Holocaust as vicarious Past

32,790,364 articles and books Periodicals Literature Search Keyword Title Author Topic The Holocaust as vicarious past: Restoring the voices of memory to history. Link/Page Citation Some people want to forget where they've been; other people want to remember where they've never been. Eli Cohen and Gila Almagor, from their film, Under the Domim Tree HOW IS A POST-HOLOCAUST GENERATION OF ARTISTS supposed "to remember" events they never experienced directly? Born after Holocaust history into the time of its memory only, a new, media-savvy generation of artists rarely presumes to represent these events outside the ways they have vicariously known and experienced them. This post-war generation, after all, cannot remember the Holocaust as it actually occurred. All they remember, all they know of the Holocaust, is what the victims have passed down to them in their diaries, what the survivors have remembered to them in their memoirs. They remember not actual events, but the countless histories, novels, and poems of the Holocaust they have read, the photographs, movies, and video testimonies they have seen over the years. They remember long days and nights in the company of survivors, listening to their harrowing tales, until their lives, loves, and losses seem grafted onto their own life stories. Coming of age after--but indelibly shaped by-the Holocaust, this generation of artists, writers, architects, and even composers does not attempt to represent events they never knew immediately but instead portray their own, necessarily hyper-mediated experiences of memory. It is a generation no longer willing, or able, to recall the Holocaust separately from the ways it has been passed down to them. By portraying the Holocaust as a "vicarious past," these artists insist on maintaining a distinct boundary between their work and the testimony of their parents' generation. Such work recognizes their parents' need to testify to their experiences on the one hand, even to put the Holocaust "behind them." But by calling attention to their vicarious relationship to events, the next generation ensures that their "post-memory" of events remains an unfinished, ephemeral process, not a means toward definitive answers to impossible questions. Moreover, what further distinguishes these artists from their parents' generation is their categorical rejection of art's traditional redemptory function in the face of catastrophe. For these artists, the notion that such suffering might be redeemed by its aesthetic reflection, or that the terrible void left behind by the murder of Europe's Jews might be compensated by a nation's memorial forms is simply intolerable on both ethical and historical grounds. At the ethical level, this generation believes that squeezing beauty or pleasure from such events afterwards is not so much a benign reflection of the crime as it is an extension of it. At the historical level, these artists find that the aesthetic, religious, and political linking of destruction and redemption may actually have justified such terror in the killers' minds. Not only does this generation of artists intuitively grasp their inability to know the history of the Holocaust outside of the ways it has been passed down to them, but they also see history itself as a composite record of both events and these events' transmission to the next generation. This doesn't mean that their vicarious memory of the past thereby usurps the authority of history itself, or that of the historians and their research; after all, as they are the first to acknowledge, they inevitably rely on hard historical research for their knowledge of what happened, how and why. But in addition to the facts of Holocaust history, they recognize the further facts surrounding this history's transmission to them, that its history is being passed down to them in particular times and places. These are not mutually exclusive claims, or competing sets of facts, but both part of history's reality. Neither history nor memory is regarded by these artists as a zero-sum game in which one kind of history or memory ta kes away from another; nor is it a contest between kinds of knowledge, between what we know and how we know it; nor is it a contest between scholars and students of the Holocaust and the survivors themselves. For these artists know that the facts of history never "stand" on their own-but are always supported by the reasons for recalling such facts in the first place. For American artists like Art Spiegelman, David Levinthal, and Shimon Attie whose work I explore here, their subject is not the Holocaust so much as how they came to know it and how it has shaped their inner lives. Theirs is an unabashed terrain of memory, not of history, but no less worthy of exploration. When they go to represent this "vicarious past," they do so in the artistic forms and media they have already long practiced. When commix-artist Art Spiegelman remembers the Holocaust, therefore, he recalls both his father's harrowing story of survival and the circumstances under which he heard it. In his "comixture" of images and narrative, he is able to tell both stories simultaneously, turning them into a single, double-stranded narrative. When photographer David Levinthal was asked by his art teacher at Yale why he took photographs of toys in historical tableaux instead of historical reality itself, he answered simply that the vintage Nazi figurines he collected and photographed were his historical reality, the only remnants of the past he personally experienced. By photographing his imagined recreations of Nazi pageantry, their war-machine, and murder of the Jews, Levinthal would limit his representations to an exploration of that which he knows from history books, photographs, and mass-media images. Similarly, in his European environmental installations, artist Shimon Attie has projected archival photographic images of the past--his memory--back onto the otherwise amnesiac sites of history in order to reanimate these sites