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Dialectical Reflections on Peter Eisenman's

Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe
Henry W. Pickford

To cite this article: Henry W. Pickford (2012): Dialect ical Reflect ions on Pet er Eisenman's Memorial for t he
Murdered Jews of Europe, Archit ect ural Theory Review, 17:2-3, 419-439

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HENRY W.
PICKFORD

DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS ON PETER

EISENMAN’S MEMORIAL FOR THE
MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE

Normative, conceptual minimal conditions of

adequacy for any Holocaust memorial arguably
include a historical relation, in that the artwork
must bear an intentional relation to historical
facts of the Holocaust, and an aesthetic
relation, in that the artwork must evince
aesthetic properties of some sort that elicit
an aesthetic experience. In this paper, after first
outlining various design possibilities, including
abstract or formalist art in general, within a
dialectical framework of representation and
non-representation, I argue that Eisenman’s
Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe
fails to bear an adequate historical relation and,
hence, is an unsuccessful memorial, despite
defences of the design by Rauterberg, Eisen-
man and Agamben. By contrast, I show how
memorials incorporating abstract art can
successfully fulfil the minimal conditions by
analysing Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memor-
ial. Finally, drawing on the tradition of memor-
ials to war dead, I propose a more radical
alternative to Eisenman’s project.

ISSN 1326-4826 print/ISSN 1755-0475 online

ª 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2012.735636
 PICKFORD
When we find in the forest a mound, six
feet long and three feet wide, raised by a
shovel to form a pyramid, we turn
serious and something in us says: here
someone lies buried. That is architecture.
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– Adolf Loos1
We can render the only service to the
victims of which we are still capable: not
to forget them.
– T. W. Adorno2
The source of the obligation to remember,
I maintain, comes from the effort of radical
evil forces to undermine morality itself by,
among other means, rewriting the past
and controlling collective memory.
– Avishai Margalit3
The conditions of adequacy, let alone success,
of a Holocaust memorial is a favourite topic of
rancorous debate in Germany, the most recent
outbreak being occasioned by the competition
for the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of
Europe, located next to the Brandenburg Gate
in Berlin. I will argue that the winning design, by
Peter Eisenman, in its failure reveals clearly the
two minimal normative conditions of adequacy
any Holocaust memorial must fulfil. First, any
Holocaust memorial must maintain an historical
relation, in that it must in some way refer to,
invoke, that is, bear an intentional relation to,
the historical facts of the Holocaust. Second, it
must maintain an aesthetic relation, in that it
must in some way evince aesthetic properties
of some sort, properties that elicit an aesthetic
experience of the work by its audience, to the
extent that the memorial is a public artwork.4
The premise to my argument in this paper is a
modest one, namely that these two relations
constitute necessary conditions of a successful
Holocaust memorial, though perhaps not
sufficient conditions. One might wish to argue
420
that there is a third desideratum, that a
Holocaust memorial must maintain a moral-
political relation, in that it must provide a
didactic, or admonitory, message, or provide
catharsis or consolation, but I shall not assume
so. To such an additional requirement one
might object, for instance, that such a relation
in fact short-circuits experience of the memor-
ial by replacing such experience by, or
subsuming it under, a proffered lesson, morale
or otherwise programmatic ‘‘closure’’. There-
fore, I think it sufficient if a Holocaust memorial
exhibit a tone and decorum proper to its
subject matter, and such matters fall within the
memorial’s aesthetic relation. Moreover, includ-
ing such a moral-political relation within the
necessary conditions of a successful Holocaust
memorial entails further questions, including:
the content and political consequences of the
‘‘message’’, the composition of the audience (in
terms of lived memory vs. later generations or
‘‘postmemory’’, political orientation, nationality
and ethnicity, gender, class, and so on).5 These
questions are decidedly empirical, whereas the
two relations outlined above, and the premise
identifying them as minimal conditions of
adequacy for a Holocaust artwork, are con-
ceptual, for they have their roots in philoso-
phical aesthetics, namely in the potential
tension between aesthetic heteronomy (of
which the historical relation is one version)
and aesthetic autonomy (of which, say, mod-
ernist abstraction, which will interest us pre-
sently, is one version).6 If we restrict ourselves
to these two conceptual, normative necessary
conditions of a Holocaust memorial in this way,
then we obtain the contours of a certain
problem: how can a memorial maintain both
relations? If it loses the aesthetic relation, it
becomes factual documentation or ‘‘merely
informative’’ or—perhaps, the antithesis of
bearing any aesthetic relation—pure annal. If
it loses the historical relation, it becomes
 ATR 17:2–3-12
aesthetically autonomous or self-referential or
‘‘merely formal’’ or—the antithesis of bearing
any historical relation—myth. A fundamental
theoretical and practical problem for any
Holocaust memorial, then, is to fulfil these
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two conditions, that is, to be aesthetic-historical.7
With this premise in place, my principal claim is
that Eisenman’s memorial fails to fulfil the
necessary condition of bearing an historical
relation to the Holocaust and, therefore, is an
unsuccessful memorial. I proceed by first
providing a selective account of past Holocaust
memorials as instantiating various possibilities
within a dialectical framework of representa-
tion and non-representation. I then situate
abstract art in general, and Eisenman’s memor-
ial in particular, within that dialectic and show
how the memorial fails, considering some
possible defences of the design. I also show
how memorials incorporating abstract art can
succeed by contrasting Eisenman’s memorial
with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
which, in my view, meets the conditions. I
conclude by pursuing the analogy between
Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial and Lin’s
memorial to the war dead in an unexpected
direction, and propose a more radical alter-
native to Eisenman’s project.
I 1980s, is also open to critique. The assumption
We can situate Eisenman’s memorial within a
dialectical relationship between non-represen-
tational and representational forms of memor-
ial design. In The Texture of Memory, James E.
Young has argued that representational, espe-
cially figurative, forms of Holocaust memorial
are hopelessly inappropriate for remember-
ing countless, nameless victims who were
industrially murdered. Instead, he champions
‘‘counter-monuments’’—non-representational
DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS
or self-thematising memorials—which, I shall
suggest, all too often renounce their historico-
commemorative specificity. Although my fra-
mework is admittedly schematic, ‘‘counter-
monuments’’ can be seen generally to fall into
three types of poetics: (1) abstract or ‘‘nega-
tively sublime’’ artworks; (2) artworks that self-
reflexively thematise the transience and diffi-
culties inherent in public commemoration as
such; and (3) ‘‘limit-case’’ artworks that tend
toward their own self-abnegation in favour of
historical documentation.
