculpture by height, the absence by presence and shelves by books.49 The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial is a positive cast of the space around books, in an anonymous library of which the interior is turned inside out. It is a white cube constructed from multiple cast slabs of creamy grey concrete.50 Its exterior is entirely made of the textured negative spaces created by the rows of books. The wall facing the square includes a double door, also cast inside out and inaccessible because of the lack of both hinges and handles. Like Bibliothek, the location of the memorial is important. Indeed, the Judenplatz is associated with numerous anti-Semitic persecutions such as the burning of a synagogue during a pogrom in 1421 and the killing of hundreds of Jews in the autos-da-fe that ensued.51 In the same way as Ullman, the artist aimed to represent the void that the Holocaust left behind rather than images of the destruction: ‘Rather than a tomb or a cenotaph’, the American artist and art critic, Robert Storr52, wrote, Whiteread’s work is the solid shape of an intangible absence –of a gap in a nation’s identity, and a hollow at a city’s heart. Using an aesthetic language that speaks simultaneously to tradition and to the future, Whiteread in this way respectfully symbolizes a world whose irrevocable disappearance can never be wholly grasped by those who did not experience it, but whose most lasting monuments are the books written by Austrian Jews before, during and In the aftermath of the catastrophe brought down on them. 53

Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, Aesthetic pleasure in Holocaust representation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 90. 49 Rebecca Comay ‘Memory Block, Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial in Vienna’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 264. 50 James E.Young, ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 70-71. 51 James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 109. 52 Robert Storr (b. 1950): American painter, curator, art critic and painter. 53 Robert Storr, Remains of the Day- English artists (Art in America, 1999), 109. Cited in James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 112. 48

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Figure 10 (opposite): Whiteread Rachel, Detail of Holocaust Memorial, Judenplatz, 2000. Berlin. [Photograph of Memorial].

Both of these memorials use an object as a means to represent the absence of the murdered Jews. In a completely different way, the German artists Renatah Stih and Frieder Schnock represented objects from everyday life to commemorate the escaped, deported and murdered Jewish dwellers of the Bayerische Viertel neighbourhood.

Figure 11: Whiteread Rachel, Detail of Holocaust Memorial, Judenplatz, 2000. Berlin. [Photograph of Memorial].

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This charming quarter is located in Berlin’s Schoeneberg district and was home to sixteen thousand German Jews before the war. The artists found this neighbourhood to be very peaceful with no visible signs of the war’s destruction and no reminders of its former Jewish inhabitants. Therefore, in 1993, they proposed the installation of eighty signposts spread in and around the Bayerische Platz. Each post includes a simple image of an everyday object on one side and on the other side a short text taken from Germany’s anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s and 1940s. For instance, on one post, a red park bench on a green lawn is shown and on the other side one can read the words ‘Juden dürfen am Bayerischen Platz nur die gelb markierten Sitzbänke benutzen’ [On the Bavarian Place, Jews may sit only on the yellow benches] (1939). Or a pair of swimming trunks are accompanied by ‘Berliner Badeanstalten und Schwimmbäder dürfen von Juden nicht bereten’ [Baths and swimming pools in Berlin are closed to Jews] (3 December 1938). Another sign shows a black and white rotary telephone dial on one side and ‘Telefonanschlusse von Juden werden von der Post gekündigt’ [Telephone lines to Jewish households will be cut off] (29 July 1940) on the other side. With the approval of the Berlin Senate, Stih and Schnock put their signs up throughout the neighbourhood without announcing this to the inhabitants. This led to a flood of complaints and calls to the police that Neo-Nazis had invaded the sector with antiSemitic signs. Reassured that the public had noticed the change, the artists pointed out that the same laws had been posted without warning at the time of the Second World War but had provoked no reactions from the Germans. As part of the cityscape, the signposts ‘infiltrate the daily lives of Berliners’ Stih has explained, no less than the publicly posted anti-Semitic laws were part of the Jews’ daily lives between 1933 and 1945. This is the idea shared by the English and Judaic Studies Professor, James Young54: ‘Where past citizens once navigated their lives according to these laws, present citizens could now navigate their lives according to the memory of such laws.’55 One of the two artists’ goals, in placing the posts at different locations throughout the area so that passersby can see one sign after the other, is to illustrate just how much the laws increasingly excluded Jews from society. This ‘spread out memorial’ reminds people that the persecution and extermination of the Jews did not happen all at once but over time while their neighbours often looked the other way.56 Since the memorial uses historical texts dating from the Holocaust, it is considered to be a realistic memorial. Berlin’s Schoeneberg District brings the past into the present, presenting historical facts from the Holocaust rather than representing its result as do Ullman’s and Whiteread’s memorials.

James Young: American Professor of English, Hebrew and Judaic Studies, author and art critic. James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 116. 56 James E.Young, ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 73-74. 54 55

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Figure 12: Stih Renatha and Schnok Frieder, Berlin Schoenberg district – Juden mussen Schmuck Gegenstande aus Gold, Silber, Platin und Perlen [Jewerly, items made of gold, silver, or platinum, and pearls belonging to Jews are to be turned to the State], February 21, 1939-­‐, 1993. Berlin. [Photograph of installation].