with his "memory" of what happened there. Haunted by what he regarded as the specter of missing Jews in Berlin's Scheunenviertel, Attie projected photographs of Jews from this quarter taken in the 1920s and 1930s back ont o their original sites. Here he has literally projected the "after-images" in his mind back onto otherwise indifferent landscapes. Spiegelman's Maus As becomes clear, especially to the author himself, Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale is not about the Holocaust so much as about the survivor's tale itself and the artist-son's recovery of it. In Spiegelman's own words, 'Maus is not what happened in the past, but rather what the son understands of the father's story.... It is an autobiographical history of my relationship with my father, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, cast with cartoon animals." (2) As his father recalled what happened to him at the hands of the Nazis, his son, Art, recalls what happened to him at the hands of his father and his father's stories. As his father told his experiences to Art, in all their painful immediacy, Art tells his experiences of the storytelling sessions themselves-in all of their somewhat less painful mediacy. That Spiegelman has chosen to represent the survivor's tale, as passed down to him in what he calls the "commix," is neither surprising nor controversial. After all, as a commix-artist and founder of Raw Magazine, Spiegelman has only turned to what has always been his working artistic medium. That the "commix" would serve such a story so well, however, is what I would like to explore here. On the one hand, Spiegelman seems to have realized that in order to remain true to both his father's story and his own experience of it, he would have to remain true to his medium. But in addition, he has also cultivated the unique capacity in the "commix-ture" of image and narrative for telling the double-stranded tale of his father's story and his own recording of it. While Spiegelman acknowledges that the very word comics "brings to mind the notion that they have to be funny ... humor itself is not an intrinsic component of the medium. Rather than comics," he continues, "I prefer the word commix, to mix together, because to talk about comics is to talk about mixing together words and pictures to tell a story." (3) Moreover, Spiegelman explains, "The strength of commix lies in [its] synthetic ability to approximate a 'mental language' that is closer to actual human thought than either words or pictures alone." (4) Here he also cites the words of what he calls the patron saint of commix, Swiss educational theorist and author Rodolphe Topffer (1799--1846): "The drawings without their text would have only a vague meaning; the text without the drawings would have no meaning at all. The combination makes up a kind of novel--all the more unique in that it is no more like a novel than it is like anything else." (5) For unlike a more linear historical narrative, the "comix-ture" o f words and images generates a triangulation of meaning--a kind of three-dimensional narrative--in the movement between words, images, and the reader's eye. Moreover, the box-panels convey information in both vertical and horizontal movements of the eye, as well as in the analog of images implied by the entire page appearing in the background of any single panel. The narrative sequence of his boxes, with some ambiguity as to the order in which they are to be read, combines with and then challenges the narrative of his father's story--itself constantly interrupted by Art's questions and own neurotic preoccupations, his father's pill-taking, the rancorous father-son relationship, his father's new and sour marriage. As a result, Spiegelman's narrative is constantly interrupted by--and integrative of--life itself, with all its dislocutions, associations, and paralyzing self-reflections. It is a narrative echoing with the ambient noise and issues surrounding its telling. The roundabout method of memory-telling is captured here in ways unavailable to more linear narrative. It is a narrative that tells both the story of events and its own unfolding as narrative. Other aspects of Spiegelman's specific form and technique further incorporate the process of drawing Maus into its finished version. By drawing his panels in a 1:1 ratio, for example, instead of drawing large panels and then shrinking them down to page size, Spiegelman reproduces his hand's movement in scale--its shakiness, the thickness of his drawing pencil line, the limits of miniaturization, all to put a cap on detail and fine line, and so keep the pictures underdetermined. This would be the equivalent of the historian's voice, not as it interrupts the narrative, however, but as it constitutes it. Written over a 13-year period between 1972 and 1985, the first volume of Maus thus integrated both narrative and anti-narrative elements of the comics, embedding the father's altogether coherent story in a medium ever threatening to fly apart at the seams. The result is a continuous narrative rife with the discontinuities of its reception and production, the absolutely authentic voice of his father counterposed to the fabular images of cartoon animals. In its self-negating logic, Spiegelman's commix also suggests itself as a pointedly anti-redemptory medium that simultaneously makes and unmakes meaning as it unfolds. Words tell one story, images another. Past events are not redeemed in their telling but are here exposed as a continuing cause of the artist's inability to find meaning anywhere. Meaning is not negated altogether, but, created in the father's telling, is immediately challenged in the son's reception and visualization of it. In fact, the "story" is not a single story at all but two stories being told simultaneously: the father's story and Spiegelman's imaginative record of it. It is double-stranded and includes the competing stories of what his father says and what Artie hears, what happened during the Holocaust and what happens now