The first type of poetics of ‘‘counter-monu-
ments’’ arose from debates surrounding Holo-
caust memorials in particular that centred
round the opposition between figurative
representation on the one hand, characteristic
of memorials in the 1950s and 1960s and
dating back to memorials commemorating
fallen soldiers of World War I, and abstract
or minimalist, non-representational memorials
on the other hand, whose justification often
draws on the unrepresentability thesis put
forward by thinkers like François Lyotard or, in
this context, Claude Lanzman or Dan Diner,
who hold that the Holocaust has no narrative
structure, only statistics.8
But the other pole of the opposition, the
abstract memorials of the late 1970s and
here is that what is to be remembered, what is
to be gestured toward or evoked because it is
not directly re-cognizable, is absence, death,
mass destruction, the endpoint of the End-
lösung. One example of this concept is Ulrich
Rückriem’s Denkmal für die Deportierten
Hamburger Juden (1983): a massive gray
square of granite, cut into seven pieces and
reassembled so that the cuts are visible and
located before the Hamburg Logengebäude,
the collection point from where, in 1941–42,
421
 PICKFORD
thousands of Jews were deported. Another
example is Sol LeWitt’s Black Form—Dedi-
cated to the Missing Jews (1987 Münster, 1989
Hamburg-Altona): a huge black block, reminis-
cent of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981),
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which the artist calls a ‘‘black hole’’ or
‘‘perceptual barrier’’ meant metaphorically to
denote the absent Jewish population.9 The
problem is that such a strategy can all too easily
fall into theological transcendence (the Holo-
caust is unique, unrepresentable) or, even
worse, an aesthetic myth. Such ‘‘black holes’’
provide an all too convenient ‘‘closure’’ by
foreclosing historical causality and agency. The
memorials mark a limit event that in its
absolute otherness implies that the Holocaust
was itself extraterritorial to its historical
genesis. If the first strategy collapses the crimes
into an undifferentiated universal mourning, the
second strategy hypostatises them into a
sublime negativity; in both cases, what is
missing is the historical differentiation that,
especially in the land of the perpetrators, might
actually enable or promote historical con-
sciousness and thus make a difference toward
Auschwitz not happening again.10
James E. Young introduced the term, ‘‘counter-
monument’’ (following Jochen and Esther
Gerz’s coinage, ‘‘Gegen-Denkmal’’), specifically
to designate the second type of poetics in my
dialectical reconstruction: several recent mem-
orials, by playing with absence and presence
and the processual, ephemeral nature of
remembrance, cast doubt upon the function
and permanence of traditional monuments.
‘‘Instead of seeking to capture the memory of
events’’, younger artists, who never experi-
enced the events directly, ‘‘remember only
their own relationship to events, the great gulf
of time between themselves and the Holo-
caust’’.11 According to Young, these artists
consider it their task ‘‘to jar viewers from
422
complacency, to challenge and denaturalize the
viewers’ assumptions . . . artists renegotiate the
tenets of their memory work, whereby monu-
ments are born resisting the very possibility of
their birth’’.12 Examples of such ‘‘counter-
monuments’’ include Harburg’s Monument
against Fascism by Jochen Gerz and Esther
Shalev-Gerz, a 12-metre-high, one-metre-
square pillar made of hollow aluminium and
plated with a layer of soft lead. An inscription
near its base reads in German, French, English,
Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish: ‘‘We
invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to
the town, to add their names here to ours. In
doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigi-
lant. As more and more names cover this 12-
meter-tall column, it will gradually be lowered
into the ground. One day it will have disap-
peared completely, and the site of the Harburg
monument against fascism will be empty. In the
end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up
against injustice’’.13 Unveiled on 10 October
1986, the pillar was sunk eight times over the
next seven years until, on 8 October 1993, it
disappeared, only its top remaining visible.
Another example of a ‘‘counter-monument’’ is
Horst Hoheisel’s Negative-Form Monument in
Kassel. The original Aschrott-Brunnen (As-
chrott Fountain) in City Hall Square was built
in 1908 and funded by the Jewish entrepreneur
and citizen of Kassel, Sigmund Aschrott. It was
demolished by Nazi activists during the night of
8–9 April 1939. In 1943, two years after the
deportations from Kassel had begun, the city
filled in the fountain’s basin with soil and
planted flowers, and local citizens came to call
it ‘‘Aschrott’s grave’’. Rather than rebuild the
fountain, Hoheisel’s design called for a mock-
up of the fountain to be inverted and buried
under the original basin, writing: ‘‘I have
designed the new fountain as a mirror image
of the old one, sunk beneath the old place in
 ATR 17:2–3-12
order to rescue the history of this place as a
wound and as an open question, to penetrate
the consciousness of the Kassel citizens so that
such things never happen again’’.14 As part of
the project, Hoheisel had schoolchildren
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research the lives of individual Jewish citizens,
write their life stories on paper, attach them to
stones, and place these ‘‘memory-stones’’
before the Kassel train station as an admoni-
tory memorial (Mahnmal). The poetics of
these ‘‘counter-monuments’’ of the second
type can be considered second-order memor-
ials, in that they bear an intentional relation first
and foremost not to the Holocaust qua
historical event(s), but rather to the nature,
possibility and temporality of remembrance
itself. They provoke, question or problematise
the very possibility of commemoration and
memorialisation, as self-conscious and perhaps
sceptical commentaries to, rather than at-
tempts to fulfil, the two conditions outlined
above. Their historical relation bifurcates into a
meta-historical, self-reflexive relation on the
one hand, and a preparatory or supplementary
process of quite specific historical research on
the other, which, however, vanishes in the
experience of the memorial. This dimension of
historical documentation accompanying a
memorial leads into the third poetics of
counter-monuments.
This third type of poetics is exemplified in
recent work by the Gerzs, who have continued
and radicalised their counter-monument strat-
egy in the admonitory ‘‘invisible’’ monument,
2146 Stones—Monument against Racism
(2146 Steine—Mahnmal gegen Rassismus) in
Saarbrücken, where Jochen Gerz was a guest
professor. There he happened upon the cell in
the basement of the city castle where the
Gestapo had held their prisoners. He and his
students wrote to 66 Jewish communities and
collated a list of all the locations of Jewish
DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS
cemeteries in Germany before 1933. They
then removed paving stones from the path
leading to the Saarbrücken castle, etched the
name of one cemetery on the underside of
each stone, and replaced the stones. As the
artist says, ‘‘When you cannot see something,
then you are almost forced to talk about it’’.15
Yet, the monument would, in adherence to its
own concept, need to remain completely
invisible. The monument was in fact ‘‘unveiled’’
on 23 May 1993. The ‘‘castle square’’ (Schloß-
platz) was renamed ‘‘square of the invisible
monument’’ (Platz des Unsichtbaren Mahnmals),
and politicians convened to unveil the new
street sign. Two critical observations arise here.
First, conceptually, one could argue that the
monument itself is superfluous, that the activity
leading to its emplacement—the research, the
inscribing—constitutes the only real memory-
work possible and that, in that case, the
artwork as public memorial has negated itself
in favour of remembrance in the form of
historical research and documentation. The
second point is, to what extent do these strict
counter-monuments, in denying representation
and/or narration altogether, whether through a
questionable mimeticism of Jewish traditions
and motives such as the Bildverbot or in favour
of the enumeration of names and places alone,
contribute to the historical oblivion against
which they are ostensibly dedicated?
Thus, by remaining bound dialectically to what
they try to negate, counter-monuments either
efface their role as public art in favour of
historical documentation alone (type 3) or, in
denying representation, communication or
historical specificity, they become themselves
‘‘black holes’’ and renounce the very ‘‘memory
work’’ they aspire to generate (type 1). In the
former case, the work of art tends to deny its
aesthetic relation in favour of purely an
historical relation, as document; in the latter
423
 PICKFORD
case, the work of art tends to deny its historical
relation in favour of purely an aesthetic relation,
as an instance of the sublime or aesthetic myth.
Finally, by thematising the resistance or ephe-
merality of remembrance in their opposition to
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conventional, ever-present and, hence, easily
overlooked (‘‘invisible’’ is Robert Musil’s apt
expression16) monuments, these (type 2)
counter-monuments at best reflexively thema-
tise, rather than fulfil, the posited minimal dual
requirements of Holocaust memorials in
Germany today.
II
We can identify such dialectical shortcomings of
‘‘counter-monuments’’ in the most recent
Holocaust memorial as well. In May 2005, the
Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe
(Denkmal für die Ermordeten Juden Europas)
was unveiled in Berlin after more than ten years
of rancorous debate, the formation and disso-
lution of committees, committee recommen-
Figure 1. Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, original design by Peter Eisenman and Richard Sera. Photo
courtesy of Eisenman Architects.