Finally, in Brick by Brick, installed just outside the doors of the Cologne Art Fair in November 1995, the artist Shimon Attie also used the representation of objects as a way to remember the Holocaust. The objects are similar to the ones used by Stih and Schnok as they are everyday-life objects but they were presented by the projection of pictures. Indeed, the objects, from turn-of-the-century Germany, were projected onto the imposing brick columns of the Rheinhalle, designed by Adolf Abel, in 1926. The nine pictures included a Singer sewing machine, a late nineteenth-century commode, a Bauhaus menorah57, a Bauhaus dining-room table, an overstuffed armchair, and four other objects from the same period. Their precise provenance is not announced but these objects represent the common furnishings of a traditional Jewish home. Again, the location of the temporary installation had its importance: built in 1923, the Cologne Art Fair Building hosted fairs until the Nazis came to power in 1933. It then became an examination centre for German army recruits as well as a great lecture hall for the ideological ‘reeducation’ of German teachers. In 1939, the government took possession of the building and turned it first into a prisoner-of-war camp and then, in 1940, into a gathering and deportation site for Sinti and Roma people. It also served, later on, as a transfer stop for Jews about to be deported on trains departing from the nearby Deutz-Tief station. Finally, the building was used as a warehouse for confiscated furniture and other Jewish household belongings. Attie planted the seeds of doubt throughout the memorial by forcing the spectator to wonder about the origin of everyday-life objects. Indeed, even perfectly ‘innocuous’ pieces may recall the voices of the dead.58

Menorah: candelabra with seven or nine lights that is used in Jewish worship. James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 79-81. 57 58

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Figure 13: Attie, Shimon, Brick by Brick, 1995. Cologne. [Photograph of installation].

While Berlin Schoenberg district uses signs to represent what was happening during the war, Brick by brick uses them to remind us of what existed before the Holocaust but was then destroyed. Both of these realistic monuments use historical documents or the representation of objects to bring the past into the present, reminding us of what is no more, because of the Holocaust. In a different way, objects are also used in the two counter-monuments, in order to represent the feeling of absence that haunts us nowadays because of the past genocide.

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Chapter III: Using existing structures in Holocaust Memorials ‘Lieux de mémoire [places of remembrance] are created by the interaction between memory and history… Without an intent to remember, lieux de mémoire would be lieux d’histoire [places of history].’59 -Pierre Nora60

Whereas certain artists like Micha Ullman and Rachel Whiteread designed new constructions in order to commemorate the Holocaust, others decided to use existing structures which had a connection with the Second World War. This is the case of Horst Hoheisel61 and Jochen Gerz62 who designed very innovative types of countermonuments, using Berlin’s existing structures. Christian Boltanski 63 and Shimon Attie worked in a similar way by using existing German street walls to create their memorials. Whereas Hoheisel’s and Gerz’s projects represent the absence through negative spaces (as do Ullman’s and Whiteread’s counter monuments), Boltanski and Attie used historical documents in order to create their memorials, similar to the way in which Stih and Shnock created theirs. In April 1990, Jochen Gerz was invited to be a guest professor at the School of Fine Arts in Saarbrucken. In a studio class he devoted to conceptual monuments, the German artist asked his students to participate in a secret memory project. Gerz’s plan was to accompany eight students, at night-time, to the cobblestone square leading to the Saarbrucker Schloss, former headquarters of the Gestapo during the war. This site had also been used during the public humiliation of the Jews of Saarbrucken, on Kristallnacht (9th-10th November 1938) and it was from this same square that the town’s remaining Jews were deported to Gurs in southern France on October 22nd, 1940. Pretending to have a friends’ gathering on the square, the students stealthily removed seventy cobblestones from it and replaced them with like-size stones which they had brought along. Each stone was fitted

Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire (New Jersey: New Harwood Publishers), 18-19. Cited in James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 62. 60 Pierre Nora (b. 1931): French historian, he is known for his work on French identity and memory. 61 Horst Hoheisel (b. 1944): Polish artist, he is known for his unusal shapes of monuments, often called ‘counter-monuments’. 62 Jochen Gerz (b. 1940): German conceptual artist, he uses different types of medias as well as performances for his pieces of art. 63 Christian Boltanski (b. 1944): French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker. 59

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underneath with a pin in order to be located later with a metal detector. Meanwhile, other students from the class had the assignment of researching the names and locations of every former Jewish cemetery in Germany now abandoned, demolished or missing. The names of these cemeteries were then engraved on the original cobblestones from the site, one by one. Once this was finished the stones were put back into place, face down, thus leaving no trace of the entire operation. Because the memorial was not visible, for it to be thought of as one, depended on the knowledge of its existence becoming public. Once the operation was revealed, through the media, visitors started to look for the seventy stones and began to wonder where they were standing in relation to the memorial. Were they walking on it? Was it really there at all?

Figure 14 (top): Gerz Jochen, The Invisible Monument, 1990. Saarbrucken. [Photograph of the memorial site]. Figure 15 (bottom): Gerz Jochen, Detail of a stone from The Invisible Monument, 1990. Saarbrucken. [Photograph of the detail].

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The artistic concept was that the spectator, in his search for the memorial, becomes part of it. Because the monument is invisible, the only observable forms in the square are the visitors.64 The absence of any visible shapes in the memorial can be read as a metaphor representing the absence of the Jews in the city after the genocide. The hunt for the indistinguishable curved stones can also be compared to the search for the missing Jews after the war. Jochen Gerz was not the only one with the idea of creating an ‘invisible monument’. In 1995, a competition for a German ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, located in Berlin, received hundreds of submissions. Among them, Horst Hoheisel’s proposal attracted much attention. The German artist, already famous for his negative form monuments, submitted a simple, if provocative, solution to the competition: blow up the Brandenburger Tor, grind its stone into dust, scatter the remains over its former site and cover the memorial space with granite plates. The artist’s idea was to honour the memory of a destroyed people with a destroyed edifice. Indeed, rather than commemorating the murdered Jews with the construction of another monument, Hoheisel thought of marking one destruction with another. While most artists filled in the void left by a murdered people with a positive form, this artist wanted to create an empty space representing the now absent people. Of course, the proposal was not accepted by the German government but the idea did attract much notice. According to Hoheisel, when a monument is completed, the work of remembrance is also finished and this brings to a close the commemoration of a specific historical period.65 This is similar to the idea expressed by Architecture Professor Adrian Forty66: ‘In general, within the Aristotelian tradition, if objects are made to stand for memory, their decay or destruction (as in the act of iconoclasm) is taken to imply forgetting.’67

Figure 16: Hoheisel Horst, Proposal for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 1995. Berlin. [Photograph of model].