in Artie's mind. As a process, it makes visible the space between what gets told and what gets heard, what gets heard and what gets seen. The father says one thing as we see him doing something else. Artie promises not to betray certain details only to show us both the promise and betrayal together. Indeed, it may be Artie's unreliability as a son that makes his own narrative so reliable. The story now includes not just "what happened," but how what happened is made sense of by father and son in the telling. At the same time, it highlights both the inseparability of his father's story from its effect on Artie and the story's own necessarily contingent coming into being. All of which might be lost to either images or narrative alone, or even to a reception that did not remark its own unfolding. David Levinthal's "Mein Kampf" Like other children of his generation, or like all who were blessedly removed from Europe during the war, David Levinthal's memory of the Holocaust was only and always a composite pastiche of television images, toys, and the stories he made up during years of war play. The reality of war and Holocaust was necessarily reduced to the miniature reality of his playthings, the intensely felt reality of his romper-room simulations. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that when photographer and toy-collector David Levinthal began to re-examine his memory of the Holocaust, he found himself reflecting once again on the toys by which he had first grasped history. But when he began to photograph these toys in 1972, one of his M.F.A. photography teachers at Yale asked him, "Why don't you take pictures of the real world, of reality?" Levinthal answered, perhaps a little too honestly, that "These toys are my reality!" Rather than forgetting that his relationship to the Holocaust would always be an imagined, make-believe one, he chose to make his vicarious past-as embodied in these simulations-the subject of his photographs. For when an artist like David Levinthal sets out "to remember" the Holocaust, all he can actually remember are the numberless images passed down to him in books, films, and photographs. When he sets out "to photograph" the Holocaust, therefore, he takes pictures of his Holocaust experiences-i.e., recirculated images of the Holocaust. Indeed, the visual reality of the Holocaust for Levinthal and his generation is forever only the record of photographs and documentary film. The physical reality of the Holocaust exists now only in its consequences, its effects and simulations: the rest is memory, itself increasingly shaped by the reality of our simulations. This memory" is not the animate memory of one who was there, but is rather as static and inert as the photos themselves, the images already small and toy-like. As a late-twentieth-century photographer, David Levinthal is hardly alone in his fascination with the ready-made simulacrum. "One of my favorite [Eugene Atget] photographs is a shop window full of hats on [mannequin] heads," Levinthal tells us. (6) Like Atget's photographs of mannequins, or Hans Bellmer's surreal photographs of recomposed dolls in process, or Jorge Ribalta's more recent portraiture of sculpted busts, or Laurie Simmons's photographs of mock-domestic doll tableaux, or Cindy Sherman's disturbing mutilated doll images, Levinthal's photographs have always taken the imitations of reality, not reality itself, as their subject. (7) For Levinthal's media-saturated generation, it could even be said that these ready-made simulations have become the primary reality of events to which they refer. Because historical events constantly pass into the ether of time, they remain "present" only in memory, imagination, and their material representations. The artists of the photo-conceptual vanguard have thus turned their interrogating eye to the simulations of reality as relentlessly as a prior generation of photographers once explored what they regarded as a natural and unmediated world. In the process, Levinthal et al. continue to reveal the ways the world is constantly packaged and repackaged for us in a commodity culture. By taking as their subject ready-made simulations only, such photographs mock the culture with the reductive banality of its simulations, even as they leave us hungry for the "real thing," for a real world constantly displaced by its media product. In the hands of photo-conceptual artists, toys and their reflected images evoke not only memories of childhood and private inner lives, but also embody the realities and preoccupations of adult life, as well as larger public issues of history and our vicarious relationship to it through art. Finally, through their "fabricated photography," these artists also ask to what extent reality itself is always a kind of ongoing fabrication--not as a kind of fiction, but more literally as that which is constantly being improvised, moment by moment. (8) In the case of Mein Kampf, the artist's second foray into memory of the wartime, the result is a disturbing and provocative series of over-sized Polaroid photographs depicting the artist's own dramatically staged tableaux of toy Nazi soldiers and their figurine victims. As Levinthal is quick to clarify, these images do not capture Holocaust history so much as they do the artist's struggle to capture his own hyper-mediated reality of the Holocaust. Moreover, Levinthal's carefully choreographed and staged photo-tableaux have their own history, their own process, which are as much a part of their significance as the content of the glossy images themselves. Levinthal's "toyland of Holocaust history," like much contemporary art, was not meant to stand by or for themselves. But rather, they are necessarily part of the artist's larger oeuvre, a life's work dedicated to exploring the fuzzy line between the photograph's traditional function as documentary record of external reality and its more recently acknowledged role in revealing the inner realities of the mind's eye. (9) It is David Levinthal's struggle between