Megan H. Austrian Soil

[Anonymous]

#811

I’m struck by the effort to memorialize trauma and tragedy and the role memorials play. Last year a professor who teaches at both the grad center and Brooklyn college taught a class on the role of memorialization, using the 9/11 memorial as a spring board for discussion.

How are memorials constructed? Or when artifacts from history are still present, like the imposing fortress-like walls of a chilling concentration camp, how should they be presented? We want the photographs that we hang, the documentaries we show, the tone that we set within that space to be an act of remembrance and truth-telling, a testimony of history.

But can we be flawed in our attempts? Is it always an act of honor and respect? Can it be revisionist or with an agenda? These questions are less applicable to concentration camps, but what about other war memorials or the 9/11 memorial?
There are invariably loaded and multivaried purposes to these place of remembrance that tell their own story, that respond to the past. I think these memorials can become complex places of study and responses, as well as remembrance, because there is always a story behind their construction. Their arrangement seems so delicate due to their symbolic purposes.

How do we memorialize traumatic history without retraumatizing people in the retelling? Without avoiding shock factor or imposing political or social agendas over the event? Without being revisionist? My attention is caught by the other memorials quietly placed in the background of On Austrian Soil (the monument for the teachers of Tyrol that was modified later to memorialize people separate from those originally intended; the memorial for Pogromnacht). I understand Horst Schreiber’s critical attitude towards the monuments because memorials, in some ways, are the last imprints of trauma recovery, the words we build to speak back to the event. But they inevitably fall short of full representation, which can never be fully accomplished, and at worst they can embody silence as much as people’s repression of events, becoming empty gestures or eternally “not enough,” as Horst says.

[Sondra Perl]

#826

Megan, I think your questions here are very important: “How do we memorialize traumatic history without retraumatizing people in the retelling? Without avoiding shock factor or imposing political or social agendas over the event? Without being revisionist?” These are very crucial questions, and the same concerns might be applied to process of writing memoir as well. How do we remember without imposing an agenda? How do we give voice to painful memories without traumatizing people in the retelling? Again, I think it’s a matter of bearing witness, the central objective of memorials, what professor Perl might call response-ability. I think we are all called to respond to the pain of others–the basis of empathy and compassion. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with engaging readers/spectators in painful experiences they may wish to avoid. There are many moments when I want to turn away from the pain of the holocaust, simply because the horror is at times unbearable. But I’m not sure I have that right, because that would be the irresponsible thing to do–I am able to resound, and that response leads me out of a passive engagement with trauma into something that has the capacity to heal. I love your phrase, “the words we build to speak back to the event,” which I take as a euphemism for the work of both memorials and memoir–and perhaps there’s something to be said about the etymologies of the words–their direct connection to memory.

[Sondra Perl]

#846

A really thoughtful and important response about the power and danger of memorials….but in the end necessary for remembering, honoring, bearing witness and moving us forward. As Patrick commented, amazingly similar to writing memoir.

[Author]

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