424
dations and their subsequent annulment, and so
on.17 The winning design, by architect Peter
Eisenman and artist Richard Serra, foresaw
4200 stone pillars or stelae, of varying height up
to 16 feet, densely filling the five acres of
undulating terrain between the Brandenburg
Gate and Potsdamer Platz, in the former no
man’s land along which the wall ran and not far
from the former headquarters of the Gestapo
and Hitler’s bunker (Fig. 1). Eisenman aligned
the memorial with the tradition of counter-
monuments when he explained that ‘‘the
enormity and horror of the Holocaust are such
that any attempt to represent it by traditional
means is inevitably inadequate’’.18
Several reservations were raised with the
original design, however. The closely placed
pillars did not provide adequate space for
visitors and tourists, and ‘‘at sixteen feet high,
the tallest pillars might have hidden some
visitors from view, thereby creating the sense
of a labyrinthine maze, an effect desired
by neither designers nor commissioners’’.19
 ATR 17:2–3-12
Moreover, the minister of culture wanted the
designers to add an interpretive centre and a
library and research centre dedicated to
presenting and understanding the history of
the Holocaust.20
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As a result, the designers were asked to modify
their original proposal. Richard Serra withdrew
from the project, while Eisenman developed a
revised design: the number of stelae on the
‘‘field’’ was reduced to about 3000, placed more
spaciously on the terrain; the maximum height
of the pillars was also reduced; rows of
evergreen and linden trees were included at
the periphery, forming a visual link to the trees
of the nearby Tiergarten; permanent tablets
bearing a historical text were placed at the
edges of the memorial, ‘‘denoting what is to be
remembered here’’21; and Eisenman drew up
designs for a large, glass-walled library and
information centre to be built along one edge
of the memorial. After more debate and
Figure 2. Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, final design by Peter Eisenman. Public domain.
DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS
wrangling, the modified design was accepted,
although Eisenman’s proposed library building
was rejected in favour of an underground
information centre below the memorial (Fig. 2).
The information centre, simply called the
‘‘place’’ (Ort), comprises a corridor linking four
rooms: the first room contains illuminated
panels displaying letters of victims; the second
room presents pre-war photographs of Jewish
families juxtaposed with descriptions of their
fates; projected onto the walls of the third
room are names of victims; the fourth room
depicts information about the camps.
If the dialectical relationship between repre-
sentational and non-representational forms of
remembrance elaborated above is cogent,
then it is easy to see how this memorial fails
the dual requirements incumbent upon Holo-
caust artworks. In fact, a consideration of two
texts that ostensibly endorse the memorial, by
the writer and journalist Hanno Rauterberg
425
 PICKFORD
and Peter Eisenman himself, reveals just how
flawed the memorial’s composition and the
intended experience of it are.22
Like the memorials of the 1970s and 1980s,
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this memorial relies on aesthetic principles of
abstract formalism and thereby gravitates
towards the non-representability pole of the
dialectic.23 However, while the abstraction of
the memorials of the earlier period was most
often read as somehow symbolising the absent
Jews, the abstraction of this memorial is read
self-reflexively, as symbolising—literally spatia-
lising—the difficulties of the ever-incomplete,
infinite task of remembrance. This interpreta-
tion of the memorial clearly informs Young’s
account of the committee’s motivations for
approving the revised design: ‘‘With this
memorial, which insists on its incompleteness,
its working through of an intractable problem
over any solution, we found a memorial that
was as suggestive in its complex conception as
it was eloquent in its formal design. As such, it
came as close to being adequate to Germany’s
impossible task as is humanly possible. This is
finally all we could ask of Germany’s national
attempt to commemorate the Nazis’ murder
of European Jewry’’.24 And Rauterberg goes
even further, extolling perhaps a version of the
negative sublime discussed earlier: ‘‘All that is
seen here is that nothing is to be seen. And
that in itself is a significant achievement’’. With
the earlier abstract memorials of the 1970s
and 1980s, their non-representational abstrac-
tion was intended to evoke a first-order object:
the murdered Jews. The non-representational
abstraction of Eisenman’s memorial instead
evokes the second-order act or process of
remembrance itself, as in more recent (type 2)
counter-monuments, and this is clearly an issue
only for the second generation of Germans
and thereafter, who lack any lived memory of
the events. The Memorial for the Murdered
426
Jews of Europe is for the murdered Jews
because it cannot be addressed, by this
generation, to them, for this generation knows
of them, but neither knew nor wronged
them.25 But the slippage from a memorial for
the memory of a population to a memorial
about the memory of a population is fatal, for if
the memorial is actually understood as being
about (the perpetual process of) remembrance
(of the murdered Jews), it is not really for the
murdered Jews at all, it is for the present-day
audience in Germany (citizens, tourists, etc.),
so that they might be ‘‘invited’’ or ‘‘demanded’’
to remember (as both Young and Rauterberg
characterise the effect of Eisenman’s memor-
ial). And if that is true, what prevents one from
understanding the memorial as in fact an act of
national-cultural narcissism?
Like the earlier abstract counter-monuments,
this memorial, too, lacks a determinate relation
to historical causality and agency; indeed, only
the supplementary tablets mounted at the
entrances to the field indicate who is to be
remembered, much like the much more
specific tablets belatedly (in response to
historians’ criticisms and public outcry) affixed
to the entrance to the 1993 Neue Wache
memorial, To the Victims of War and Tyranny,
located a kilometre away on Unter den
Linden.26 Thus, in respect to historical specifi-
city and the possibility of engendering genuine
historical consciousness, this memorial fails its
historical function.
There might be a possible line of defence
available to the advocates of the memorial,
based on some comments by Rauterberg,
Eisenman himself and the art historian, Mark
Godfrey. Rauterberg seems to suggest that the
experience of the memorial must be under-
stood in terms other than historical remem-
brance or understanding:
 ATR 17:2–3-12
No, these concrete slabs are not a sign.
At most, they are a non-sign, an indica-
tion that there is nothing to be discov-
ered about the past, here in a place that,
of all places, surely should be a site of
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remembering. We are not confronted
with the presence of history, but with the
present itself. What has been created
here is not a landscape of remembrance,
but a landscape of experience.
Rauterberg claims that Eisenman’s memorial is
in fact a ‘‘performance landscape’’ and ‘‘the
attempt to create a new immediacy’’. The
defence, therefore, would be to deny the
dialectic of representation and non-represen-
tation by arguing that representation is not the
correct concept to consider applying when
thinking about this memorial; rather, the
argument would go that the experience of
the memorial as performance somehow can
elicit historical consciousness. In principle, this
might be a promising line of reasoning, but,
unfortunately, Eisenman’s memorial does not
possess the means adequate for such a task.
Here is how Rauterberg describes the effects
of the ‘‘performance landscape’’:
Remembrance, for [Eisenman], is walking
towards an unknown destination; it is a
physical experience in which we come
closer to ourselves and, he hopes, to
history. It involves a vague notion of art’s
ability to bridge time and change atti-
tudes. But even for those who do not
subscribe to this idea, unexpected im-
pressions emerge while walking, touching,
seeing. And for some, at least, these
impressions turn out to be vital and
memorable metaphors. An abstract
awareness of history slips into the here
and now. We see people disappear into
the inextricable maze before our eyes.
DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS
We discover how the seemingly harmless
becomes menacing. We sense that even
the rational has an irrational undercur-
rent. We notice how easily our notions of
order are undermined.
I submit that ‘‘an abstract awareness of
history’’ is no awareness of history at all: it
is at most, perhaps, an awareness of
historicity, the evanescence of lived experi-
ence, and that awareness is insufficient for
historical consciousness in any genuine sense
of the term.