what he knows and how he has known it, between Holocaust history and how it has been passed down to him in the popular, all too mythologized icons of television and photographs. For whether we like it or not, once icons of the Holocaust enter the popular imagination, they also turn mythic, hard and impenetrable. Levinthal insists that these new mini-spectacles are as object-driven as his earlier projects: the little Nazi drummer corps is set before something resembling the Brandenburg Gate; a soldier and dog patrol outside guard tower and wire fence; a woman holding a child whirls away from a German soldier aiming a rifle at her from inches away. But it is also clear that each of these toys has sparked a particular visual association in the artist's mind, the memory of an image, which the artist then brings into physical relief. And because they are meant to evoke, not mime, and to stimulate the imagination but not simulate actual historical realities, these photographs are shot in what Levinthal terms a "narrative style": what the artist has characterized as "intentionally ambiguous to draw the viewer in so that you make your own story." (10) Or as he elaborates in another interview, "I think I create a window that allows the viewer to come into an image that appears to be more complete than it really is. It become s complete when the viewer becomes a participant and fills in the missing details."(11) That is, added to the artist's story as he constructed the tableaux are the stories viewers tell themselves about what they see. These pieces depend on narrative for their lives, animated by the stories we tell about them. Levinthal accomplishes this ambiguity by shooting these tableaux at Polaroid's New York studio with a 20x24 Land Camera, its aperture set wide open, to create an extremely shallow focal plane-hence, the blurry fore- and backgrounds. The more ambiguous, under-determined, and oblique the image, the more it seems to invite the viewer's own narrative. The sharper the image, the more repellent it is of multiple-readings, for it crowds out the reader's projected story with the clutter of its own detail. The essential tension in Levinthal's particular medium is that between the toy's fixedness and the camera's seeming liquification of its material hardness. In this way, he turns the traditional assumption of photographic precision against itself, extending the range of the camera inward to include the mind's eye and imagination. Depending on the particular image, the focal plane in Levinthal's work lies just before or behind the toy objects, never on them. Rather than concentrating the mind on the toy-object, the focal plane takes us into the space between the object and its once-worldly referent, into the space between it and us--where the mind is forced to imagine and thereby collaborate. The indistinct lines don't absorb the eye as sharp images might, but instead the soft focus deflects the mind's eye away from the object and inward, back into itself. In the seemingly iconic image of guard tower, fence, soldier and dog, it is the rich black and blues tints of the sky that absorb the eye, pulling the mind through the figures into the space behind them. This is a kind of reverse reality effect: I stare and realize that the darker and less discernible the dog and soldier, the more real they become in my mind. In almost every one of the images from Levinthal's Mein Kampf series, many more questions-aesthetic, personal, and historical-are raised than answered: What is the relationship of the artist to events? Does such a medium trivialize memory even as it interrogates it? What of the history itself is understood through such images? And what do such images tell us about our relationship to the Holocaust now, 50 years later? The cool and studied polish of these images constantly reminds us of their aesthetic intervention between then and now. They are staged to look deliberately staged, choreographed to show their choreography. All rawness is gone, all innocence put to flight. Resonant with our own corrupted memory traces, these photographs show us how far away from actual events the icons of our culture have already taken us. (12) To this day, many people insist that there are some scenes from the Holocaust that cannot ethically be represented. Since no one survived the gas chambers to describe the terror there, its darkness has remained absolute. Other areas on which artists are practically forbidden to tread include the sexuality of victims, the possible sad o-sexuality of the killers. When I objected to what seemed to be a deliberate eroticization of the murder process and tried to talk the artist into eliding from the exhibition several images, the artist responded that Art Spiegelman had also tried to talk him out of showing those. "But nowhere in the literature have I found anything to suggest an erotic component to the killing process," I said, "only in the imaginations of those who weren't there, like D. M. Thomas in his novel, The White Hotel." To which Levinthal replied that whether or not there was actually a sexual, erotic component to the murder process, it remains certainly-if unfortunately-true that in many of its popular representations, the Holocaust has been eroticized, whether we like it or not. Since his subject is the readymade simulation of the Holocaust, he was only showing a Holocaust pornokitsch already at play in the cultural transformations of these terrible scenes. In popular movies like Schindler's List or Sophie's Choice, or novels like The White Hotel, for example, Eros and Thanatos are twinned as constituent elements of Holocaust victimization, projected reflexively onto victims by a culture obsessed with both, a culture that has long linked the two as fatally interconnected, a culture that has eventually grown dependent on their union for commercial and entertainment value. (13) Moreover, he believes that both killers and victims understood that part of the dehumanization of the Jews included their sexual