How Can We Remember?

In this last year of the twentieth century, we are keenly aware of the passage of time. Our deeply-felt desire to fix the past and hold it, our despairing realization that not only certitude but even authenticity will always elude us affects the philosophy of every field and endeavor. The difficulties of remembering historical events, particularly compounded when they examine that contradiction we would rather not see - human savagery - have become increasingly problematic. As the eyewitnesses to the earlier parts of our century leave us for the truly great unknown, we are left to rely more and more on memory at the same time that we are increasingly aware of its limits. As events and participants fade into the distance, we face a problem as great, and unforgivable, as forgetting. We face the problems of indifferent appropriation and the rash distortions of an unthinking commercial culture.

Art can be a way to preserve, at least, the veracity of individual empathy in the face of monstrousness, but even in the arts, the victims are taking a less and less human form. The first artists of the Holocaust against the Jews were those artist inmates who actually took their lives in their hands to draw forbidden scenes of the death and dying inflicted by their Nazi jailers. Theirs was an act of witness, designed to inform the world of the atrocities in the attempt to effect a rescue. The best known of these brave men, whose story has been told in Gerald Green's The Artists of Terezin, were able to arrange for some of their documentary drawings to be smuggled out of the "Paradise Ghetto" before they paid the price of terrible punishments. Despite their expressionistic style, these artists did not indulge in metaphor. They knew their horrific material too well and there was too much at stake for them to express themselves indirectly. The need to express, however, did not end with the ending of the war. Cultures that have experienced a genocide need to keep telling their story, even if the narrative becomes more symbolic the further it is removed from actual events. This evolving distance is seen in many of the works in Absence/Presence: the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust and Genocide.

Both polarities of the literal and the conceptual are present in the work of Judith Liberman, whose evocation of Anne Frank, the best known victim of the third Reich, puts a human face on the Holocaust and demonstrates that interpretations do not automatically lessen in integrity as they are separated from events. Recent discussion of Anne Frank's legacy has revealed that her diary was quickly turned into a celebration of the triumph of youthful innocence, rather than the testament to the disaster of a young Jewess and her people. Liberman's rigorously geometric maps, such as of Auschwitz-Birkenau where Anne and her family were first sent, places Anne within the context of Jewish history and restores her to her proper place.

Although Judith Liberman's wall hangings have chiefly dealt with the Holocaust against the Jews, her reflection on the Roma and Sinti in Gypsies Too gives recognition to a victim group where literature of remembrance is sparse and where artistic memory is even less visible because of cultural currents. The artist uses wall hangings, a form both feminine and public, to memorialize the victims and provide a vehicle for wider meditations.

Selma Waldman's early experience of anti-Semitism in the small Texas town where she was raised in the only Jewish family, created a special sensitivity for Jewish suffering. Her 1968-72 series, Das Ringen um Brot , did not flinch from a physical portrayal of naked victims desperately gnawing small round loaves. She rendered these standing figures with a nervous sketchy line emphasizing their hunger, cold and fear. She is represented in Absence/Presence with a more generalized statement of suffering, Bread - which is best understood coming from the concerns of this earlier work. Perhaps the ultimate statement of physical reduction is found in Roy Strassberg's recent Holocaust Bone Structures. I have been told that some of the guides to the death camps of Poland are willing to stir pond waters to measure the depths of human ash and uncover fragments of bone for their tourist charges. Strassberg also stirs up the bones and will not let them lie forgotten under the surface. For many human lives, their bones are all that remains and Strassberg's work is a direct evocation of their presence. Yet this kind of direct representation of the victims is becoming increasingly rare. Ben Shahn's 1963 Warsaw lithograph commemorated the noble but futile resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto. Although his image expresses both grief and defiance with clenched fists, the burden of meaning is shared by the thirteenth century elegy on the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba uprising. Francis Yellow, a Lakota Native American, uses a similar method of memorial with the inclusion of poetry in his work and, as with Shahn, his meditations on loss are enriched by referencing the traditions of his people.