Mark Godfrey has endorsed and expanded
upon similar lines of interpretation in his
defence of the memorial by suggesting ways
in which the memorial ‘‘generates meaning’’
sufficient to represent the Holocaust. Drawing
on Eisenman’s observation about the impor-
tance of ground (Boden) in National-Socialist
ideology, Godfrey suggests that the memorial
‘‘replaced the firmness and fixity of the
German ground with a fictitious, unpredictable,
newly invented topography, one that is ‘other
than stable,’ as [Eisenman] said’’. A second
interpretation relies on the dissonance be-
tween an apparently rational grid of pillars and
individual pillars that lean inward or outward at
various degrees, which Godfrey, perhaps like
Rauterberg in the above quote, sees as ‘‘a
disturbing product of a rational system’’ and as
an ‘‘analogy for Nazism’’:
By reading the Holocaust in this way,
Eisenman also turns the memorial into a
warning. The memorial not only reads
history, but suggests that there is no
reason why contemporary industrial
capitalism cannot produce another Ho-
locaust. Reason and order, in other
words, can once again give rise to chaos
and violence.
427
 PICKFORD
Lastly, a third association for Godfrey is that the
grey, concrete pillars jutting up at various angles
suggest ‘‘a pre-modern graveyard, such as the
famous Jewish Cemetery in Prague. This is to
say that Eisenman’s field conjures not only a
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space of death, but a famously Jewish space,
and one belonging to a community destroyed
by the Nazis’’.27 Yet, I submit, something has
gone amiss if the uneven terrain and skewed
stelae associatively evoke or symbolise both
the irrational ideology of Nazism and its
terrible results, while eliding, failing to pose
the question, of how such events transpired.
The abstract design features of the memorial
here being interpreted—an ideal Cartesian
grid and its imperfect instantiation—are not
sufficient to elicit, even interrogatively, the
concepts of agency, causality, etc., required for
genuine historical consciousness.
But there is an even more nefarious aspect to
the experience or performance of this mem-
orial as described by its advocates. The
specifically ‘‘theatrical’’ experience (in Michael
Fried’s sense) that Rauterberg invokes is that of
seeing people disappear into an ‘‘inextricable
maze’’ (sic) and Eisenman and Godfrey, too,
have championed the affective dimension of
disorientation and solitude experienced by
visitors within the field: as Eisenman says,
‘‘You will feel what it is like to be lost in
space’’.28 Yet, this effect of disorientation within
an incomprehensible maze does not merely
ignore historical specificity and agency, it denies
it, for with the image of an ‘‘inextricable maze’’,
Rauterberg apparently unwittingly echoes
Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s infamous apotropaic
warning about the ‘‘labyrinth of modern Ger-
man history’’ in response to criticisms that the
Neue Wache memorial’s dedication, ‘‘To the
Victims of War and Tyranny’’, elided historical
specificity: ‘‘One could of course ask whether
such a sweeping formulation doesn’t include
428
much that we don’t want to see included. For
this reason one might consider going into more
detail with the formulation. But in doing that
one slides into the whole labyrinth of modern
German history. The more you formulate, the
less justice you’ll provide’’;29 justice to whom, of
course, is the question and Kohl’s invocation of
history stands diametrically opposed to Bunde-
spresident Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech on
8 May 1985, in which he attempts to name
specifically those who are being remembered
and why, and which is belatedly echoed in the
tablet at the entrance to the Neue Wache
memorial. Furthermore, the image of an
‘‘inextricable maze’’ swallowing people suggests
that the Shoah be conceived as an impersonal,
impassive trap, as though the only agency
involved was that of those who designed and
engineered it on the one hand, and those who
‘‘wandered’’ into it on the other. ‘‘History’’
stands opposed to a passive humanity like
divine or natural forces confronting a vulner-
able polis—as impersonal, inscrutable fate
rather than human, all too human, political
catastrophes. All of humanity appears as a real
or potential Schicksalsgemeinschaft, a ‘‘commu-
nity united by fate’’, a concept with a highly
compromised political history in Germany.
Rauterberg concedes the lack of historical
specificity himself when he writes: ‘‘This open
work of art is conducive to many such
approaches, and it does not preclude misinter-
pretation. There may be some who believe that
walking among the stelae is a reconstruction of
the dark experience of the Jews, and who may
feel themselves victims’’. Thus, visitors under-
going the experience or performance of this
landscape may come to empathise with the
murdered Jews or their descendants, but might
just as easily empathise with the conscripted
Wehrmacht soldier, or the misguided Waffen
SS officer, or the reservist serving as a camp
 ATR 17:2–3-12
guard in order to avoid going to the Eastern
front, or the victims of Allied bombings during
the war, or the Vertriebene (German ‘‘displaced
persons’’ forced to leave the occupied ‘‘Eastern
territories’’ after the war), and so on. And in his
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own descriptions of the anticipated experience
of the memorial, Eisenman emphasises the
sense of uncanniness and instability created by
the stelae and the landscape:
Unlike other site-specific work that has
no memorial or political program, it is the
memorial’s obdurate lack of obvious
symbolism that makes its public claim to
creating the sense of a dual time: one
experienced in the present; the other, the
possible remembrance of another experi-
ence of the past in the present. It is this
sense of a dual time and the way that this
is experienced that is insistently architec-
tural in its being. This is achieved through
the denial of the ground as a datum of
reference. Instead, there are two topolo-
gical and undulating surfaces marked by
the tops and bottoms of the pillars. These
define a zone of instability with respect to
the datum of the surrounding street
context and to the upright subject who
enters the field above the pillars and, as
the ground falls away, becomes enveloped
within them. This necessity of contain-
ment and enclosure, now articulated in a
different way, can only be understood as
architectural.
Granted that one feels a sense of unease and
instability while wandering in the memorial, but
it is unclear how this experience is to be
understood as anything more specific than
Rauterberg’s ‘‘dark experience’’ above.
Rauterberg concedes that in the absence of
the means for eliciting determinate historical
DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS
awareness, the memorial leaves each visitor to
her own device for deriving historical under-
standing:
Each of us must decide for ourselves how
far we dare to venture into this landscape
of stelae and souls, and how we read it.
Even so, the act of remembering is not
left entirely to chance. The Information
Centre underneath the memorial pre-
sents a clear, incisive, unmistakable pic-
ture of the Holocaust.
That is, just as with the tablets mounted at the
entrance to the Neue Wache, the subterra-
nean information centre (the Ort) supplements
the memorial’s deficiency by providing the
required historical relation. But here, too,
Eisenman’s memorial marks a regression for,
while the Neue Wache’s tablets at least directly
adjoin and prophylactically correct the mythic
aestheticising tendency of the memorial within,
the Eisenman memorial and the four rooms of
the information centre are spatially disjoint and
virtually independent of each other, such that
each relation—the aesthetic and the histor-
ical—becomes autonomous and self-sufficient,
the aesthetic tending toward myth, the histor-
ical toward mere document. Godfrey describes
well, and ultimately rejects, Eisenman’s ‘‘at-
tempts to integrate the architecture of the field
into the Ort’’:
In the first room, the illuminated panels
were the same dimensions as the stelae’s
footprints. In the second, the stelae
appeared to protrude from the ceiling
but stopped before reaching the floor,
providing suspended walls on which the
family photographs were displayed. Of
course, though grey, these protrusions
were obviously not made of concrete,
and were hollow and tinny when tapped.
