The Politics of Memorialization

“By the waters of Babylon we sat and we wept as we remembered Zion,” the Psalmist wrote.

Why does Scripture record the place of remembrance? The religious principles of interpretation are specific. Extra words are not used. All words have meaning. The place from which we remember an event shapes the nature of that memory. By the waters of Babylon we remember Zion differently. Perhaps elsewhere we would sit differently, weep differently. The dialogue between an event and its memorialization is inevitable. As circumstances change, the task of memorialization itself changes.

These remarks will focus on the politics of Holocaust memorilization in the United States, in Germany, in Poland, and albeit briefly in Poland in Israel. In the United States, I have been both a participant and an observer of the processes of memorialization; so too in a much reduced role in Germany and Poland. Thus much that will be said is based on first-hand experience but also on keen observation, as this work has been central to my professional – and dare I say personal life – for more than a score of years.

Permit me a few words regarding politics: I recall a conversation between Miles Lerman, then chairman of the International Relations Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and Anatoly Dobrinan, the long-time Ambassador the Soviet Union to the United States.

Lerman said: “Mr. Ambassador, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council is not political.”

Dobrinan interrupted him and said: “Mr. Lerman, in Washington, everything is political.”

The was an acute wisdom in Dobrinan’s observation, for despite the lofty goals of the Museum and its historic task, both its inception and ongoing life have been an integral part of politics in Washington. Lerman would have been more accurate if he had said: “Mr. Ambassador, the Council tries to remain as far as possible non-partisan – or bi-partisan. That would have been closer to the truth.

The origins of the Museum were political. Jimmy Carter committed himself to the creation of a President’s Commission on the Holocaust on the occasion of Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s visit to the White House in May 1978 in the presence of 1,000 Rabbis on the South Lawn. Even for that commitment to take place, two political processes were already in play along with a transformation in the role of the Holocaust in American Jewish identity.

Carter’s relationship with the Jews was strained over the sale of advanced weapons to Jordan. After his call for a Palestinian entity in November 1977, the American Jewish Community was deeply distrustful of Carter and was in the midst of one in a series of confrontations that would characterize the ongoing relationship with the Jews. His political advisor on the Jewish community, Brooklyn-born Mark Siegel, who first floated the idea of a memorial to the Holocaust, had resigned on principle. Relations were strained with Menachem Begin, who shared many characteristics with the President including a Biblical orientation and a streak of personal self-righteous. His visits to the White House were not meetings among friends and the occasion – a celebration of the 30th anniversary of Israeli independence – was an excellent

deflection of a tense relationship between the two leaders.

The idea of suggesting the creation of the President’s Commission was first floated by Mark Siegel and later advanced in a memo by Stuart Eizenstat and his assistant Ellen Goldstein. Eizenstat was then an anomaly in Washington. As chief of President Carter’s Domestic Policy Staff, he was at that time the highest ranking practicing Jew ever to occupy a position of such prominence, a Jew whose children went to day school and who, in the absence of political crisis, would go home for Friday evening dinner and routinely attend Shabbat morning worship. Jewish political leaders such as Eizenstat were to become commonplace in the years that followed but Eizenstat was the first who felt fully at home as an American, fully at home as a Jew. He was the first not to follow the traditional post-emancipation rule, “be a Jew in your home and a man in the street.” Entering the public domain, Jews were supposed to abandon their Jewish commitments and not to push a “parochial agenda,” nor to dare that such a “parochial agenda” – memorialization of the Holocaust – be made part of the national agenda.

The one non-political development that made the President’s Commission possible was the emergence of the Holocaust as a central part of American Jewish identity in the years after the Six Day War. Jacob Neusner characterized this Jewish identity as the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption. In April 1978, but weeks before Carter’s announcement, that Jewish identity was to find its confirmation in the impressive success of the NBC Docu-drama “the Holocaust,” which despite its critical and historical shortcomings had captivated the nation. The “Holocaust” had gone mainstream. The parochial interests of a bereaved community had become of general interest to the American people and indeed later to people in other countries in which this series was aired. It was said in Germany that the “docu-drama the Holocaust had more impact than the original.”