degradation in the moments before death. As women have been objectified in these toys and the Jews were objectified by the Nazis, the victims would here be presented as objectified twice over. Designed as sexual objects to begin with, the dolls are used to recapitulate not only the relationship between killers and victims but also, if more implicitly, that between contemporary viewers and these very images. Here Levinthal suggests that with every representation of their murder, the Jews are in some sense murdered again and again. Robbed of life by the Nazi gunmen, the victims are robbed of their dignity by the observing photographer--and then again with the recirculation of such images. Only now we are the passive bystanders, and not so innocent at that. The complicated role such images play in the public sphere came into especially sharp relief in a slightly different context a few years ago in Jerusalem. When confronted by leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, the curators at Israel's national Holocaust memorial museum, Yad Vashem, refused to remove wall-sized photographs taken by the Nazis of naked Jewish women on their way to the gas chambers at Treblinka (many of them orthodox and so violated unequivocably by the S.S. photographer at the moment). The museum replied that because this degradation, too, was part of the reality of the Holocaust, it had to be shown as part of the historical record--whether or not it offended the religious community's own rigorous sense of modesty. In the eyes of the religious community, however, the humiliation and violation of these women's modesty was as much a part of the crime as their eventual murder. That their modesty would be violated yet again by the viewers now may even suggest not so much a repetit ion of the crime as an extension of it. At the same time, despite the curators' stated aim of maintaining the exhibit's historical integrity, the museum may have refused to acknowledge another historical reality: the possibility of their visitors' pornographic gaze. Will we ever know all the reasons why people are transfixed by these images? Is the historical record of past travesties enough to blind us to the possibility of present travesties on the parts of viewers? Can we say with certainty that every museum visitor's gaze is as pure as the curators' historical intent? For the fine line between exhibition and exhibitionistic remains as fragile as it is necessary, even in the hands of scrupulous historians and curators. At least part of what makes these images so unnerving for viewers is their suggestion that we, as viewers, may be no less complicit in the continuing degradation of the victim than the original Nazi photographer. For Levinthal, the question was never whether to show such images, but rather how to ask in them: to what extent do we always re-objectify a victim by reproducing images of the victim as victim? To what extent do we participate in this degradation by reproducing and then viewing it? To what extent do these images ironize and thereby repudiate such representations? Or to what extent do these images feed on the same prurient energy they purportedly expose? Or as Saul Friedlander has already asked, "Is such attention fixed on the past only a gratuitous reverie, the attraction of spectacle, exorcism, or the result of a need to understand; or is it, again and still, an expression of profound fears and, on the part of some, mute yearnings as well? (14) By leaving these questions unanswered, Levinthal confronts us with our own role in the representation of mass murder, the ways we cover our eyes and peek through our fingers at the same time. Shimon Attie's "Writing on the Wall" In "Sites Unseen," Shimon Attie's series of European installations between 1991 and 1996, the artist has not only projected his necessarily mediated memory of a now lost Jewish past onto otherwise forgetful sites. But in so doing, he has also attempted a simultaneous critique of his own hyper-mediated relationship to the past. By literally bathing the sites of a now invisible Jewish past in the photographic images of their historical pasts, he simulataneously looks outward and inward for memory: for he hopes that once seen, the images of these projections will always haunt these sites by haunting those who have seen his projections. The sites of a lost Jewish past in Europe would thus retain traces of this past, if now only in the eyes of those who have seen Attie's installations. When Shimon Attie moved to Berlin in 1991, he found a city haunted by the absence of its murdered and deported Jews. Like many Jewish Americans preoccupied by the Holocaust and steeped in its seemingly ubiquitous images, he saw Jewish ghosts in Europe's every nook and cranny: from the Scheunenviertel in Berlin to the central train station in Dresden; from the canals of Copenhagen to those of Amsterdam; from Cologne's annual art fair to Krakow's Kazimierz neighborhood. For Attie, however, private acts of remembrance in which he alone saw the faces and forms of now absent Jews in their former neighborhoods were not enough. He chose, therefore, to actualize these inner visions, to externalize them, and in so doing to make them part of a larger public's memory. Once thus actualized, he hoped, these images would continue to haunt the sites even when no longer visible, and enter the inner worlds of all who saw them. He hoped that once others had become witnesses to his memorial projections, the installations themse lves would no longer be necessary. "After finishing art school in San Francisco, I came to Berlin in the summer of 1991," Shimon Attie writes in his introduction to a book for "The Writing on the Wall." "Walking the streets of the city that summer, I felt myself asking over and over again, Where are all the missing people? What has become of the Jewish culture and community which had once been at home here? I felt the presence of this lost community very strongly, even though so few visible traces of it remained." (5) Strangely