James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 140. 65 James E.Young ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 90-93. 66 Adrien Forty: English Professor of Architectural History and writer. 67 Forty Adrian, The Art of Forgetting (Oxford: Oxford Berg, 1999), 4. 64

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While Gerz’s memorial was created without permission and Hoheisel’s proposal was rejected, both artists suggested establishing a space within the landscape to be filled with the memory of those who come to remember Europe’s murdered Jews instead of concretizing and displacing the memory of these dead people. The visitors are directly engaged into the act of memorialisation, whether it be by looking for the memorial, trying to understand or reacting to it with certain feelings. Whilst Horst Hoheisel’s idea was to demolish an existing structure to create a memorial, Christian Boltanski did the opposite: he used an already destroyed site to remind people of what used to be there. Indeed, while walking through Berlin’s former Jewish Quarter, the French artist’s attention was attracted by an unusual gap between two buildings. Researching the location, he found that the building at 15 and 16 Grosse Hamburgerstrasse had been destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945 and was never rebuilt. In his project, known as Missing House which he put together for the October 1990 Berlin exhibition Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit [The Finiteness of Freedom], the artist recounted the lives of all of the people who had lived in this ‘missing house’ between 1930 and 1945, including Jewish Germans who had been deported as well as non-Jewish Germans who had been allotted the Jews’ homes. During his research, he found family photographs, letters, children’s drawings, ration books and other remnants of these people’s lives. The documents were photocopied and put, together with maps of the neighbourhood, in archival boxes. At the site of the missing house, on the white-plastered walls of the surrounding buildings, he hung nameplates containing a bit of information about each of the former inhabitants so that these now-missing dwellers could be identified. An introductory board explains to visitors at the site the meaning of these plaques. The artist also created a series of glass cases containing more extensive information about the former inhabitants. These were exhibited elsewhere in the city as temporary displays.68 The void between the two houses had incited Boltanski to fill it with remembrance following what he discovered during his research and his goal was that it would lead to the same reflexion when visited by others. The memorial could be considered as a counter-memorial because of the use of void and absence representing the missing occupants of the vanished house. Indeed, as with the two previous counter-monuments, the Missing House is an open, empty site where visitors are invited to fill the space with the remembrance of the murdered Jews. However, the artist used historical documents during the process of the memorial’s conception. In his search through historical documents, Boltanski was as much an artist as a historian. Indeed, the writer and Professor John Czaplicka69 claims that Missing House is ‘a work of history as well as a work of art’.70

Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, Aesthetic pleasure in Holocaust representation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 145-147. 69 John Czaplicka: American independent scholar, his publications have dealt with the pictoral iagery of Berlin, Austrian exile artists, Americanism in Germany and commemoratve practices une urvan history in East-Central Europe. 70 John Czaplicka ‘History, Aesthetics and Commemorative Practice in Berlin’ in New German Critique 65 (Spring-Summer 1995), 167. Cited in Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, Aesthetic pleasure in Holocaust representation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 147. 68

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Figure 17: Boltanski, C hristian, The Missing House, 1990. Berlin. [Photograph of the m emorial].

This comment could apply to Christian Boltanski’s work as well as Simon Attie’s. Indeed, in order to create ‘The Writing on the Wall’, Attie also undertook archival research. Both memorials use the association of historical documents with meaningful locations to recall the Jewish genocide. While Christian Boltanski researched the past of one specific house, Shimon Attie looked for information about a Berlin neighbourhood known as Scheunenviertel.

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‘After finishing art school in San Francisco, I came to Berlin in the summer of 1991,’ the artist Shimon Attie wrote in his introduction to a book about The Writing on the Wall. Walking the streets of the city that summer, I felt myself asking over and over again, where are all the missing people? What has become of the Jewish culture and community which had once been at home here? I felt the presence of this lost community very strongly, even though so few visible traces of it remained’.71 Stih and Schnok located memorials around the Schoeneberg district because nothing remained there to remind the public of its past Jewish inhabitants. Shimon Attie created memorials around the Scheunenviertel for the same reason. In Berlin’s archives, he found dozens of photographs of that neighbourhood from the 1920s and 1930s and was able to locate, quite precisely, the places where these pictures had been taken. Shimon Attie then repopulated the Scheunenviertel district in Berlin with the Jews who had once lived there. In the same way as the images of furniture were projected in Brick by Brick, he projected the old photographs onto the identical or close addresses at which they had been taken earlier in the century. The artist ‘wanted to give this invisible past a voice, to bring it to light, if only for some brief moments’.72 Therefore, for a year, Attie projected the images of Jewish life before the war back into present-day Berlin. Each installation lasted for one or two evenings, visible to current inhabitants, street traffic and passersby. By bringing the past into the present, the artist says he wanted ‘to peel back the wallpaper of today and reveal the history buried underneath’.73 The pictures seemed to take on a realistic form, in particular at the buildings’ doorways where the former Jewish residents appeared to be stepping out of a third dimension. Some, like the dweller standing in the doorway at Joachimstrasse 2, seemed to be caught suprised by both the original photographer and later, by us. Others, like the salesman of religious books, at the corner of what used to be the Grenadierstrasse and Schendelgasse, look as if they have been interrupted by the photographer or by the present- day spectator.

Shimon Attie, Writing on the wall project, 9. Cited in James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 67. 72 Shimon Attie, Writing on the wall project, 9. Cited in James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 67. 73 Shimon Attie. Cited in Chazan, Ghosts of the Ghettos. Cited in James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 70. 71

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Figure 18: Attie, Shimon, The Writing on the Wall, 1991. Berlin. [Photograph of the m emorial].