429
 PICKFORD
The third room was wide open, with the
field’s forms replicated as a grid in the
ceiling, while finally in the fourth room, a
pattern of columns defined its uneven
perimeter. While the decision to use four
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methods [that is, the different thematic
contents of each room] to represent the
history of the Holocaust felt convincing,
the decision to use four devices to
combine the upper architecture with
the lower space was aggravating.30
While Godfrey, who in general argues for the
success of Eisenman’s memorial, must ulti-
mately concede that ‘‘[t]he problem of how to
integrate the field and the Ort together had
not been solved’’, the philosopher, Giorgio
Agamben, attempts to make a virtue of the
memorial’s deficit in a short text published
in the newspaper Die Zeit. Agamben first
distinguishes ‘‘the memorable’’ (Erinnerbares), as
that which can be historically documented,
from ‘‘the unforgettable’’ (Unvergessliches), as
that which exceeds the archive, individual and
collective memory. Agamben tacitly dismisses
the attempts to unite the field and the Ort at
their junction (the ceilings of the Ort’s rooms)
and instead praises their absolute separation:
‘‘In the memorial these two heterogeneous
dimensions of remembrance [Erinnerung] are
topographically differentiated: above ground
the absolutely unreadable stelae, and below an
information center, reserved for reading. The
immaterial threshold, which divides these two
memories [Gedächtnisse], is the true place of
the memorial’’.31 For Agamben, the aesthetic
abstraction of the field, what he calls its
‘‘illegibility’’, constitutes an admonitory remin-
der or correction to the presumption of
(complete? accurate? impartial? affect-neutral?
Agamben does not say) historical representa-
tion embodied by the Ort. Thus, Agamben has
identified and isolated the two necessary
430
conditions for a successful memorial and
recognised their implicit mutual tension, there-
by restating the aesthetic-historical problem
introduced at this paper’s outset. Yet, Agam-
ben’s ‘‘immaterial threshold’’ between field
and Ort, aesthetic and historical relations, is a
theoretical one only: no visitor can occupy
that threshold. And even while cogently in-
voking precisely the relationship between the
two conditions, the two relations, that should
organise the memorial, Rauterberg, too, con-
cedes as much: ‘‘Without this explanatory
exhibition, the inexplicable above ground
would be little more than a field of myth.
The two places need one another, yet each has
a life of its own’’. The final failure of the
Eisenman memorial is that its best apologists
apparently misconstrue the proper application
of a dialectical relationship.
It might be concluded from the above reflec-
tions that, given the dialectical relationship
advocated above, abstract art works, in virtue
of their eschewal of representation, cannot in
principle fulfil the historical relation required of
any Holocaust memorial. In his Abstraction and
the Holocaust, Mark Godfrey has undertaken a
valiant defence of abstract art in this respect,
but above I raise significant doubts about his
interpretation of the associative and affective
evocativeness of Eisenman’s memorial and
second his misgivings regarding the failed
integration of field and Ort and, hence, the
failed solution of the aesthetic-historical pro-
blem I presented at the outset. However, like
Godfrey, I too claim that an abstract memorial
can fulfil the dual conditions, whereby I adopt
Godfrey’s broad characterisation of ‘‘abstrac-
tion’’: ‘‘Abstract artists eschew depiction and
figuration and sometimes overt symbolism, but
this is not to say that their work refuses
signification. In front of abstract art works, the
lack of a depicted image tends to heighten our
 ATR 17:2–3-12
awareness of materials, of compositional (or
anti-compositional) structures, of the process
of looking itself ’’.32 Given this understanding of
abstraction, a brief consideration of Maya Lin’s
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in contrast to
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Eisenman’s memorial, will bear out the claim,
while revealing missed opportunities for the
Berlin memorial.
Like the Eisenman memorial, Lin’s memorial
incorporates an undulating landscape that leads
downward into a central depression of about
ten feet, at whose centre are joined two walls
of reflective black granite at an angle of 125
degrees that taper in both directions of the
incline. On the V-shaped wall, almost 500 feet
in length, are inscribed the names of 58,195 US
service men and women who were killed in
the war. The names are listed chronologically,
beginning on the right-hand side of the
juncture under the rubric, ‘‘1959’’, and con-
tinuing to the end of the right wall; it then
Figure 3. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Maya Lin. Public domain.
DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS
continues at the narrow end of the left wall and
continues to the central juncture, concluding
under the rubric, ‘‘1975’’. These are the only
dates inscribed on the wall. The names of the
dead are listed alphabetically within each
‘‘casualty day’’, although these dates are not
listed on the memorial (Fig. 3). Immediately
after the date, ‘‘1959’’, a short opening
inscription reads: ‘‘IN HONOR OF THE MEN
AND WOMEN OF THE ARMED FORCES
OF THE UNITED STATES WHO SERVED IN
THE VIETNAM WAR. THE NAMES OF
THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES AND OF
THOSE WHO REMAIN MISSING ARE IN-
SCRIBED IN THE ORDER THEY WERE
TAKEN FROM US’’. And immediately after
the date, ‘‘1975’’, a closing inscription reads:
‘‘OUR NATION HONORS THE COURAGE,
SACRIFICE AND DEVOTION TO DUTY
AND COUNTRY OF ITS VIETNAM VETER-
ANS. THIS MEMORIAL WAS BUILT WITH
PRIVATE CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE
431
 PICKFORD
AMERICAN PEOPLE. NOVEMBER 11, 1982’’.
However, these inscriptions were not part of
Lin’s original design, and were the result of
compromises reached between her and the
private Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund
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financing the memorial. So were other addi-
tions to the original memorial, meant to
assuage some veterans’ displeasure with the
austere abstraction of Lin’s design. Thus, a
realist bronze sculpture by Frederick Hart,
depicting three soldiers gazing toward the
walls, and a flag were erected near the
memorial; subsequently, the Vietnam Women’s
Memorial, another realist bronze sculpture, of
three uniformed nurses with a wounded male
soldier, was also installed. Unlike the supple-
mentary tablets affixed to the entrance of the
Neue Wache and the tablet added to the
Eisenman memorial, however, these addenda
do not correct via specification the vagueness
of this memorial’s historical relation: the names
and dates make clear who this memorial
commemorates. Rather, the additions to Lin’s
original design reflect political divisions and
controversies regarding how the war, the
American defeat, should be understood and
remembered. While Lin’s original design ab-
stains from encoding a moral-political relation
in the memorial, the addenda to her design
reflect political constituencies pressing for
precisely that relation.33 However, Lin’s mem-
orial as originally designed, while similar to
Eisenman’s in its abstraction, nevertheless
creates a determinate historical relation, in
stark contrast to the Berlin memorial.
Like Eisenman’s memorial, the Vietnam Veter-
ans Memorial can be understood as a
‘‘performance landscape’’, in Rauterberg’s
phrase. Arguably similar senses of unease,
instability and descent beneath the surface of
the ground are created or ‘‘performed’’ by both
landscapes: the visitor to the Vietnam Veterans
432
Memorial loses her orientation as she descends
the incline and most landmarks from the
Washington Mall slip out of view (with two
important exceptions, to which I return below)
and, in this way, the memorial creates the sense
of being ‘‘lost in space’’, in Eisenman’s phrase.
One could perhaps claim that the sombre
black memorial puts into question the nation’s
‘‘sacred ground’’ of the Washington Mall,
characterised by the white marble memorials
to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, and that
the austere order of the memorial’s walls slice
into the undulating earth of its environment,
creating a dissonance between order and
disorder. Thus, with respect to affect, contra-
puntal conceptual dissonance, and symbolic,
ideological associations, one could argue that
the two abstract memorials are similar. But, if
my earlier reservations regarding Godfrey’s
reading of the Eisenman memorial along these
lines are cogent, such abstract aesthetic means
are not sufficient to constitute a determinate
historical relation.
