Our class visit this past Wednesday to the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) and the Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror) presented me with one of most emotionally challenging trips we have gone on during this course. Floating on top of the steady waves of sorrow that always attended me during visits to these kind of places, was a series of complicated dialectics, ones difficult to resolve or even develop at the current moment, save for their brief mention: (the victims/the perpetrators), (reason/unreason), (above ground, light filled/subterranean, dark), (site/non-site), (information aesthetic/aesthetic impenetrability), (text/image), (unfathomability/directness of story and narrative). Unfortunately, I remain, at least at the time of this writing, stuck in the silence that Georges Didi-Huberman so earnestly asks us to break in his excellent Images in Spite of All, a silence that sticks to and is complicated by the 2,711 uneven, rectangular stele that reside above the Information Center of the memorial.
Category: Class Trips
Our class visit this past Wednesday to the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) and the Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror) presented me with one of most emotionally challenging trips we have gone on during this course. Floating on top of the steady waves of sorrow that always attended me during visits to these kind of places, was a series of complicated dialectics, ones difficult to resolve or even develop at the current moment, save for their brief mention: (the victims/the perpetrators), (reason/unreason), (above ground, light filled/subterranean, dark), (site/non-site), (information aesthetic/aesthetic impenetrability), (text/image), (unfathomability/directness of story and narrative). Unfortunately, I remain, at least at the time of this writing, stuck in the silence that Georges Didi-Huberman so earnestly asks us to break in his excellent Images in Spite of All, a silence that sticks to and is complicated by the 2,711 uneven, rectangular stele that reside above the Information Center of the memorial.
Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History: VI)
Is this propaganda or memorialization? This is the question I have been unable to answer after my visit to the Berlin Wall Memorial. Is it both? If so, how? Is it possible to have a memorial that doesn’t propagandize itself? Sure, the capitalist west “won,” but should that be the only narrative? What happens to our sense of self and government when we stop our public historical probing at the horror of the 136 dead and the totalitarian control of life in the DDR. How often is “respecting the dead” used as an obfuscation? What else is there? Where is this history?
I found another small horror in viewing the “death strip” as a purely aesthetic object, one possessing a minimalism that captures the Kantian sublime like no other I’ve encountered, the smooth gravel almost looking like a canvas Agnes Martin could pencil lines on.
Well, I was successfully nauseated by the architecture of the hallways underneath the building. The forced perspective of the sloped floor and uneven angles of the hallways left me feeling properly destabilized (this architecture is very intentional) before we were led on what what as a half-lame tour of only a very small part of the Museum. The guide was anxious to the point of distraction and only showed us a couple of exhibits and was thus a little disappointed. The museum, however, was full of carful didacticism, offering a tour of the history of Jews in Germany. After lunch in the café, we didn’t have much time to continue walking through, so, I might return to take the full walk the galleries present.