Using pictures of specific people, Attie’s aim was not to commemorate only the lives of these people but the lives of the murdered Jews in general. As the French literary theorist, Roland Barthes74, expresses in his writings, photography is always about loss, about the absence of what was once real in front of the camera. ‘When we define the Photograph as a motionless image,’ Barthes writes, ‘this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.’ 75 Indeed, in both Attie and Boltsanki’s memorials, the photographs remind us of who used to live there but also points to the fact that these people now only exist on prints, motionless and no longer alive. Michael Andre Bernstein76, an English and Comparative Literature Professor, thinks that photographs can bring pleasure as well as sadness:

Roland Barthes (1915-1980): French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, semiotician and critic. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage Books), 8. 76 Michael Andre Bernstein (1947-2011): Austrian Professor of English and Comparative Literature. 74 75

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To look at a photograph is to experience a certain sorrow at the sheer fact of loss and separation, curiously mingled with the pleasure of recognizing that what no longer exists, has been, if not restored to us, then at least memorialized for us, fixed in the stasis of an image now forever available to our gaze.77 Indeed, the photographs projected in both memorials, cause sadness and pleasure at the same time; sadness for the absence of the people represented in the pictures and pleasure for the beauty of the installation. Shimon Attie wanted to keep the mixture between sorrow and pleasure in balance so that the beauty of the image itself would never redeem the pain of the Jews’ loss.78 In both realistic monuments, Missing House and The Writing on the Wall, the artist shows us the past, through names or pictures, integrated into the present. Although Missing House is focused on a few people about whom Boltanski has information, the memorial leaves one with a less personal and more detached feeling than does The Writing on the Wall. Indeed, because it does not confront the spectator with human faces, as opposed to Attie’s projections, the plaques on the white walls engender less thought as to the long-gone people’s stories.79 Richard Dorment80, the Daily Telegraph’s chief art critic, comments on Boltanski’s work: ‘names in themselves just don’t have the resonance that photographs or articles of clothing do. [...] Here, the setting is perfect, the idea promising, only the magic just doesn’t work’.81 These four case studies demonstrate that memorials can be designed through the use of archival pictures, extensive historical research, hidden information -or none of the above. Gerz’s and Hoheisel’s memorials attempt to use the existing space to engage the public directly by touching on their emotions. Boltanski and Attie also used existing structures as supports to exhibit the results of their research.

Michael Andre Bernstein, Shimon Attie, 6. Cited in James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 72. 78 Berel Lang, ‘Second-Sight, Shimon Attie’s Recollection’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 22-29. 79 Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, Aesthetic pleasure in Holocaust representation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 145-147. 80 Richard Dorment (b. 1946): American art critic, he organizes art exhibitions and was named Critic of the Year in the British Press Awards for 2000. 81 Richard Dorment, Wrong Number: Christian Boltanski’s Installation of 3000 Telephone Directories Is Intriguing and Beautiful, but Magic is Lacking (London: Daily Telepgraph, April 17 2002), 19. Cited in Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, Aesthetic pleasure in Holocaust representation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 146. 77

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Chapter IV: Ensuring everlasting memory of the Holocaust through fleeting memorials

‘Memory is important, letting that memory be sufficiently ambiguous and open-ended so that others can inhabit the space, can imbue the forms with their own memory.’82 -James Ingo Freed83

Most of the memorials discussed in this dissertation, such as the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna or The Bibliothek in Berlin, were designed to endure the ravages of time, the assumption being that the memory of the subjects which they honour will be as everlasting as their concrete memorials. However, some artists contend that the rigidity of a monument can lead to its demise over time. A memorial, created at a specific time and observed many years later, can appear archaic or irrelevant. Also, like Horst Hoheisel‘s concept for the Brandenburger Tor proposal, other artists share the idea that only an unfinished memorial can ensure the everlasting Holocaust memory. This is the case for Jochen Gerz, Esther Shalev84 and Norbert Radermacher85 who feel that changing the form of a memorial over time and space, incites the public to remember in a different and more efficient way. These artists created varied types of memorials that would disappear with time.

James Ingo Freed, Young (1993), 283. Cited in James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 283. 83 James Ingo Freed (1030-2005): American architect, member of the Chicago Seven, he is well known for being part of the International Style. 84 Esther Shalev (b. 1948): Lithuanian artist, she works individually and with Jochen Gerz since 1984. 85 Norbert Radermacher (b. 1953): German Professor of art and artist, he is well known for his art interventions in public spaces. 82

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Figure 19 (opposite): Gerz Jochen and Shalev Esther, Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Right, 1986. Berlin. [Photograph of the memorial].

A year after meeting Esther Shalev, in 1984, Jochen Gerz was invited, with five other artists, to propose a design for a ‘Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights’, in Hamburg. Jochen Gerz and his new companion designed a winning project that they described as a Gegen-Denkmal [counter-monument]. In the process of design, the artists’ main concern was to create a monument that would convey the desired message without resembling the types of monuments erected by fascists. To their minds, didactic monuments tend to be rigid, and fixed evoking traits which they associate with fascism itself.86 ‘What we did not want’, Jochen Gerz explained, ‘was an enormous pedestal with something on it presuming to tell people what they ought to think.’87 Therefore, their monument had to go against the traditionally didactic function of such edifices and their propensity to represent the past as well as against the authoritarian tendency in all art that reduces the viewers to passive spectators. The artists rejected the city’s offer to locate the monument in a sun-dappled park in the centre of town and instead, chose a pedestrian shopping mall in a working-class suburb. Indeed, they explained that they preferred an eyesore amidst others on a blighted cityscape which they termed a ‘normal, uglyish place.’88 They liked the fact that passing shoppers would like it or detest it, but they could not avoid the monument.89 Unveiled in 1986, the memorial is a pillar, twelve meters high and one meter wide, made of hollow aluminium and plated with a thin layer of dark lead. At its base, an inscription is written in German, French, English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish: We invite the citizens of Hamburg and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Hamburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.90