Lin’s memorial, in contrast to Eisenman’s,
demonstrates further aesthetic means that
are, I suggest, sufficient to generate a determi-
nate historical relation and, hence, determinate
content of historical consciousness and re-
membrance. Firstly, Lin’s memorial intentionally
incorporates its surrounding, historically sig-
nificant environment in its design. The 125-
degree juncture of the two walls is oriented so
that the lines of incline extend on the one end
to the Washington Monument, which cele-
brates the founding leader and principles of the
nascent democracy, and on the other end to
the Lincoln Memorial, which commemorates
the death of the nation’s leader at a time of
utmost national disunity and civil war. That only
these two national memorials are visible from
the nadir of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
tacitly asks the visitor to understand this
 ATR 17:2–3-12
memorial in the nexus of the history, founding
principles and darkest self-interrogation and
self-diremption of the nation.34 By contrast,
Eisenman’s field is abstracted, as it were, from
its surroundings, constituting a distinct and
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independent aesthetic geography. Had the
memorial been designed to incorporate, or in
some way refer to, the nearby Hitler bunker,
Gestapo headquarters, Reichstag or the build-
ings that previously housed several ministries of
the Third Reich, a similar historical-symbolic
constellation might have been generated that
would subtly, yet historically, contextualise the
affective performance of the landscape. Sec-
ondly, and most importantly, the visitor to Lin’s
memorial is confronted, face-to-face, with the
Figure 4. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Maya Lin. Public domain.
DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS
names of the war dead and the chronology of
their deaths (the memorial also provides
indexes whereby visitors can look up and find
specific names on the walls). The polished
black granite mirrors the visitor’s face, so she
sees her visage transposed with the inscribed
names: she is literally imbricated, and figura-
tively implicated, in the names of the dead and
the minimal chronological narrative the walls
exhibit (Fig. 4). Placed in a visual relation to the
dead by the granite’s reflectiveness, the living
are tacitly solicited to reflect upon the other
kinds of relation in which they stand to the
dead and the events surrounding their
deaths—personal, historical, political, moral.
Lastly, it should be noted that this encounter
433
 PICKFORD
(of self-reflection) is afforded precisely by the
minimal historical referentiality of the memor-
ial: the names are what philosophers call
logically proper names, which denote their
unique referents—individuals—by direct refer-
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ence, rather than any description, and the
beginning and concluding dates function as a
minimalist narrative of pure chronology, again
without descriptive markers of any kind.35
These bare names and dates constitute, I
suggest, what Lacan calls ‘‘points de capiton’’:
direct referential links between the abstract
memorial’s signifiers and ‘‘the real’’ (individual
men and women, times and places) that
constitute ‘‘attachment points’’ that anchor
the affective experience of the memorial to
historical reference and, thereby, might gen-
erate determinate historical consciousness and
remembrance.36 By contrast, the very ‘‘illeg-
ibility’’ of Eisenman’s field and its stelae extolled
by Agamben lacks such means by which to
anchor its powerful affective response to a
determinate historical relation, or, rather, it has
relegated those minimal historical means—
names, dates, places—to the four rooms of the
Ort. How exactly Eisenman’s design might have
incorporated such minimal historical referenti-
ality into the memorial is of course not an easy
task, given the incomplete and fragmentary
knowledge of all those who perished and how
they perished. One idea would be for certain
stelae, selected randomly, each to be inscribed
on one of its faces with specific textual or
visual information to serve as such ‘‘points de
capiton’’. Consideration of other, relevantly
similar Holocaust artworks suggests that ex-
amples might include: (1) the name of a death
camp, a year and the estimated number of
those who were murdered there; (2) a
Nuremberg law and the date of its introduc-
tion;37 (3) a Reich transport order for rail
passage from a town to a death camp, listing
the anticipated number of passengers to the
434
camp, and the return trip marked ‘‘empty’’,
could be etched onto the side of a pillar;38 (4)
an excerpt from an eyewitness account,
survivor’s testimonial, perpetrator’s trial, and
so on.39 The random and fragmentary nature
of these discrete missives from the past would
accurately reflect the nature of our attempts to
grasp the Holocaust as well, further anchoring
the powerful sense of disorientation per-
formed by the landscape.
This sketch of a critical comparison of the
Eisenman and Lin memorials,40 I hope, suffices
to show that the shortcomings of Eisenman’s
memorial in my account do not amount to a
general condemnation of the use of abstraction
in Holocaust memorial design, for Lin’s suc-
cessful memorial demonstrates one way in
which abstract formalist memorials can fulfil
the two necessary conditions, and in particular
the requirement of maintaining a determinate
historical relation.
III
I have endeavoured, against the rational recon-
struction of various designs for Holocaust
memorials understood as a dialectic of repre-
sentation and non-representation, to show
how Eisenman’s Memorial for the Murdered
Jews of Europe fails to fulfil what I identified as
the two minimal necessary conditions for a
successful Holocaust memorial, viz., that the
memorial maintain both an aesthetic and a
historical relation, and I have suggested that
Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in turn,
shows how abstraction need not render an
historical relation impossible in a memorial
designed according to general principles of
abstract formalism. One might object that the
comparison of a Holocaust memorial, which
commemorates the civic catastrophe of
 ATR 17:2–3-12 DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS

genocide (or what Hannah Arendt called
‘‘administrative massacre’’), with a memorial
to the military war dead is inapt (although I
think the suggested inscriptions to the stelae
above would honour this difference). In
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which was officially adopted by the Weimar
Republic in 1925. George Mosse notes that ‘‘its
custody of war graves was limited as the
overwhelming number of fallen rested in
foreign soil, and the Treaty of Versailles made

conclusion, I would like to press the compar-
ison in a different direction, and raise the more
fundamental question regarding the relatively
unique complications attending a nation’s
erecting a memorial to a people its earlier
government had sought to eradicate.
That is, there is within the tradition of war
memorials at least some historical precedent
for an alternative to the idea of memorial to
victims of the Shoah designed and built by the
German nation. The Volksbund Deutsche
Kriegsgräberfürsorge was founded in 1919 to
organise activities associated with remembering
Germany’s fallen soldiers. It introduced the
national day of mourning, the Volkstrauertag,
it the duty of every nation to care for the war
dead of the enemy buried on its territory. The
actual design of these cemeteries was never-
theless left to the nation to which the dead
belonged’’.41 While the disanalogy between war
and genocide is profound and obviously
requires careful consideration, one might
suggest that the real estate adjoining the
Brandenburg Gate that was set aside for the
memorial instead—in an act of humility and
hospitality—be given as a gift in perpetual trust
to the survivors of the Holocaust and their
descendants. A representative organisation of
the Holocaust survivors and their families could
decide how they wish their dead to be
remembered in the land that murdered them.42

Notes
1. Adolf Loos, ‘‘Architektur’’, in
Trotzdem: 1900–30, In-
nsbruck: Brenner, 1931,
109–110; quoted in Karsten
Harries, The Ethical Function
of Architecture, Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 1997,
292.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Me-
taphysics: Concept and Pro-
blems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann,
trans. Edmund Jephcott,
Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2000, 124.
3. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics
of Memory, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press,
2002, 83.
4. Of course, what constitutes an
aesthetic property or concept
is itself a controversial ques-
tion. For the purposes of this
article, I take an aesthetic
property to be a second- or
third-order (e.g. ‘ soothing’’ and
‘ harmonious’’, respectively) re-
sponse-dependent property
that is weakly supervenient
on first-order non-aesthetic
properties, suitably relativised
to cultural contexts, aesthetic
traditions, and so on. See Eddy
Zemach, ‘ What is an Aesthetic
Property?’’, in Emily Brady and
Jerrold Levinson (eds), Aes-
thetic Concepts: Essays after
Sibley, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2001: 47–60; also Frank
Sibley, ‘ Aesthetic Concepts’’, in
John Benson, Betty Redfern
and Jeremy Roxbee Cox
(eds), Approach to Aesthetics:
Collected Papers on Philosophical
Aesthetics, Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 2001: 1–23; and,
on response-dependent con-
cepts, Mark Johnston, ‘ Dispo-
sitional Theories of Value’’,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 63 (1989),
139–174.
5. I explore some of the
complications surrounding
the post-war German audi-
ence for such memorials in
my ‘‘Conflict and Commem-
oration: Two Berlin Memor-
ials’’, Modernism/Modernity,
12, no. 1 (2005): 133–173.