Joyce Lyon, child of survivors, uses the metaphor of landscape to explore the Holocaust. Although her travels in Poland, especially to her father's destroyed community, have been an important source of subject matter, she has explored the topic with twilight scenes of empty chairs that indicate the grandparents she has lost. For Lyon, the Holocaust continues to happen in her back yard. But if the use of broken bodies, broken bones, poetic traditions and empty landscapes has been used to evoke the victims, a new, and surprising approach is to focus on the perpetrators. Edgar Heap of Birds' Building Minnesota displays some of this tendency in commenting on Native American history. Although he lists as an honor roll the often unspecified names of the leaders of the great Sioux uprising who were hanged by the government, he places their names on the common type of sign that lines our highways. In this way, the victims are sited in a setting not of their making; a setting that was only made possible by their destruction. This new concentration on perpetrators frequently involves the use of architectural metaphor. Daisy Brand, survivor of seven camps, has a deep and indelible understanding of the human suffering of the Holocaust, yet she has expressed this experience in small elegant porcelain sculptures of enclosures, towers, gates and tracks. Her only human reference is to the black and white stripes of the camp uniforms which she incorporates as architectural elements. It is as if the people have become subsumed into the places designed to destroy them. Howard Oransky was known for his depictions of camp victims which were often based on documentary photography. He is represented in Absence/Presence with a 1995 work that references the perpetrators both with their architecture and their words. Auschwitz Gate: The Testimony of Rudolf Hoess recalls the memory of the dead through an image of the architecture of Auschwitz above which is inscribed a sentence from the former commandant's memoir: "The stench of burning flesh was carried for many miles and caused the whole neighborhood to talk about the burning of the Jews." Additional text under the image includes more of Hoess' words and changes the most immediate associations with Auschwitz, the suffering of the victims, to the question of who is to blame.

In the realm of research, holocaust denial, an attempt to refute millions of pages of evidence about the crime, has forced researchers to review evidence and clarify some details. Arie Galles' Fourteen Stations , a work in progress, with poems by Jerome Rothenberg, is represented with eight large charcoal drawings of death camps and the ravine of Babi Yar. Galles bases some of these works on actual aerial photography taken by the Luftwaffe. Thus the perpetrators give evidence against themselves. In this case of artistic expression, the artist is working very much like a researcher, whose final product is a visual rather than a written work . The artist evokes Jewish suffering by embedding the words of the Kaddish , the prayer for the dead, within the images. The words have become as invisible as the Jews who can not be seen from such a height. Yet, by telling us that the Kaddish and the actual Jews who were in the camps when the photographs were taken are deeply contained within the images, the artist makes us aware of what lies at the heart of his work.

The fear that architectural symbolism will displace a proper concern with Jewish suffering and that the Jews of the Holocaust will become as invisible as those in the photographs that formed the basis for Galles' drawings is, at first, seemingly confirmed by the shocking projects of Zbigniew Libera. This Polish artist is best known for his works with toys which leaves him open to the charge of frivolousness and disrespect. But his belief that toys are a major key to the norms and values of a society is not controversial and he was even able to have the Lego company sponsor his 1996 work, Lego System. This work reminds us so thoroughly that our world is what we make of it. Using Libera's kit, Lego pieces can be assembled to create a village with a mental hospital, Stalin's prison, a World War II or Bosnian concentration camp. As in real life, organizational elements can be put together in different times and places to create a variety of horrors. In that few Lego pieces had to be custom made, Libera makes the point that all the elements for similar abominations are still contained within our current and seemingly benign institutions. He is also represented in Absence/Presence by one hundred bronze figures of women, in a piece called Eroica. Although they are based on Greek statues (the Nazis were smitten with classicism), their small size and packaging in four boxes suggests toy soldiers. This purposeful evocation of the male reminds us of the neglected recognition of female presence during the Holocaust. The title of the work, Eroica, suggests both the heroism of these women and the erotic atrocities committed against them.

The belief that children's culture is a crucial medium for understanding the world of adults is also Melissa Gould's point of departure in her installation From Adler to Zylber which is based on pre-Fascist German and Austrian children's books. By examining the period before the most blatant propaganda, she is able to explore its more subtle but influential origins. She had learned that her grandfather was carried to Auschwitz in a convoy of a thousand Jews from Drancy, France in November of 1942. Using the list of those who had been transported with him, she matched some of these family names to the book illustrations she has found in ways that suggest the fate of these Jews was foreshadowed in the premises of German culture. Although Gould borders the illustrations with deep black, as if they are death announcements, she is not trying to create a memorial. As with other artists who focus on the perpetrators, her purposes are more analytical than commemorative. By making these Jewish and German juxtapositions, she asks perhaps the most fruitful question: what was wrong with a culture that could do such things?

This exploration of perpetrator culture is also a major concern of the new medium of video art. The idea that fascist values continue to exist in easily resurrectable ways is the theme of Maciej Toporowicz's purposely confusing melange of Nazi architecture, sculpture and propaganda footage with Calvin Klein advertising. He adds additional cinematic confusion by using snippets from films like the Night Porter, a 1974 movie by Liliana Cavani which explores the sadomasochistic relationship between a former Nazi officer and his inmate rape victim. Mr. Toporowicz has announced that "Calvin Klein is consciously or unconsciously using Nazi images in his campaigns." The artist believes that his Polish background (he came to the US as a political refugee in 1985) has given him a special sensitivity to "body fascism." The recollection that Klein is a Jew adds many extra complexities to this work and illumines both the importance and limits of memory. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and himself a Holocaust survivor, believes that Toporowicz's fascist labeling of the Klein ads is incorrect and an offensive attempt to capitalize on the Holocaust. Toporowicz's Obsession illustrates that a wide metaphor can easily confuse the relationship between victims and perpetrators and that the manipulations and distortions of art can obscure as well as enlighten.