enough, it was not the absence of Berlin's lost Jews that Attie felt so strongly, but their presence. For in fact, though they may have been invisible to others walking those same streets, Attie's memory and imagination had already begun to repopulate the Scheunenviertel district in Berlin with the Jews of his mind. After several weeks of photographic research in Berlin's archives, Attie had found dozens of images from the Scheunenviertel of the 1920s and 1930s and was able to pinpoint nearly one-quarter of their precise locations in the current neighborhood just east of Berlin's Alexanderplatz, formerly in the eastern sector of the city. That September, only three months after moving to Berlin, Attie began projecting slides of these photographs onto the same or nearby addresses where they had been taken earlier in the century. "'The Writing on the Wall' grew out of my response to the discrepancy between what I felt and what I did not see," Attie explains. "I wanted to give this invisible past a voice, to bring it to light, if only for some brief moments" (9). And so for the next year, weather permitting, Attie projected these images of Jewish life from the Scheunenviertel before the Holocaust back into present-day Berlin. Each installation ran for one or two evenings, visible to local residents, street traffic, and pas sersby. During these projections, the artist also photographed the installations themselves in time exposures lasting from three to four minutes. The resulting photographs of the installations have been exhibited widely in galleries and museums, works of fine art in their own right, the only remaining traces of the original installations. Once projected onto the peeling and mottled building facades of this quarter, these archival images seem less the reflections of light than illuminations of figures emerging from the shadows. In his own words, Attie says he wanted "to peel back the wallpaper of today and reveal the history buried underneath."(16) From the doorways, in particular, former Jewish residents seem to be stepping out of a third dimension. Some, like the resident standing in the doorway at Joachimstrasse 2, are caught unaware by both the original photographer and now, it seems, by us. Others, like the religious book salesman at the corner of what was formerly the corner of Grenadierstrasse and Schendelgasse, seems to have been interrupted by the photographer, and has turned his head sideways to gaze impassively back at us. Because the streets of the dilapidated Scheunenoiertel (called the Finstere Medine, or "dark quarter" by its Yiddish-speaking denizens) are still largely run down, as were many parts of the formerly East Berlin wh en the wall came down, the projected images added a life to these streets that they appeared otherwise not to have. Ironically, of course, the "voice" Attie gave these absentJews was at times also the voice of residents objecting to the project itself. 'While Attie was installing the Buchhandler slide projection, for example, a 50-year-old man suddenly came running out of the building shouting that his father had bought the building "fair and square" from Mr. Jacobs in 1938. "And what happened to this Mr. Jacobs?" Attie asked the man. "Why, of course, he was a multi-millionaire and moved to New York." (17) Of course. All of which was captured by German television cameras who broadcast the confrontation that night on national news. Attie couldn't have scripted this particular projection any more powerfully. Another resident called the police to complain angrily that Attie's projections of Jews onto his building would make his neighbors think that he was Jewish. Make him stop, he pleaded. The response is as much a part of these works as the installations themselves, the artist says. The installation thus included both the projections of Attie's inner obsessions, as well as the counter-projections of the neighborhood residents' own obsessions. Without these responses, the installations, like the buildings themselves, remain inert, inanimate, dead. Indeed, even though these images may have disappeared from sight as soon as Attie turned off the high-intensity projector, their after-image lived on in the minds of those who had seen them once. From this point on, the images of these Jews "live" only as their subjects lived before them: in the photographs of these installations. These are quite literally photographs of photographs we are seeing here, just as the local burghers now walk their neighborhoods haunted by their memory of Attie's memory-installation. They are now haunted not by the Jews who had once lived here, or even by their absence, but by the images of Jews haunting the artist's mind. As Michael Andre Bernstein has made so painfully clear, photography is always about loss, about the absence of what was once real in front of the lens: hence, the essential melancholia at the heart of the photograph. "To look at a photograph," Bernstein writes, "is to experience a certain sorrow at the sheer fact of loss and separation, curiously mingled with the pleasure of recognizing that what no longer exists, has been, if not restored to us, then at least memorialized for us, fixed in the stasis of an image now forever available to our gaze." (18) Insofar as this bitter-sweet mixture of sorrow and pleasure necessarily haunts our experience of all photographs, its extremes seem wildly exaggerated in these wall projections. For it's true, they are beautiful and chilling, slightly exhilarating and depressing; they inspire longing and fear, hope and despair. By keeping the mixture between sorrow and pleasure in balance, they can also keep their potential for redemption in check, never allowing the pain of s uch loss to be redeemed by the beauty of the image itself. In this way, these installations have served as a somewhat literal metaphor for the artist's projection of his own inner desires onto the walls around him. All of us wish we could bring the victims back to life, to repair the terrible wound. But "The