The concept of ‘‘postmem-
ory’’ comes from Hirsch:
‘‘Postmemory is a powerful
and very particular form of
memory precisely because
its connection to its object
or source is mediated not
through recollection but
through an imaginative invest-
ment and creation. This is not
to say that memory itself is
unmediated, but that it is more

435
 PICKFORD
directly connected to the
past. Postmemory charac-
terises the experience of those
who grow up dominated by
narratives that preceded their
birth, whose belated stories
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are evacuated by the stories
of the previous generation
shaped by traumatic events
that can be neither under-
stood nor recreated’’ (Mar-
ianne Hirsch, Family Frames:
Photography, Narrative and Post-
memory, Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1997,
22).
6. Indeed, elevating a moral-
political relation to a neces-
sary condition for the suc-
cess of a memorial has led
some critics to conclude
that memorials in principle
are doomed to failure. See
William M. Taylor and Mi-
chael P. Levine, Prospects for
an Ethics of Architecture,
London: Routledge, 2011,
125–154; and, against the
background of a Heidegger-
ian critique of modernity,
Harries, The Ethical Function
of Architecture, (especially pp.
292–311). It should be added
that I think a moral imperative
underwrites the normative re-
quirement of the historical
relation, as the second and
third epigraphs attest.
7. The tension between the two
relations can be viewed, there-
fore, as a version of that
between Hegelian aesthetic
heteronomy (art is the ‘ sen-
suous appearance of the idea’’)
and Kantian aesthetic autono-
my (aesthetic experience is sui
generis and thwarts concep-
tual subsumption), and it re-
curs in theoretical treatments
of Holocaust literature gener-
ally. I develop these ideas at
greater length in The Sense of
Semblance: Philosophical Ana-
436
lyses of Holocaust Art, New
York: Fordham University
Press, forthcoming 2013.
8. This line of thought is wide-
spread in the literature—
for instance, in his recent
Caught by History, Van Al-
phen avers that ‘‘formalist
abstraction evokes the sub-
lime unrepresentability of
the Holocaust’’ (Ernst Van
Alphen, Caught by History:
Holocaust Effects in Contem-
porary Art, Literature and
Theory, Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997,
4). On the other hand, the
use of a sculpture of a
mother cradling her dead
son in the renovated Neue
Wache memorial (1993)
constitutes a regressive re-
turn to figuration and so is
liable to the same criticisms
levied at figurative memor-
ials of much earlier vintage.
In ‘‘Conflict and Commem-
oration’’, I consider various
criticisms of the memorial.
9. Here I draw on Franziska
Kirchner, ‘‘Zur Frage der
Abstraktion oder Gegen-
ständlichkeit im heutigen
Denkmal’’, in Orte des Erin-
nerns: Das Denkmal im
Bayerischen Viertel, vol. 1,
Berlin: Edition Hentrich,
1994, 44–46.
10. ‘‘A new categorical imperative
has been imposed by Hitler
upon unfree mankind: to ar-
range their thoughts and ac-
tions so that Auschwitz will
not repeat itself, so that
nothing similar will happen’’
(Theodor W. Adorno, Ne-
gative Dialectics, trans. by E. B.
Ashton, New York: Conti-
nuum, 1973, 365). See also
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘Edu-
cation after Auschwitz’’, in
Theodor W. Adorno, Critical
Models, ed. and trans. by
Henry W. Pickford, New
York: Columbia University
Press, 2005, 191–204.
11. James E. Young, Texture of
Memory: Holocaust Memor-
ials and Meaning, New Ha-
ven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1993, 27. He devel-
ops and endorses this prin-
ciple of memorial design in
his subsequent At Memory’s
Edge: After-Images of the
Holocaust in Contemporary
Art and Architecture, New
Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2002, 120–151.
12. Young, Texture of Memory,
28.
13. Quoted in Young, Texture of
Memory, 30.
14. Quoted in Young, Texture of
Memory, 43.
15. Interview with Jochen Gerz
in the television show,
Denkmaldämmerung, SWF
3, 26 March 1992.
16. Robert Musil, ‘‘Denkmale’’,
in Adolf Frisé (ed.), Gesam-
melte Werke, vol. VII, Ham-
burg: Reinbek, 1981, 506–
509.
17. On the controversy in general,
which received international
press attention as well, see
Jane Kramer, The Politics of
Memory, New York: Random
House, 1996, 255–293. On
the controversy surrounding
the early competition and
proposed designs for the
memorial to the Jews, which
Kramer summarises, see Der
Wettbewerb für das ‘Denkmal
für die ermordeten Juden Euro-
pas’’. Eine Streitschrift, Berlin:
Verlag der Kunst, 1995. James
E. Young, who served on the
 ATR 17:2–3-12
final selection committee, also
recounts the political wrangling
and ultimate compromises in
‘ Germany’s Holocaust Mem-
orial Problem—and Mine’’, in
his At Memory’s Edge, 184–
Downloaded by [University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries], [Henry Pickford] at 12:12 11 February 2013
223.
18. Quoted in Mark Godfrey,
Abstraction and the Holo-
caust, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2007, 253.
19. Young, At Memory’s Edge,
209–210.
20. Young, At Memory’s Edge,
219.
21. Young, At Memory’s Edge,
214. Informational bro-
chures are also provided
to the memorial’s visitors.
22. The two texts, ‘‘Building Site
of Remembrance’’ by Han-
no Rauterberg and ‘‘The
Silence of Excess’’ by Peter
Eisenman, are found in the
large-format illustrated vo-
lume, Holocaust Memorial
Berlin, ed. Eisenman Archi-
tects, Baden: Lars Müller,
2005, unpaginated.
23. Quentin Stevens helpfully
provides a brief history of
abstract minimalism and its
critical theorisation as a
preface to discussing Eisen-
man’s memorial (Quentin
Stevens, ‘‘Vague Recollec-
tions: Minimalist Aesthetics
in Public Memorials’’, Pro-
ceedings of the XXVth Inter-
national Conference of the
Society of Architectural Histor-
ians, Australia and New Zeal-
and. Geelong, Australia, 3–6
July 2008: 1–17).
24. Young, At Memory’s Edge,
216.
25. That is, postmemory gen-
erations know [wissen, savoir]
the victims, but did not know
[kennen, connaıˆtre] them.
26. One tablet reads (in my
translation):
The Neue Wache is the
place of memory and
remembrance of the vic-
tims of war and tyranny.
We remember the peo-
ples, who have suffered
because of war. We re-
member their citizens
who were persecuted
and lost their lives. We
remember the fallen of
the World Wars. We
remember the innocent,
who perished in the war
and the consequences of
the war in their home-
land, in captivity, and in
the expulsion [Vertreibung,
which has come to signify
the relocation of Ger-
mans from the Eastern
provinces after the war].
We remember the mil-
lions of murdered Jews.
We remember the mur-
dered Sinti and Roma.
We remember all those
who were killed because
of their lineage, their
homosexuality or be-
cause of sickness or de-
bility. We remember all of
the murdered, whose
right to life was denied.
We remember the peo-
ple who had to die on
account of their religious
or political convictions.
We remember everyone
who were victims of tyr-
anny and died innocently.
We remember the wo-
men and men who sacri-
DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS
ficed their lives in the
resistance to tyranny. We
honor everyone who met
death rather than compro-
mising his or her con-
science.
We remember the men
and women who were
persecuted and murdered
because they resisted tot-
alitarian dictatorship after
1945.
The other tablet provides a
brief history of the building
itself, including its earlier uses
as a war memorial. For details,
see my ‘ Conflict and Com-
memoration’’.