Jeremy Newman also uses video to examine the culture of the perpetrators with much less equivocal results. His 1996 Synagogues on Fire slowly scrolls down the horrific words "Set their synagogues on fire...They should be put under a roof or in a stable...Their rabbis must be forbidden to teach under the threat of Death." The shocking attribution of the quotation to Martin Luther, 1544 establishes the theme that Christian anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust. Although there are ominous scenes of vulnerability, they are outweighed in number and vividness with scenes that adulate Hitler. It was important to Newman that he not have burning bodies or corpses. He instead uses an understated ambiguity to serve as a warning. Newman describes his final quotation from nineteenth century German poet Heinrich Heine: "When one burns books, one will in the end, burn people" as "an ironic German voice for German tolerance." Newman returns to this subject in his 1998 Agnus Dei which he has described as "a plea for tolerance - warning that religion without morality is death." After a brief scene of a Jew praying in his tallit (prayer shawl), the artist recreates scenes of book burning which make up the rest of the film, except for brief cuts of a swastika, shadowy pieta and the textual conclusion, "The Nazis murdered six million Jews and seven million Christians." Newman's meditation on German Christianity has found it wanting even in respect to its own members.

Seth Kramer's project of counting six million grains of rice documents his search for an emotional understanding of the almost incomprehensible number of victims. Although this conception at first seems mechanical in the video, the artist does not let us forget that he is remembering real lives. Unable to count more than a million in the first eight months of the project, he specifies that he has begun with the children. Kramer has also been motivated by Holocaust denial, as described in an angry off-screen conversation, and he documents Jewish losses with photographs of bodies and newspaper stories all the more terrible as they are briefly viewed. Above all, his counting is an attempt to inspire people to learn more about the Holocaust "or at least answer the question why the Jews are trying so hard not to forget."

British artist Barbara Loftus's The Taking of the Porcelain uses her mother's memory of the night when the S.A. came to steal the family's porcelain collection. Although it also focuses on the acts of the perpetrators, her work is much more gentle than that of the male video artists in Absence/Presence yet the implications of her work are equally horrific. Although a limited number of earlier Holocaust art works included some camp guards and Nazis, these were portrayed for the most part as anonymous men. The new emphasis on perpetrators and their culture is much more specific. As Arnold Trachtman has explained: "The horror that occurred between 1933 and 1945 was created by men. Who were they? What drove them?" He points out that the German businessmen who freely made use of slave labor were not punished but were back in business within a decade. He describes his work as "an attempt to put faces on that period from 1933 to 1945..." This strategy is shared and exceeded by Sid Chafetz whose wall of broadside lithographs shows us the faces of the men who helped make it all possible. His use of period photographs as his source gives an evidentiary quality to work that is designed to combat both Holocaust denial and the "inurement" that he believes more documentary depictions of concentration camp victims now produce. Although this shift away from the depiction of the victims may be troubling to some, it does seem that this tendency can add a fruitful component to the need to witness and to grieve. In a world that has already repeated the mistakes of mid-century, the apportioning of blame and the demanding of responsibility may be the most useful role that the artist can now play.

In an American culture that tends to blend and commodify every event, artists like these represented in Absence/Presence are needed as a corrective. Radio personality Rush Limbaugh refers to pro-choice feminists as "feminazis." The Jerry Seinfeld television show referred to an irascible and punitive lunch counter owner as "the soup Nazi." The recent film Wag the Dog has a television news director say: "Gimme some of those woo-woo sirens, you know; those Anne Frank sirens." And this fall, Superman went back to the Holocaust. Although the man of steel was ultimately unable to change the course of history, he at least slowed down the Nazis with his ability to rip open railroad cars and the power of his famous uppercut. In a concluding panel of the Superman cartoon, the Warsaw Ghetto, the Oklahoma City bombing, German National Socialism and American Neo-Nazi activity are conflated with the machinations of an evil time manipulator. Thus is the Holocaust exploited and desecrated by commercial culture. As representations of the Holocaust against the Jews and of the genocides against other peoples inevitably shift over time with different approaches and emphases, it is in art exhibitions such as Absence/Presence that we will find the purest echoes of emotional memory. And although the statements within the work may lack the certitude we seek, they will keep us from the trivialization that is becoming so increasingly hard to avoid.

Nancy Weston, Ph. D.
St Cloud State University

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Last modified on October 22, 2009