James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 130. 87 Jochen Gerz. Cited in Claude Gintz, L’Anti-Monument’ de Jochen et Esther Gerz, Galeries Magazne 19 (June-July 1987), 87. 88 Jochen Gerz. Cited in Claude Gintz, L’Anti-Monument’ de Jochen et Esther Gerz, Galeries Magazne 19 (June-July 1987), 87. 89 James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 30. 90 Jochen Gerz Public Space. ‘Mahnmal gegen Faschismus, Monument against Fascism, Hamburg-Harburg, Germany 1986, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’. Last modified in 2012. http://www.gerz.fr/html/main.html?art_ident=76fdb6702e151086198058d4e4b0b8fc&res_ident=5a9df42460494a34beea361e8 35953d8 86

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A steel-pointed stylus was attached to a cable at each corner of the monument so that visitors could write their names on it. Once the bottom meter and a half were covered with inscriptions, the monument was lowered into the ground. After seven years and five lowerings, the memorial was completely buried on November 10th 1993, with over 70 000 signatures inscribed on its surface. There is now no trace of the monument except a burial stone, above the top of the pillar, inscribed with the words ‘Hamburg’s Monument Against Fascism’.

Figure 20 (left): Gerz Jochen and Shalev Esther, Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Right, 1989. Berlin. [Photograph of the m emorial]. Figure 21 (top right): Gerz Jochen and Shalev Esther, Detail of Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Right, 1992. Berlin. [Photograph of the memorial]. Figure 22 (bottom right): Gerz Jochen and Shalev Esther, Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Right, 2007. Berlin. [Photograph of the m emorial].

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With audacious simplicity, the counter-monument goes against typical memorial conventions: its aim is not to comfort but to provoke, not to stay the same but to change, not to be eternal but to disappear, not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation. Like the self-destroying sculpture, Hommage à New York, that Jean Tinguely91 designed in such a way that it batters itself to pieces in the Sculpture Garden of the MOMA (New York) in 1960, the Monument against Fascism also challenges the idea of sculpture being sturdy and enduring. Similarly to Gerz’ Invisible Monument, in Saarbucken, the aim of sinking the memorial into the ground is to make the public reflect upon itself and then become part of the art. As Douglas Crimp92, Professor in art history, has observed, ‘The viewer, in effect, [becomes] the subject of the work’.93 The literary critic Michael North’s94 statement, ‘the public becomes the sculpture’95, could refer to both of Gerz’ memorials (The Invisible Monument as well as The Monument against Fascism). This artist’s idea of the purpose of a work of art is similar to that of a performance. Once the art has penetrated the thoughts, aroused feelings and provoked reactions from the viewer, it can disappear, its task accomplished. Jochen Gerz expresses this idea when saying: Art, in its conspicuousness, in its recognizability, is an indication of failure. […] If it were truly consumed, no longer visible or conspicuous, if there were only a few manifestations of art left, it would actually be where it belongs- that is, within the people for whom it was created.96 The ‘performative piece of art’ initiates a dynamic relationship between artists, their work and spectators, breaking down the hierarchical relationship between an art object and its beholder. Indeed, by inviting its own violation, the memorial forces the public to desanctify it and becomes its equal. Inevitably, while most people wrote their names or drew small symbols such as hearts or stars of David, swastikas also began to appear. This had been expected by the city authorities who had warned the artists of the possibility of vandalism. However, Gerz’ answer was ‘Why not give the phenomenon free rein and allow the monument to document the social temperament in that way?’97 Indeed, the memorial acted as a social mirror, reminding the community of past fascist events while reflecting their responses to the memory of this past.

Jean Tinguely (1925-1991): Swiss painter and sculptor, he is best known for his kinetic art. Douglas Crimp (b. 1944): American Professor in art history. 93 Douglas Crimp. Cited in James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 31. 94 Michael North (b. 1951): American literary critic and professor in the department of English. 95 Michael North, ‘The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament’ (Critical Inquiry 16), 861. Cited in James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 31. 96 Jochen Gerz. Cited in Doris Van Drateln, Jochen Gerz’s Visual Poetry (Contemporarnea), 47. Cited in James E.Young, At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 130. 97 Jochen Gerz. Cited in Michael Gibson, Hamburg: Sinking Feelings, ARTnews 86 (summer 1987), 106. 91 92

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The disappearance of the memorial can also be considered as a metaphor for the victims who disappeared during the Holocaust. Indeed, the Memorial against Fascism commemorates a vanished people with a perpetually unfinished, fleeting monument.98 The Monument against Fascism is comparable to the Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial, which Horst Hoheisel designed at the same period. Like Shalev and Gerz’ counter-monument, the Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial was visible until it was hidden in the ground, leaving the public as its only observable aspect. The Monument against Fascism and the Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial lead one to understand that the artists’ goal was to represent the destruction of the Jewish people by creating a disappearing memorial. Hence, The Monument against Fascism as well as the Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial are considered to be counter-monuments. The Aschrott-Brunnen [Ashrott Fountain] was a historical monument, located in Germany, in Kassel’s main town square, facing the city Hall. Built in 1908, the fountain was designed by the City Hall architect, Karl Roth99, and funded by a Jewish entrepreneur from Kassel, Sigmund Ashrott100. The Nazis ordered its demolition during the night of 8-9 April 1939, calling it the ‘Jews’ Fountain’ because it was a gift from a Jew to the city. A few weeks later, only the sandstone base of the fountain had not been cleared away, leaving an empty basin in the centre of the square. In 1943, the city filled this space with soil and planted flowers in it. Local inhabitants then called it the ‘Aschrott Grave’. In the 1960s a fountain was rebuilt on this spot. However, most people could not remember what had happened to the original one. In 1985, in response to their lack of awareness of the past, the Society for the Rescue of Historical Monuments suggested that some form of the historical fountain be restored, in honour of Sigmund Aschrott and other dignitaries of Kassel.101 Participating in the competition for the new design was the local artist, Horst Hoheisel who felt that neither the preservation of the fountain’s remnants nor its complete reconstruction would be effective. Therefore, he proposed a counter-monument to call to mind the original twelve-meter-high neo-Gothic pyramid fountain. When awarded the project, the artist described the concept behind his negative-form monument:

James E.Young, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 32-37. Karl Roth (1875-1932): German architect and university lecturer. 100 Sigmund Aschrott (1826-1915): German-Jewish businessman, real estate entrepreneur, industrialist and banker. 101 James E.Young, ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 64-67. 98 99

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Figure 23 (left): Hoheisel Horst, The Aschrott Brunnen Memorial before being buried, 1987. Kassel. [Photograph of the memorial]. Figure 24 (top right): Hoheisel Horst, The Aschrott Brunnen Memorial being buried, 1987. Kassel. [Photograph of the memorial]. Figure 25 (bottom right): Hoheisel Horst, The Aschrott Brunnen Memorial, 1987. Kassel. [Photograph of the memorial].

I have designed the new fountain as a mirror image of the old one, sunk beneath the old place in order to rescue the history of the place as a wound and as an open question, to penetrate the consciousness of the Kassel citizens so that such things never happen again.102 His idea was to use the old plans of the fountain to create a similar sculpture in the form of a concrete hollow. The new fountain was exposed for a few weeks on City Hall Square, before being sunk, mirrorlike, twelve meters deep into the ground.

Horst Hoheisel, ‘Rathaus-Platz-Wunde’ in Aschrott-Brunnen: Offene Wunde der Stadgeschichte, Berlin, 1989, James. E. Young translation. Cited in James E.Young, ‘Memory, Counter-memory, and the End of the Monument’ in Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 66. 102

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Hoheisel’s concept behind this design was to remind us of absence by reproducing it; which is the same concept that inspired his proposal to destroy the Bradenburger Tor, in 1995. In the memorial at Kassel, the negative space of the absent monument constitutes its phantom shape in the ground. The absence of the monument is preserved in its precisely duplicated negative space. Just like Whiteread who represents the absence of the books by shaping the space around them into a negative cast (The Holocaust Memorial, Vienna), Hoheisel represents the absence of the fountain by reproducing it and sinking it into the ground, creating its negative shape. Taken a step further, the inverted pyramidal fountain combined with the memory of the shape of the original fountain, could be read as the representation of the Jewish star. Of course, the memorial is not immediately evident on a visit to City Hall Square in Kassel. Like the Monument against Fascism, before being lowered, upside-down into the ground, the newly designed fountain sat on the square for a while. However, while the memorial in Hamburg disappeared gradually, over a period of seven years, the one in Kassel vanished from one day to the next. The site is now marked by a bronze tablet with an image of the fountain and an inscription detailing the original fountain and why it was destroyed. When entering the square, one can see narrow canals on the ground, carrying water into a large underground hollow. The sound of gushing water gets louder as one approaches and finally stands above the Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial. 103 ‘With the running water’, Hoheisel suggests, ‘our thoughts can be drawn into the depths of history, and there perhaps we will encounter feelings of loss, of a disturbed place, of lost form.’104 Indeed, both with Gerz’ Monument against Fascism and Hoheisel’s Invisible Monument, the spectator plays an important role in the memorial, becoming a part of it. ‘The sunken fountain is not the memorial at all’, Hoheisel explains, ‘It is only history turned into a pedestal, an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found.’105 Both these vanished monuments (the Monument against Fascism and the Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial) would not exist without the spectators; it is the public that turns the work into a memorial. This is also the case of a memorial designed by Norbert Radermacher, in the Neukölln district of Berlin. It also disappears over time like the two previously described counter-monuments and can therefore be considered to be one as well. However, differing from Gerz’ and Hoheisel’s memorials, it uses written historical facts to inform the public about the use of its site during the Holocaust. As did Boltanksi’s for Missing House, the artist researched the location and used this information for the memorial; therefore, it can also be described as a realistic monument.

James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 45-48. 104 Hoheisel. Cited in James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 45. 105 Hoheisel. Cited in James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 45. 103

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In 1992, the memorial was installed in the Neukölln district of Berlin, former site of a forced labor camp (the KZ-Aussenlager) during the war and one of Sachsenhausen’s satellite camps. Norbert Radermacher’s memorial is located along the Sonnenallee, next to the sports ground. Pedestrians walking by the installation, trip a light-beam trigger, which in turn flicks on a high-intensity slide projection of a written text relating historical details about the use of the site during the World War II. The text is first projected onto the crowns of the trees, where one perceives the lettering but cannot quite read it. Slowly, it descends to the wire fence that surrounds the sports ground and the perimeter of the former camp. The words gradually become clearer and one can read the text. Finally, the text is projected onto the sidewalk for one minute, before slowly fleeting. 106 Therefore, although the memorial always reappears when a spectator triggers the light-beam, each projection disappears like Gerz’ and Hoheisel’s memorials.

Figure 26: Radermacher, Memorial, Berlin. 1992. [Photograph of the m emorial].