Writing on the Wall" is no such reparation or bringing back to life; it is, rather, the reminder of what was lost, not what was. At the same time, it is clear in Attie's mind, as he means for it to be in ours, that these projections are simulations, not historical reconstructions. Their immense value lies not in showing us literally what was lost but in showing that loss itself is part of this neighborhood's history, an invisible but essential feature of its landscape. No doubt, some will see the work of these artists as a supremely evasive, even self-indulgent art by a generation more absorbed in their own vicarious experiences of memory than by the survivors' actual experiences of real events. (19) Others will say that if the second or third generation want to make art out of the Holocaust, then let it be about the Holocaust itself and not about themselves. The problem for much of these artists' generation, of course, is that they are unable to remember the Holocaust outside of the ways it has been passed down to them, outside of the ways it is meaningful to them fifty years after the fact. As the survivors have testified to their experiences of the Holocaust, their children and children's children will now testify to their experiences of the Holocaust. And what are their experiences of the Holocaust? Photographs, film, histories, novels, poems, plays, survivors' testimony. It is necessarily mediated experience, the after-life of memory, represented in history's after-ima ges: the impressions retained in the mind's eye of a vivid sensation long after the original, external cause has been removed. Why represent all that? Because for those in Spiegelman's, Levinthal's, and Attie's generation, to leave out the truth of how they came to know the Holocaust would be to ignore half of what actually happened: we would know what happened to Spiegelman's father but miss what happened to the artistson. But isn't the important story what happened to the father at Auschwitz? Yes, but without exploring why it's important, we leave out part of the story itself. Is it self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing to make the listener's story part of the teller's story? This generation doubts that it can be done otherwise. They can no more neglect the circumstances surrounding a story's telling than they can ignore the circumstances surrounding the actual events' unfolding. Neither the events nor the memory of them take place in avoid. In the end, these artists ask us to consider which is the more truthful account: that narrative or art which ignores its own coming into being, or that which paints this fact, too, into its canva s of history? For artists at home in their respective media, whether it is the "commix" of Spiegelman or the vanguard photography of Levinthal, questions about the appropriateness of their forms seem irrelevant. These artists remain as true to their forms and chosen media as they do to their "memory" of events. But for those less at home in the languages of contemporary art, the possibility that form--especially the strange and new-might overwhelm the content of such memory-work leads some to suspect the artists' motives. Historian Omer Bartov, for example, has expressed his sense of "unease" with what he describes as the "cool aesthetic pleasure" that derives from the more "highly stylized" of postmodern Holocaust representations. (20) Part of what troubles Bartov is that such work seems more preoccupied with being stimulating and interesting in and of itself than it is with exploring events and the artist's relationship to them afterward. Also implied here is an understandable leeriness on Bartov's part of the possibilit y that such art draws on the power of the Holocaust merely to energize itself and its forms. Even more disturbing for Bartov, however, is the question Saul Friedlander raised several years ago in his own profound meditations on "fascinating fascism," in which Friedlander wonders whether an aesthetic obsession with Fascism may be less a reflection on Fascism than it is an extension of it. Here Friedlander asks whether a brazen new generation of artists bent on examining their own obsession with Nazism adds to our understanding of the Third Reich or only recapitulates a fatal attraction to it. "Nazism has disappeared," Friedlander writes, but the obsession it represents for the contemporary imagination-as well as the birth of a new discourse that ceaselessly elaborates and reinterprets it- necessarily confronts us with this ultimate question: Is such attention fixed on the past only a gratuitous reverie, the attraction of spectacle, exorcism, or the result of a need to understand; or is it, again and still, an expression of profound fears and, on the part of some, mute yearnings as well? (21) As the artists whose work I explore here suggest, the question remains open. Not because every aesthetic interrogation of the Holocaust also contains some yearning for "fascinating fascism." But because they believe that neither artist nor historian can positively answer yes or no to this question. NOTES (1.) This essay has been adapted from my full-length study, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) for presentation at "The Future of the Holocaust," a symposium at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, 25 February 2001. (2.) From author's interview with Art Spiegelman, as well as from Art Spiegelman, "Commix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview," Print (November/December 1988): 61. (3.) Art Spiegelman, "Commix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview": 61. (4.) From Jane Kalir, "The Road to Maus," at Galerie St. Etienne, November 17, 1992 through January 9, 1993: 2. (5.) Art Spiegelman 61. (6.) Quotedin The Wild West: Photographs by David Levinthal (Washington, DC/London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 5. (7.) In an eye-opening essay on the work of Hans Bellmer, Herbert Lust wrote that "Any artist interested in the female body's endless