27. Godfrey, Abstraction and the
Holocaust, 246–247. Ac-
cording to Quentin Stevens
(‘‘Vague Recollections’’, 10),
Eisenman, in an interview,
describes his memorial as
one that ‘‘gains moral sig-
nificance through projec-
tions of meaning or
memory onto it’’, noting
that some have associated
the number of stelae
(2711), which was an arbi-
trary result of geometric
constraints on the design,
with the number of pages in
the modern Torah.
28. Quoted in Godfrey, Abstrac-
tion and the Holocaust, 249.
29. ‘ Die Debatte des Deutschen
Bundestages’’, in Christoph
Stölzl (ed.), Die Neue Wache
Unter den Linden: Ein Deutsches
Denkmal im Wandel der
Geschichte, Berlin: Koehler &
Amelang, 1993, 212–222
(216).
30. Godfrey, Abstraction and the
Holocaust, 243.
437
 PICKFORD
31. Giorgio Agamben, ‘‘Die
Zwei Gedächtnisse’’, Die Zeit,
4 May 2005, http://www.
zeit.de/2005/19/Mahnmal_2f_
Agamben (accessed 16 Octo-
ber 2012).
Downloaded by [University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries], [Henry Pickford] at 12:12 11 February 2013
32. Godfrey, Abstraction and the
Holocaust, 4. Cf. Quentin
Stevens’ narrower defini-
tion of ‘‘abstraction’’ as a
‘‘reduction of sculptural
form to simple three-di-
mensional solids with flat,
hard, usually opaque sur-
faces’’ (‘‘Vague Recollec-
tions’’, 3).
33. Interestingly, perhaps the two
most insightful interpretations
of the memorial diverge on
this point somewhat. Both
Griswold and Griswold
(Charles L. Griswold and Ste-
phen S. Griswold, ‘ The Viet-
nam Veterans Memorial and
the Washington Mall: Philoso-
phical Thoughts on Political
Iconography’’, Critical Inquiry,
12, no. 4 (Summer 1986), pp.
688–719) and Sturken (Marita
Sturken, ‘ The Wall, the Screen,
and the Image: The Vietnam
Veterans Memorial’’, Represen-
tations, No. 35, Special Issue:
Monumental Histories (Sum-
mer 1991), pp. 118–142)
claim that the memorial effec-
tively divorces the act of
honouring the war dead from
the act of praising the cause(s)
for which they sacrificed their
lives, and thus implicitly asks
whether they died in vain.
However, while Sturken holds
that the memorial withholds
any narrative closure (‘‘The
screens of the memorial thus
act as screen memories in two
senses: they attempt to con-
ceal and to offer themselves as
the primary narrative, while
they provide a screen for
projections of a multitude of
memories and individual inter-
438
pretations’’, [137]), the Gris-
wolds hold a more sanguine
view, namely that ‘ the monu-
ment has in fact accomplished
the goal that those who have
objected to it also praise: the
goal of rekindling love of
country and its ideals, as well
as reconciliation with one’s
fellow citizens’’ (713). By con-
trast, Taylor and Levine (Pro-
spects for an Ethics of
Architecture, ch. 5) hold both
that a memorial should pro-
vide a moral-political message
and that no memorial—in-
cluding Maya Lin’s memorial,
as one of their case studies—
can meet that requirement.
My claim is that a moral-
political relation is not a neces-
sary condition for a successful
memorial, as evidenced by
examples such as Maya Lin’s
memorial and the Bavarian
Quarter memorial in Berlin
(on the latter, see note 37
below), and that Eisenman’s
memorial fails not because it
lacks a moral-political relation,
but because it lacks a determi-
nate historical relation.
34. Although the Washington
Monument is in fact a
memorial to Washington,
there is no inscription nam-
ing him, no indication on
the building that its function
is to honour his death (un-
like, say, the Lincoln and
Jefferson Memorials) and,
perhaps consequently, the
monument is usually taken
as celebrating the founding
of the nation. Danto’s ana-
lytic distinction between
monument and memorial
thus appears germane here:
‘‘We erect monuments so
that we shall always re-
member and build memor-
ials so that we shall never
forget . . . Monuments com-
memorate the memorable
and embody myths of be-
ginnings. Memorials ritualize
remembrance and mark the
reality of ends . . . . Monu-
ments make heroes and
triumphs, victories and con-
quests, perpetually present
and part of life. The mem-
orial is a special precinct,
extruded from life, a segre-
gated enclave where we
honor the dead. With
monuments, we honor our-
selves’’ (Arthur Danto, ‘‘The
Vietnam Veterans Memor-
ial’’, The Nation, 31 August
1985, p. 152). Rowlands
notes that a memorial to
the war dead may be
refunctioned to perform a
monument’s function of na-
tional myth-making and
documents attempts to do
this with Maya Lin’s memor-
ial (Michael Rowlands, ‘‘Re-
membering to Forget:
Sublimation as Sacrifice in
War Memorials’’, in Adrian
Forty and Susanne Küchler
(eds), The Art of Forgetting,
Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999, 129–145
[130]). Griswold and Gris-
wold present the most ex-
tensive reading of the
memorial in the context of
the Washington Mall and its
other monuments and
memorials.
35. But note that Abramson
interprets the graphical pre-
sentation of chronological
time-lines in Lin’s three
most significant memorials
as bearing a moral-political
relation, e.g. in the case
of the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial, ‘‘the chronology’s
circular form symbolizes the
war’s temporal closure’’
(688) and thus provides
conciliation. Interestingly, at
one point in his argument,
he faults the memorial’s
 ATR 17:2–3-12
aesthetic design in that ‘‘the
similarities to minimalism
[are] largely superficial. In-
stead of using the alienating,
nonart, industrial materials
of minimalism—steel, alu-
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minium, or concrete—Lin
used luxurious, polished,
artful granite. Instead of
being emptied of extrinsic,
referential meaning, Lin’s
monument clearly pos-
sessed a subject out-
side itself ’’ (704) (Daniel
Abramson, ‘‘Maya Lin and
the 1960s: Monuments,
Time Lines, and Minimal-
ism’’, Critical Inquiry, 22. no. 4
(1996), 679–709). These
observations, criticising the
memorial for its aesthetic
heteronomy from the
standpoint of its aesthetic
relation, nicely support my
initial claim that the two
necessary conditions—aes-
thetic and historical—are in
fact dialectically related.
36. On Jacques Lacan’s ‘‘points
de capiton’’, see The Semi-
nar. Book III. The Psychoses,
1955–56, trans. Russell
Grigg, London: Routledge,
268.
37. Quotations of Nuremberg
laws and other texts di-
rectly related to the Holo-
caust are incorporated
in the textual/conceptual
‘‘Places of Remembrance’’
(Orte des Erinnerns) memor-
ial in the Bavarian Quarter
of Berlin, which I interpret
as a successful Holocaust
memorial in my ‘‘Conflict
and Commemoration’’.
38. The historian, Raul Hillberg,
displays and discusses such
a Reichsbahn transport or-
der in Claude Lanzman’s
film, Shoah.
39. With his nachschrift series,
the Austrian writer, Heim-
rad Bäcker, created what
could be called memory
books comprised entirely
of selected quotations of
perpetrators, victims and
DIALECTICAL REFLECTIONS
bystanders, including official
documents, and this consti-
tutes a further way in which
abstract aesthetic proper-
ties can be successfully
combined with an historical
relation. See my The Sense
of Semblance, ch. 3.
40. Stevens’ ‘‘Vague Recollec-
tions’’ interestingly focuses
on differences in visitor
behaviour in relation to
the two memorials’ abstract
minimalism.
41. George L. Mosse, Fallen
Soldiers: Reshaping the Mem-
ory of the World Wars,
Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990, 82.
42. My thanks to two anon-
ymous referees and this
journal’s editors, whose cri-
ticisms and queries im-
proved the final version of
this paper.
439