Also, similarly to the Monument against Fascism which changed every time a new visitor signed it, the memorial installation at Neukölln is meant to be constantly changing. According to the artist, the projection of the memorial’s text is never exactly repeated: the different times of day, changing weather and varied witnesses ensure that two projections are never precisely alike. By day, the site appears to be speckled with text, while by night distinct words appear on the projection’s surroundings. In addition, like Gerz did for the Invisible Monument, Radermacher has invited schoolchildren to research the

James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 40. 106

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history of the area, adding the result of their investigations to his own to be projected at the site. The memorial design suggests that the site alone cannot constitute a memorial and only becomes one when the memory of what it was, is projected for passersby. Of course, the projection can be avoided if the pedestrian simply crosses the street or passes under the light-beam trigger. However, even this would be a memorial act of sorts because, to avoid the memorial, one would first have to conjure up the memory of what it commemorates. Indeed, one would have to remember what it is one wants to forget107. These three case studies are different but have in common that they disappear with time. Whether the monument slowly sank into the ground, vanished from one day to the other or faded systematically before reappearing, the artists used the disappearance and the absence to represent the loss of the Jews who are forever gone. For this reason, these monuments can be criticized as well as defended. Indeed, some might agree that the best way to represent the disappearance of a people is with a disappearing memorial which may be a poignant way in which to attract the public’s attention towards the memory of loss. Yet, how can a vanished monument ensure everlasting remembrance of the Holocaust? Is it not a paradox to create a ‘temporary’ monument to guarantee eternal memory? This might bring one to feel that to guarantee the memory of the Holocaust and make sure that such events never happen again, memorials should be permanent and visible.

James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 41-42. 107

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Conclusion ‘For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.’108 -Elie Wiesel109

My study focuses on eleven Holocaust memorials. These represent only a few examples of the thousands of Holocaust Memorials which exist throughout the world, with dozens more being proposed and built every year. I limited my work by researching two types of memorials: the counter-monuments and the ones which I chose to call ‘realistic monuments’. To conclude, I would like to give my opinion on these two categories. I am usually attracted to conceptual art and the thought process developed by artists when designing their work. Therefore, counter-monuments address my artistic tastes better than realistic ones. However, a memorial is not just a piece of art, it is also an object of remembrance. In order to recall the Holocaust, a historical event, realism might be the most appropriate. Indeed, by putting faces, names or locations into Holocaust memorials, the act of remembering becomes less abstract. For example, commemorating the lives of those who lived in the Scheunenviertel district by observing Attie’s photography projections in The Writing on the Wall may be more accessible than remembering the people who were deported from Saarrbrücken, while standing on Gerz’ Invisible Memorial. Many survivors believe that the atrocity of their experience demands as literal a memorial expression as possible. ‘We weren’t tortured and our families weren’t murdered in the abstract’, some survivors expressed while complaining about certain memorials, ‘it was real.’110 Realistic memorials do not have as much potential for minimization of the Holocaust as do counter-monuments. On the other hand, the public will relate more to counter-monuments because they express the consequences of the Holocaust on the present, whereas realistic monuments show what existed at the time of the terrible events which they commemorate. The first type of memorial represents

Elie Wiesel. Cited in ushmm. ‘Elie Wiesel’s Remarks at the Dedication Ceremonies for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’. http://www.ushmm.org/research/ask-a-research-question/frequently-asked-questions/wiesel 109 Elie Wiesel (b. 1928): Romanian-born, Jewish-American Professor, political activist and author, he writes testimonies abot his espericens as a prisoner during the Holocaust. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 at the Norwegian Nobel Committee 110 Cited in James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 9. 108

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contemporary emotions in relation to the Jews’ disappearance such as the feeling of loss expressed in Hoheisel’s Aschrott-Brunnen Memorial. The second type of monument represents facts about the period of the Holocaust such as the historical information exposed on Boltanksi’s Missing House. The public may better understand the present, because of its accessibility, than the past which has to be relived through documents and images. Another argument in favour of counter-monuments is the fact that their designs are often more daring than those of realistic monuments. In my opinion, unexpected installations are more likely to be remembered. If the Bradenburger Tor had been destroyed, following Hoheisel’s proposal, the public would never have forgotten the memorial. However, the purpose of a memorial is not to ensure the memory of the piece of art itself but of the subject it honours, the Holocaust. James E. Young defines the difference between memorials and other types of art: ‘Where contemporary art invites viewers and critics to contemplate its own materiality, or its relationship to other works before and after itself, the aim of memorials is not to call attention to their own presence so much as to past events because they are no longer present.’111 While counter-monuments invite the public to reflect upon their conception, realistic monuments call attention to historical aspects upon which they are based. One might think that providing historical information is the role of documentary films or museums rather than of memorials. However, personally, I appreciate the fact that these memorials commemorate the Holocaust while offering information about it. Indeed, a person who knows little about the Holocaust will probably better understand Norbert Radernacher’s memorial than Ullman’s Bibliothek. Finally, I think the quality of a memorial depends on the public’s reaction to it. Indeed, ‘The public monument’, writes the author Marianne Doezema112, ‘has a responsibility apart from its qualities as a work of art. It is not only the private expression of an individual artist; it is also a work of art created for the public, and therefore can and should be evaluated in terms of its capacity to generate human reactions.’113

James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 12. 112 Marianne Doezema: American author and director of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in Massachusetts. 113 Marianne Doezema, ‘The Public Monument in Tradition and Transition’ in The Public Monument and Its Audience (Cleveland), 9. Cited in James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 13. 111

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 Therefore, the value of a memorial depends on the impact it has on spectators. Since all viewers are different, the impact of a memorial will vary for each one, influenced by who they are, why they care to remember, and how they observe the monument. Personally, I am still unsure of which type of memorial I find most appropriate. However, I am certain of one thing: no matter their shape or form, I am thankful that they do exist. Indeed, it is essential to never forget the Holocaust and in this, various media such as art and architecture have a crucial role to play.

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‘Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.’114 -Jean Baudrillard115

114

Jean Baudrillard, ‘Holocaust’ in Simulacra and Simulations. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Cited in James E.Young, The texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 1. 115 Jean Baudrillard (1929-­‐2007): French sociologist, photographer, philosopher, cultural theorist and political commentator.