The President’s Commission made three decisions. Two inevitably pressed on American politics. The Commission felt that the only appropriate memorial was a living memorial that would tell the story of the Holocaust – a museum. The Museum would be built in Washington – not New York – and would be built on public land with private funds. The decision to build in Washington was made over the objections of Lucy Dawidowicz, who alone of the Commission 24 members objected to both a Museum and its construction in Washington. She felt that an appropriate memorial should be built in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population in the world, the city with the most Holocaust survivors. Other Commission members were willing to risk the movement of the bereaved memories of a parochial community to the center of national life. They were willing to engage the political process, to strive for their place among the national institutions in Washington.

Almost immediately, it became clear that the journey to Washington would not come without a significant price. Membership on the Commission became contested when non-Jewish victims of Nazism, Poles and Ukrainians primarily – Gypsies, homosexuals and  Jehovah’s Witnesses would come later – vocally insisted that they be included in the process and in the proposed Museum. Armenians, victims of an earlier genocide were asking for their place. And Elie Wiesel, whose own work stressed the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the Kingdom of Night as a world apart, was concerned that this move of inclusion would stimulate dejudaization and falsification. The primacy of Jewish victimization – the judeocentricity of the Holocaust – and its relation to non-Jewish victims was to become a perpetual dilemma for the Museum.

There were essentially three points of view and they represented three different perspectives on Jewish participation. Wiesel argued for the primacy of the Jewish experience. “While not all victims were Jews, all Jews were victims,” he said. The very definition of the Holocaust in the Report to the President of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust represented the primacy of Wiesel’s view. Jews were given metaphysical primacy, they were not the first of the Nazi victims historically. The Report said: “The Holocaust was the systematic state-sponsored murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II; as night descended millions of others were murdered as well.” Contrary to this view, was the definition of the Holocaust as “the systematic state-sponsored murder of six million Jews and 5 million (or sometimes just millions of) non-Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. This second definition was offered in remarks by President Jimmy Carter and later in the Presidential Order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which involved a specific presidential decision to “universalize” the Holocaust. Contested memory or what has been pejoratively called the “Olympics of suffering” has been present from the very beginning of the Council’s work. Carter appointed representatives of other victim groups to the Council, including the Armenians and his successors Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton have followed in his footsteps.

The ultimate solution came from the history of the Holocaust. All the victims were included, for only then could the evolution of Nazi genocide and the singularity of Jewish fate under Nazism be demonstrated. History required the inclusion of non-Jews. Concentration camps were first developed for political prisoners and trade unionists. Jews were incarcerated in significant numbers after 1938. Mobile gas chambers, stationary gas chambers and crematoria were first developed for the murder of the handicapped. They became the training ground for the personnel who were later to staff the death camps and the first instance of “Medicalized” killing.

To teach the uniqueness of the Holocaust, all of the Nazi victims must be discussed. Inclusion of victims groups in the Museum did not require that one insist that their experience of victimization, that Nazi policy toward them was identical. For in contrast to Poles, who were to become a peasant people subservient to the Germans, saw their political and religious elite decimated and their gifted children Aryanized. All Jews – even those capable of working -- were to be annihilated. Jehovah’s Witnesses, the only voluntary victims in the camps, could leave if they renounced their faith or, at times, male homosexuals if they performed with women. All Jews were targeted, even Sister Edith Stein or the Roman Catholic Priests of Jewish ancestry who staffed the Church in the Warsaw Ghetto.

This turn to history and to inclusion has been decisive not only in Washington, but also in New York and Jerusalem. In the early 1980s, the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage was proposed. The Mayor of New York City and the Governor of New York State replicated the process of the Presidential Commission. In New York, the Museum was to be for Jews alone or so it seemed at the time of its formation. Since it was built on state land lands with state and city funds and is supported by tax dollars, non-Jews ultimately had to be included. More than a decade later, Ultra-Orthodox Jews’ anger at any mention of homosexuals among the Nazi victims, and the Museum’s insistence on their inclusion, permitted Museum visitors from other victim groups to be satisfied with but the most marginal mention of non-Jews as victims of Nazism.

