CANS 406 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Rachel Whiteread
22 May 2018
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Monday January 29th: Counter Monuments & the Holocaust
Essay #1: March 1st @ noon
- Assignment sheet on mycourses and it will give you ideas for themes
- List of newspapers articles
- essay=thesis+theory+evidence
- Theory: scholarly articles and books (secondary sources)
- use in class readings
- Only use other readings from outside areas if need be, confirm with
teacher
- Evidence: newspaper articles, videos, (primary sources)
- Thesis: an argument and claim about the evidence analyzed within a theoretical
framework
- Stated in introduction, 2nd or 3rd sentence
- Think about theories from secondary articles beyond ones on confederate
symbols
- Insufficient
- Description only: “this is what happened to Monument X”
- Normative judgement only: “Nazis are bad” (not a thesis, need a judgement)
- Won’t read drafts
- Uncomfortable histories: things we don’t want to think about or consider put into history
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on international Remembrance day
- Statement released a year ago after white house mentioned holocaust memorial day
and didn’t mention jews
- This year, they did mention jews in their mentions
The end of “Statue Mania”?
- From glorifying victories
- Trafalgar
- Presence of something, like the nation, or the state
- Tended to emphasize the presence of the nation rather than the loss of the
people
- Deliberately emphasize their permanence and don’t make leniency for other
interpretations
- to remembering horror
- Post WWII sentiments/approached to monuments change
- People want to represent the losses and tragedy
- Young “ a monument against fascism would have to be a monument against
itself”
Young
The Counter-Monument
- Memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument
- Upside down duke in Prague
Franck and Fazakerley
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Dialogic Counter Monuments
- Couled counter monuments that critique the purpose and the design of a specific,
existing monument, in an explicit, contrary and proximate pairin
- Ex. fearless bull and the girl added to it
- Changes the meaning of the old monument
- It’s a dialogic counter monument
Imre Nagy and the Red Army Monument
- Imre Nagy, leader of the uprising in 1956 against the SU (red army) (used in a lecture
beforehand)
- Facing the hungarian parliament buildings and has its back to the red army
monument
- Hungarians can’t remove the red army monument for a variety of reasons
Anti-Monumental Counter Monuments
- Essentially what Young eludes to but developed by Franck and Fazakerley
- A monument contrary to conventional subjects and technique or form of monumentality.
They differ from traditional commemorative works in at least one of the following five
respects:
- Subject (darker, not glorious)
- Form (abstract, temporary, trying to represent absence)
- Site (Chance/unexpected)
- Visitor experience (other senses than sight, personal visitors asked to engage in
personal ways)
- Meaning (not didactic, not all laid out for you and there’s interpretation by the
visitor)
Aschrott-Brunnen (Young)
- aschrott -brunnen fountain
- Memorialize the fountain that was known as the jews fountain that was destroyed
in 1939
- Didn’t rebuild the fountain, they build a monument to represent the absence of the
fountain
- Build a fountain in negative relief, it was built underground that you can see through the
floor and walk above
Bebelplatz Book-Burning Memorial
- Memorializing the book burning of Berlin 1933
- Opened in 1995
- Underground library with empty shelves
- “Those who burned books would late burn people” demonstrating that it’s a
process
Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial
- Vienna, 2000
- Famous by Rachel Whiteread
- Inside out library
- Can’t go inside
- Can’t see the titles of the books, their spines are flipped inwards
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
- Absence of books that showed its significance
- Controversy:
- Its form, a big concrete block was considered bad for business
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe-1955 Competition
- In berlin in major central site
- Lots of proposals
- Horst Hoheisel proposed the memorial as blowing up the Brandenburg Gate
- Would be true absence
- Stih and Schnock-bus stop in a central square and the bus would go to
concentration camps and memorial sites around
- Was meant to be against the idea of a permanent final memorial
- Thought it should be an ongoing memorial
- Includes its own requirement of commemorative vigilance, whole basis of
the memorial
- Reran competition with chosen artists
- Called memorial to the murdered jews of europe in 2005
- 2,011 concrete blocks in a giant grid
- It’s not on flat ground and it gets confusing
- Its meant to evoke particular feelings of horror and being surrounded by
an immense field of concrete and being lost/not sure what’s going to
happen
- Some thought it was too abstract, there were no names and its less personal
- Doesn’t discuss the perpetrators either
Denk-Stein Sammlung (memorial Stones)
- Horstel Heisel again
- Got germans students to research history of individual jews and put their writings into
cobble stone and placed them in glass boxes at the train stations that the jews went to
get shipped to concentration camps
- It’s related to the jewish tradition of stacking stones on top of graves
Stolpersteine in Berlin
- The large scale version of the Denk-Stein Sammlung
- Done by Gunter Demnig
- Stones with engravings of the name of a particular person, information about them
- Placed in front of their last known address and put a little bit above the ground
- Meant to stumble on them and see them
- Over 60,000 of them, in a dozen countries not just germany
- Anybody can sponsor one
- Pay 120 euros
Poslednyi adres (last Address)
- Spinoff by russia of plaques put up for people that were killed by the SU
- Absence of the picture meant to represent absence of the person
Controversy of Stolpersteine Project
- Munich
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Monday january 29th: counter monuments & the holocaust. Assignment sheet on mycourses and it will give you ideas for themes. Theory: scholarly articles and books (secondary sources) Only use other readings from outside areas if need be, confirm with teacher. Thesis: an argument and claim about the evidence analyzed within a theoretical framework. Stated in introduction, 2nd or 3rd sentence. Think about theories from secondary articles beyond ones on confederate. Description only: this is what happened to monument x . Normative judgement only: nazis are bad (not a thesis, need a judgement) Uncomfortable histories: things we don"t want to think about or consider put into history. United states holocaust memorial museum on international remembrance day. Statement released a year ago after white house mentioned holocaust memorial day and didn"t mention jews. This year, they did mention jews in their mentions. Presence of something, like the nation, or the state.