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Websites and PDF files Frieze. ‘ The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History’. http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/the_art_of_memory_holocaust_memorials_in_history/ (Accessed January 28, 2014.) Gordon Adi and Goldberg Amos, ‘Interview with Professor James E. Young.’ PDF file. Yad Vashem Resource Center (May 1998). http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203659.pdf (Accessed February 7, 2014.) Harris Cecily, ‘German Memory of the Holocaust: The Emergence of Counter-Memorials.’ PDF file. Penn History Review, n. 17 (Spring 2010). http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=phr (Accessed February 8, 2014.) Imaginary Museum. ‘The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History’. http://imaginarymuseum.org/MHV/PZImhv/YoungHolocaust1994.html (Accessed February 4, 2014.) Nrw Museum. ‘Norbert Radermacher’. http://www.nrwmuseum.de/en/#/en/more/biographies/details/details/artists///norbert-radermacher.html (Accessed January 28, 2014.) Real Time Cities Wikispaces. ‘Monument Against Fascism, War, and Violence-and for Peace and Human Rights’. Last modified in 2014. http://realtimecities.wikispaces.com/Monument+Against+Fascism,+War,+and+Violenceand+for+Peace+and+Human+Rights (Accessed January 28, 2014.) Senate University of California. ‘In Memoriam, Michel André Bernstein’. Last modified in 2011. http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/inmemoriam/michaelandrebernstein.html (Accessed February 8, 2014.)

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Illustrations Credits Figure 1: ‘Works by Morris Louis, Contextual Images’. PDF file. Images. http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/2180/6/03images.pdf (Accessed February 20, 2014.) Figure 2: ‘Rico Lebrun’. PDF file. Syracuse University Art Galleries. http://suart.syr.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2013/02/1983-Lebrun-Transformations-Tranfigurations.pdf (Accessed February 20, 2014.) Figure 3: An Arduous Road, ‘Sanuel Bak – 60 years of Creativity’. Last modified in 2014. http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/traveling_exhibitions/bak/panel_3.asp (Accessed February 20, 2014.) Figure 4: A Teacher Guide to the Holocaust, ‘David Olère Drawings & Paintings’. Last modified in 2005. http://fcit.usf.edu/Holocaust/resource/gallery/olere.htm (Accessed February 20, 2014.) Figure 5: Bustler, ‘Chipperfield and Eisenman Win Israel’s Prestigious Wold Prize’. Last modified in 2010. http://www.bustler.net/index.php/article/chipperfield_and_eisenman_win_israels_prestigious_wolf_prize/ (Accessed February 2014.) Figure 6: Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 64. Figure 7: Hornstein, Shelley and Jacobowitz Florence. Image and Remembrance, Representation of the Holocaust. Indiana University Press, 2003, 210. Figure 8: Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 17. Figure 9: Art Déjà vu. Nd. http://www.artdejavu.net/dejavu/index.php?level=picture&id=287&tipo=94 (Accessed December 2 2013.) Figure 10: Flickr, ‘Bruce Coleman’. Last modified in 2005. http://www.flickr.com/photos/32215181@N08/6573239591/ (Accessed December 2, 2013.)

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Figure 11: Manifestations of Memory, A Competition as a Memorial to American Slavery, ‘Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial’. Nd. http://www.asmcompetition.com/judenplatz-holocaust-memorial/ (Accessed November 27, 2013.) Figure 12: Stih and Schnock ‘Places of Remembrance – Memorial in the Bavarian Quarter (1993)-‘. Nd. http://www.stih-schnock.de/remembrance.html (Accessed November 27, 2013.) Figure 13: Study Blue ‘Shimon Attie & Christian Boltanski Review’. Last Modified in 2013. http://www.studyblue.com/notes/note/n/shimon-attie--christian-boltanski-review/deck/2274442 (Accessed November 27, 2013.) Figure 14: Art on file ‘1927 Stones- Monument Against Racism’. Nd. http://www.artonfile.com/detail.aspx?id=GPA-04-06-01 (Accessed November 27, 2013.) Figure 15: Artspla du chemin ‘Histoire des Arts: Jochen Gerz: Monument contre le racisme’. Last Modified May 2013. http://artspladuchemin.over-blog.com/article-histoire-des-arts-jochen-gerzmonument-contre-le-racisme-105322660.html (Accessed November 27, 2013.) Figure 16: Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies ‘Removal of the Brandenburg Gate’. Last modified in 2012. http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/memorials/hoheisel/brandenburg.html (Accessed November 27, 2013.) Figure 17: Flickr ‘The Missing House’. Nd. http://www.flickr.com/photos/54468837@N03/5457361118/in/photostream/ (Accessed November 27, 2013.) Figure 18: Shimon Attie ‘The Writing on the Wall’. Nd. http://www.shimonattie.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13 (Accessed November 27, 2013.) Figure 19: Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 129. Figure 20: Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge, After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 132. Figure 21: Art on file ‘Monument Against Fascism, War, Force – For Peace and Human Rights’. Nd. http://www.artonfile.com/detail.aspx?id=GPA-05-04-02 (Accessed February 14, 2014.)

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Figure 22: Sites of Memory ‘World War One and counter-memorial in Hanbug-Harburg’. Nd. http://sitesof-memory.de/main/harburgfascism.html (Accessed February 14, 2014.) Figure 23: University of Minnesota, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies ‘Aschrottbrunnen Fountain, Memorial to the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain in Kassel, Germany’. Last modified in 2014. http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/memorials/hoheisel/fountain.html (Accessed Feburary 14.) Figure 24: University of Minnesota, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies ‘Aschrottbrunnen Fountain, Memorial to the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain in Kassel, Germany’. Last modified in 2014. http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/memorials/hoheisel/fountain.html (Accessed Feburary 14.) Figure 25: University of Minnesota, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies ‘Aschrottbrunnen Fountain, Memorial to the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain in Kassel, Germany’. Last modified in 2014. http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/memorials/hoheisel/fountain.html (Accessed Feburary 14.) Figure 26: Imaginary Museums ‘The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorial in History’. Nd. http://imaginarymuseum.org/MHV/PZImhv/YoungHolocaust1994.html (Accessed Feburary 14.)

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