And Yad Vashem, which at first looked upon these debates with amusement or annoyance, feared the dejudaization of the Holocaust and thus both a falsification of history. It also feared the loss of political capital that could accrue to Israel because of increased Holocaust consciousness. After all, Israel served as the haven for Holocaust victims and the homeland of its survivors because of the slaughter. Yet increasingly, Yad Vashem is receiving non-Jewish visitors. It too, has included non-Jews as part of the historical story.

The place from which the event in remembered shapes the content of that memory. And place changes over time.

Permit me an aside on vocabulary: at first, the debate used the terms Jews and others or Jews and non-Jews, reflecting the division of perspectives into Jews concerned over the memory of Jewish suffering and non-Jews victimized by the Nazis. In my work, publishing the results of the 1987 Conference on Non-Jewish Victims Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, I used the categorically American term A Mosaic of Victims. In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, we titled the exhibitions on the fourth floor “Enemies of the State”, the German term for those persecuted and on the exhibition on the third floor “Prisoners of the Camp”. Separate exhibitions on the fourth floor relate to terror in Poland and the murder of the handicapped.

I suspect that the room for compromise would be more limited today and the intensity of the debate only more heated because of developments in the American Jewish community. Reflecting the Eizenstat generation, the Museum was built by American Jews who felt empowered by their entry into the mainstream and who felt that one could make a Judeo-centric statement on the American Mall but who were sensitive enough to what is required by the American experience to develop a language of compromise. A Jewish statement need not be parochial but can be at once deeply Jewish, deeply American and deeply universal. Today, there is an increasing vocal element of the Jewish community that feels that the deparochialization of Jewish memory fatally endangers Jewish survival and the movement toward the outside world must be resisted at all costs. Only a parochial community will survive as Jews. The counter-force who can be labeled for want of a better term assimilationists find Judeo-centricity both inappropriate and unwarranted. They were afraid that the Museum would be known as a Jewish Museum and thus inappropriate for construction on the site. Finally, those Jews who feel comfortable as denizens of two worlds are significantly less confident that they can transmit Jewish loyalty and openness to the world.

James Ingo Freed’s design for the Holocaust Memorial Museum building put it in dialogue with monumental Washington, Museum Washington, and the routine offices of bureaucratic Washington. The Museum exhibition deliberately described the Holocaust as a modern event, reflecting the power of government, industrial practices and human ingenuity celebrated in the Smithsonian complex. It seemed for a while that the dialogue was actually a monologue. The National Capital Planning Commission twice rejected Museum planners’ efforts to be visible from the Mall, refusing permission to demolish a building known as Annex II and thus give Mall visitors a clear site line to the Hall of Remembrance, and scaling back the Hall of Remembrance in size so it would not protrude beyond the building lines of the adjacent National Mint. Artistic reasons were given, but the not so hidden debate was keeping the Museum in place, restraining it from intruding into sacred national space. Let me be precise, this was a decision in the planning stages. I suspect that once the American people voted to accept the Museum as part of Washington by visiting it in such impressive numbers, the Planning Commission decision would have been otherwise.

The Museum deliberately evoked American images. Presidential words are inscribed on the outside of the Hall of Remembrance, Flags of American units who “liberated the camps mark the 14th Street entry. Only within the exhibition do we learn that these soldiers were “accidental liberators” who came upon the camps. On the 15th Street side, the visitor walks between a quote from George Washington – “The government of the United States... gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and a quote from the Declaration of Independence – All men are created equal; ... They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; ... among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “Only a few visitors notice the slight transformation of the original. Omitted are the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Why? The history of the Holocaust cuts against the grain of the American ethos. We are a nation of new beginnings, of eternal hope. We believe that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. Our founding fathers proclaimed that human equality was a self-evident truth. We know better. In the Holocaust Memorial Museum, we learn of evil unredeemed, of death, of destruction. The Holocaust offers no happy ending, no transcendent meaning, or easy moralism. And even as we occasionally to learn of courage and valor, of heroism and decency, the overriding theme of the Holocaust is evil perpetrated by individuals, organizations, and governments.

