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4 / florence vatan and marc silberman
In the European context the competition among victims can hardly be
dissociated from the competition of memory paradigms. After the collapse
of the Soviet Union the memory of the Holocaust—with Auschwitz as its
iconic site and official symbol—emerged as the dominant model of reference.
Yet the diffusion, cosmopolitization, and transnationalization of this
Holocaust paradigm elicited opposition. In Eastern Europe this model of
reference has been perceived as a Western form of cultural imperialism,
ignoring victims of communist occupation and failing to do justice to local
heritage communities. Some memorial sites attempt to reconcile competing
memories and to accommodate different groups of victims by creating
supplemental exhibitions or different routings in their space. These topographical
and makeshift architectural solutions testify to the difficulty of
addressing diverging or irreconcilable paths of memory. When consensus
prevails that the past—whatever its painfulness—should be acknowledged
and confronted, the modes of commemoration still raise vexing questions
on how to represent violence. 4 One of the well-known paradoxes of memorialization
resides in the self-defeating visibility of public displays that
“bury” the past and promote forgetting rather than remembrance. Early
on Nietzsche’s critique of monumentalization and Robert Musil’s ironic
observation about the way great men are pushed “into the sea of oblivion
with, so to speak, a commemorative stone around their necks” have
pointed to the anesthetizing power of commemorations. 5 To counter the
conventional memorials’ tendency to “seal memory off from awareness,”
artists have privileged voids, absence, invisibility, or vanishing monuments
as a way to suggest loss, challenge the monumental taste of authoritarian
regimes, and keep the work of memory alive. 6
The representation of violence remains a challenge from an aesthetic
and ethical viewpoint. How should one make death and terror visible in a
meaningful and ethically relevant way? If the duty to remember implies
an obligation to imagine what defies imagination—as a way to resist
the perpetrators’ wish for the total erasure of the victims—what are the
appropriate channels to perform this task? The commodification of violence
in the media and entertainment industry generates sensory overload
and emotional numbness. It is easy to look at violent images without seeing
them or being affected by them. Viewers become passive bystanders
of a spectacle that does not directly concern them. Alternatively, complacent
displays of violence nurture voyeurism and sensationalism, preventing
self-reflection and attention. One might think, as Andreas Huyssen
suggests, that in a culture dominated by fleeting images and immaterial
modes of communication, monuments and memorials become salient as
a result of their materiality and spatial inscription. 7 Yet memorial sites
are not immune to the dangers of commodification and derealization.
Copyrighted material – 9781137343512