possibilities or 'forbidden' mental states must reckon with [Hans] Bellmer" ("For Women Are Endless Forms: Hans Bellmer's Dark Art," Sulfur (Spring 1990): 47). While this is undoubtedly so, it maybe equally true that neither can viewers today see any of these contemporary artists' work without recalling Bellmer's early conceptual photographs of his violently reconstituted doll. Moreover, when we recall that Bellmer made and photographed this doll in 1934 Germany as an explicit protest, dissent and challenge to the unyielding absolutism of the Nazis, Levinthal's images of erotic dolls as Holocaust victims begin to resonate as a kind of protest art and further breaking of cultural taboos. (8.) For a fuller elaboration of both Levinthal's place among the "photo-conceptual vanguard" and the place of his Mein Kampfseries in his larger corpus of work, see Charles Stainback and Richard B. Woodward, David Levinthal: Work from 7975-7996 (New York: The International Center of Photography, 1997), a catalogue for a retrospective exhibition of the artist's work. (9.) This chapter is adapted from my catalogue essay, "David Levinthal's Mein Kampf Memory, Toys, and the Play of History," in David Levinthal, Mein Kampf (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 1996), pp. 67-83. (10.) From The Wild West: Photographs by David Levinthal, p. 7. (11.) From interview with Richard B. Woodward in David Levinthal Workfrom 1975-1976, p. 153. (12.) Reviews of Levinthal's Mein Kampf were generally, if warily, positive. In almost every case, reviewers were moved by the power of the images on the one hand, even as they were made intensely uncomfortable by their subject-and its relentlessly cool treatment. "Lovely to look at, horrific to behold" was how Robin Cembalist put it in her review of Mein Kampf in the Forward ("Levinthal's Disturbing Photos of Nazis in Toyland," Forward [11 November 1994]: 9). Others, like Sarah Boxer, wonder whether Levinthal can't help but become part of the pornographic culture he proposes to be exploring ("Hardly Child's Play: Shoving Toys Into Darkest Corners," New York Times [24 January 1997]: C--7). (13.) For an elaboration of the ways women's corpses, in particular, have been represented as emblematic in our culture, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Rody: Configurations of Femininity, Death & the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge Press, 1992). (14.) Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 19. (15.) Shimon Attie, "The Writing on the Wall Project," in The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1994), p.9. (16.) Quoted in Guy Chazan, "Ghosts of the Ghettos," London Times (25 January 1995). (17.) As related by the artist to the author in an interview. This exchange is also described by Attie in The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter, 12. (18.) Michael Andre Bernstein, "Shimon Attie: Images as Memory-Memory of Images," in Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter, p. 6. (19.) In responding to my call for interweaving a history of events with a reflection on how Holocaust history comes to be told, for example, a well-respected historian, Peter Hayes, suggested that such a study, "as well as Saul Friedlander's recent work, lavishes talents on a project not quite worthy of [Young and Friedlander]. Their preoccupations reflect a sort of scholasticism now quite rampant in the academy in which commonplace problems of technique are mistaken for profound matters of substance, in which how we learn and relate what we know becomes as intellectually significant and preoccupying as the knowledge itself, and in which-in self-flattering fashion-the scholars who interpret and the students who learn become the subject of inquiry, inevitably displacing the participants themselves." Here I am grateful to Peter Hayes for sending me his "Comment in Response" to an early version of "Toward a Received History of the Holocaust," both delivered as parts of a panel on "Contemporary Interpretations of the Holocaust," at the annual Social Science History Association Conference, New Orleans, 12 October 1996. (20.) Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation(Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 116. (21.) Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, p. 19. JAMES E. YOUNG, a Contributing Editor, is Professor of English and Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of At Memory's Edge (2000), The Texture of Memory (1993), and Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988). His article, "Germany's Vanishing Holocaust Monuments," appeared in the Fall 1994 issue. COPYRIGHT 2002 American Jewish Congress No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder. Copyright 2002 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. Please bookmark with social media, your votes are noticed and appreciated: Article Details Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback Author: Young, James E. Publication: Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought Article Type: Excerpt Geographic Code: 1USA Date: Jan 1, 2002 Words: 7614 Previous Article: The future of the Holocaust: Storytelling, oppression, and identity; See under: "apocalypse". Next Article: B'reshit. Related Articles In the shadow of history: second generation writers and artists and the shaping of Holocaust memory in Israel and America. CAMP HUMOUR OR SUBLIME HORROR? Experiencing Explaining, and Exploiting the Holocaust. New Holocaust curriculum in Israel. The topographies of memory in Berlin: The Neue Wache and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Thinking about the Holocaust and its Visual Culture. Integrity and relevance: shaping Holocaust memory at the Sydney Jewish Museum. Millicent Marcus. Italian Film In the Shadow of Auschwitz. Bibliography for work in Holocaust studies. Trajectories of memory; intergenerational representations of the Holocaust in history and the arts. 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