Within the Museum confronting this European event brings us a new recognition of the tenets of American constitutional democracy: a belief in equality and equal justice under law; a commitment to pluralism and toleration; a determination to restrain government by checks and balances and by the constitutional protection of "inalienable rights;" and the affirmation of for human rights as a core national value and a foundation for foreign policy.

The New York Museum also incorporates its American setting. From the Third floor one can see the Statute of Liberty and Ellis Island. The Museum remains open to these symbols of America as a haven and will remain open to them even as the third floor undergoes dramatic change.

I could continue, but permit me to turn to Germany and its many efforts at memorialization.

In its first meeting at the Reichstag Building in Berlin, the German Parliament approved  the creation of a Holocaust Memorial in its alte neu (Old New) capital, Berlin. The memorial, commonly known as Eisenmann plus because it will incorporate the design by German born, New York architect Peter Eisenmann and additional, hitherto unspecified, elements, was approved after many debates and enormous controversy.

Germany had rejected all previous plans. It would not be an exaggeration to say of the previous plans that one was rejected as too large and one as too small, one was too prominent, another not prominent enough. One was too violent, one not violent enough. One design was too imposing , another not imposing enough.  One design was too Jewish and its rival not Jewish enough.  The professional committee assigned the professional tasks of design selection were overruled, even by Chancellor Helmut Kohl himself and the debate raged in the newspapers, magazines, as well as on the air.

Why did Germany cancel plan after plan for a Holocaust memorial. I think it is clear that the memorial was asked to assume the impossible task of finding an artistic way of representing the destructive consequences of the last time Berlin was the capital of Germany. It had to speak to the new Germany of the old Germany.

Most fascinating is the path that Germany did not take: It did not choose to build a Holocaust Memorial Museum, but a Memorial alone. Despite the enormous success of the Washington Museum and the ongoing dialogue with the Washington Museum, it never chose or even seriously pursued the idea of building a Museum.

               Spurious arguments were offered: Why memorialize when in essence you have authentic sites? 

I have been to each of the concentration camps in Germany as have many at this conference and I believe we share the view that these camps cannot bear the burden of remembrance. They can at most, tell the story of what happened at the given site and often only with difficulty. In the West, only a fragment of Dachau remains. The crematoria appear in a Garden-like setting. And what is startling about Dachau is its proximity to the center of town. Bergen-Belsen was destroyed in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust because of the fact that 13,000 people died in Bergen-Belsen after liberation.  There was no way to get the place clean without burning it down. In the East, one could offer a Ph.D. in Museum Studies on how to destroy a site by what was done in Sachsenhausen. The sites are under funded and in desperate need of refurbrishment. 

Only the move to Berlin and the return of the Parliament to the Reichstag building forced a resolution of the issue. Still the mayor of Berlin objects and one wonders if the issue is truly resolved.

I believe that the only way the Germans will resolve their problem is if they do what my generation of Americans did, which is to dare to ask the question, “How is the story of the Holocaust to be told from the streets of Berlin to a new generation of Germans? Building a Museum would force its planners to confront this question.

Much has happened in Germany over the past decade to transform Holocaust memory. The grandchildren are asking questions of their grandparents that their parents – the sons and daughters of the perpetrators -- refused to ask. The best sign of that multigenerational wrestling in Germany is the difference of what happened about 16 years ago with the Bitburg visit versus what happened in recent years with the powerful and uncompromising exhibition that has appeared in several German cities on the Wermacht.  The Bitburg visit was designed to convey the impression that that there were good German soldiers and bad ones. In contrast, the recent exhibition on the Wermacht showed the degree to which the military was complicit. The German Army was indispensable to the killing process.

The Goldhagen debate in Germany is but another indication of the changes that have occurred. In this forum, I do not want to deal with Hitler’s Willing Executioners as a work of scholarship.  I want to deal with it as a phenomenon of dialogue and debate. The book became a bestseller before it was published in German when it was only available in English, and it became the weapon by which the third generation asked questions that the second generation, was too polite to ask of the first generation. Another indication f the intergenerational problem: three of four Germans who saw Schindler’s List were under the age of thirty.

Suffice it to say, that Germany is now as it returns and renews itself in Berlin, is going to have to come to terms with the Holocaust. The unmastered trauma casts its giant shadow into the future. The decision on the Berlin Memorial is asking an art form to bear the burden of a society that has not yet been able to come to terms, and I for one believe that only very, very great art will bear that form, and thus far they have had good art, some excellent art, but not very great art. 

Permit me the briefest of comments regarding Poland in virtually bullet form.

The narrative of the story told at Auschwitz has clearly changed with the changing political conditions in Poland. The dejudaization of the Communist era is evident throughout the core exhibition as victim groups were described by nationalities and Jews were at best barely mentioned. Since the demise of the Communist regime, slight changes have been made, slight improvements. Acceptance in the West will require the rejudaization of the exhibition, but the issue of the Cross is a political quagmire that may now be reaching resolution. Polish nationalism and Roman Catholicism are joined. Right-wing nationalists have seized upon the Cross as a symbol of defiance to the current regime and the regime has responded by removing the crosses, but not touching the immoveable, the Papal Cross. Jewish groups have been in negotiation for a compromise solution that will involve not moving the Papal Cross which is situated outside of the Camp, but still visible to the Camp, but by designing the location of the Cross in such a way that it is not visible from the camps. The entire negotiations were overshadowed by inner Jewish politics, the attacks by Rabbi Avi Weiss – the brother-in-law of dismissed former Museum Director Dr. Walter Reich -- on former Holocaust Memorial Council chairman Miles Lerman. The personal and the political overlapped and the accusations against Lerman can fairly be described as vicious – and false.

               Inner Jewish politics paralyzed the negotiations. Yet something larger is at stake that can shape a visit to Auschwitz for the next century -- an infrastructure to accommodate visitors. Parking lots, bus parking, cafeteria and restrooms, and new exits from the highway are now in the planning stages. Where they will be situated will determine most future visits to the site. The parking lot is now situated adjacent to Auschwitz I and only one in ten visitors get to the Birkenau site. Robert Jan Van-Pelt, the distinguished architecture historian whose work centers on Auschwitz, has designed an arrangement of infrastructure equidistant between Auschwitz (Auschwitz I) and Birkenau (Auschwitz II). A tram would go in both directions and encourage a visit to Birkenau, the site of the Jewish death camp. With such an infrastructure in place, the half million visitors a year to Auschwitz would visit both places. Without such an infrastructure, visits to Birkenau will remain rare. One can only hope that the paralysis brought about by inner Jewish politics will come to an end so that the infrastructure debate can begin.

Crosses at Auschwitz will be a perpetual dilemma. The infrastructure, especially the highway exits, road and parking complexes will last more than a generation.

One final word on Israel: Yad Vashem is in the midst of redesigning its Museum for opening in 2002. Clearly, the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum spurred the reconstruction of Yad Vashem for the next century. It will also have different visitors in this new century, fewer survivors, fewer children of survivors and more visitors for whom the Holocaust is not personal family history but collective memory. The content of the exhibition will also be influenced by the struggles of the Zionists and the post-Zionists, as well as the empowerment of the religious sector of the Israeli population who will demand representation of their experience and not just of the armed resistance of the Zionists within the Museum exhibition. It is too early to tell how these struggles will play out, but it will be interesting – very interesting  -- to observe.