Memorials

Introduction

0:00I have a foundation from Slate.

0:06Tamar Avishai is an art historian, and she does a podcast. Yeah, it's called The Lonely Palette, and every month I try to make art history a little more accessible, a little less dusty and snooty, by focusing on the stories behind one artwork at a time. Yeah, I love your show. But there's one kind of public art that's very personal for you and raises a lot of interesting philosophical questions, especially in recent years, and that's why you wanted to come on this show to talk about it.

Public Memorials

0:35Yeah, I'm really fascinated by public memorials, like the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin or the 9-11 Memorial in New York. There are so many incredibly rich and really personal issues that inform the aesthetic choices and the materials used, and really ask who is doing the remembering? What does it mean to have memory versus history? And especially in the last 30 years or so, whether or not they should be representational or abstract, and how that speaks to people really differently. Memorials are a really fascinating topic, and they seem like they should be timeless, but

1:08they're also, as you might expect, really powerfully tied to their own moment.

Representational vs Abstract

1:13Could you define the difference between representational and abstract? So a representational memorial would probably be something that, like in representational art, it looks like the thing it's supposed to be. So if you're thinking about a memorial to a war, then you would actually see the soldiers in the war, like, pushing up the American flag. And an abstract memorial, like abstract art, doesn't have any one narrative idea. It doesn't have any one interpretation.

1:43And so it can be interpreted any number of ways, which isn't really how we're used to thinking about memorials. An abstract memorial would focus more on the materials or maybe have abstract shapes that don't necessarily speak to anything specific, but could speak to a larger idea. It's less something that you read and more something that you kind of give yourself over to.

Memorializing

2:07So that's what we're going to talk about today. In our crossover with Tamar Avishai and the Lonely Palette podcast, we're going to examine the very concept of a public memorial. Take it away, Tamar.

2:25Would you be willing to tell your own story? Sure. This is Karen Krolock. She's a writer and the artistic director for a dance company in Boston. In August of 2012, my husband and I were in the process of moving and we got a call from the house that we were staying at saying the police have arrived. They wouldn't talk to me on the phone. They needed us to come back to the house. After they hung up and said we had to return, I got a phone call from my, now, my only remaining

2:56brother. And so I had said, the police are at the door, Michael, what's happened? And he said, they're all gone. A driver on the other side of the road had crossed a median strip and hit my parents' car head on. And my mother, father and older brother, Patrick, were killed instantaneously. In moments of shock and trauma and grief, it's so helpful to have rituals for how to mourn,

3:30how to remember, how to structure the worst moments of our lives into concrete things to do. That's one of the things that religions do really well and individuals don't. My parents had broken off from the Catholic church and my younger brother, Michael, had gone to an elementary school that was trying to talk about religion and inclusivity. And so they had asked one day in class, going around, can everybody just say what your religion is? And when they got to my brother, he was like, I don't understand the question.

4:03So she sent him home and had said, find out for tomorrow what your religion is. And my dad was a brilliant man, but often lost in thoughts. No one is really clear on what he was thinking when my brother said to him, oh, dad, by the way, what religion are we? And my dad was like, son, you're an eagle. And he didn't know if that was on the list of approved names of things. So, you know, goes into school, teacher calls on him and says, did you find out what religion you are? And he said, I did, we're eagles. And next thing you know, he's in the office.

4:37My mother is getting a phone call. About how my brother thinks he's an eagle. And, you know, it just kind of became this thing that was then like our answer anytime anyone asked us. And I really don't think the people at the funeral home were prepped for the moment of, you know, trying to get the two of us to focus in on what we would do for any of the services when they were like, so what religion are you? And it was like this great little moment of like everything got silent. And then together, the two of us kind of laughed and said, oh, we're eagles.

Memorial Design

5:10Karen and her brother were now suddenly and unfathomably the only members left of their immediate family. And they were now newly responsible for holding on to all these idiosyncratic memories that only immediate families have and simultaneously figuring out how to memorialize them for the world. We didn't know what to be able to do to honor them. And for several years, they didn't even have a headstone because we couldn't figure out what's the point of that? What is it supposed to do for people?

5:40And what is it supposed to do for us specifically? And so I began really looking into both my own kind of memories of memorials that had stood out. Suddenly, public memorials could be personal and instructive. For example, back in 2001, Karen was on tour and a member of her company who had lost someone close to her in the Oklahoma City bombing asked that they specifically go out of their way to visit its memorial. We were going into Oklahoma City. It was like really early, like just as the sun was rising, we kind of went in.

6:15And I remember the field of chairs just kind of glowing with such a powerful impact because instead of it just being a list of names, literally seeing a chair that represented every single one of the people that died suddenly made the scale of it really viscerally understandable. And in particular, the 19 chairs that are smaller for children, we brought home in a totally

6:48different and unexpected way what was lost there.

6:55How is memorializing different from simply remembering? I mean, we all remember things all day long, all our lives. We do it as individuals and we do it as collectives and as cultures. And most of the time, we don't even realize we're doing it. Even though grief is deeply personal, memorials are almost always public, whether it's a huge sculpture in a plaza or even simply a headstone for a loved one in a cemetery. No matter how you memorialize, you inevitably make a private loss public.

7:30Then I was in New York one day and came into this green space to sit and have lunch and noticed this big glass memorial for 9-11 that a company had put up. But what struck me about it was that the names in the glass at the front were printed, but as you looked through to the back of the glass, it was everyone's signature. There was something so powerful about seeing each person's individual handwriting suddenly

8:03made that back layer really feel like humans and the individuals that were lost there. And even more than the individual handwriting, Karen was struck by the way the memorial captured light. For me, I began thinking a lot about how cemeteries often feel very dark and that what I wanted was something that would somehow feel like it had the kind of light that was missing that felt like it was missing by losing my family members all at once.

8:35I began going through a lot of cemeteries and there are several headstones there. That are made out of pink rose quartz. And what was stunning about them is the way that any time of year, they kind of hold light. They kind of glow in the landscape. And I was trying to think about what within the experience of this grave that was for both parents who died on the same day and were very different people could kind of help articulate what I felt I'd lost. On the morning that they had left on their trip, my mom had left this poem that she had cut

9:12out of the Boston Globe on the kitchen sink. And it's a really beautiful poem that ends talking about letting go and with every loss you learn and you learn. I remember walking into their house and my aunt handing me that poem and saying, I think you want to hold on to this. When we walk into a cemetery to go stand at this stone and feel a sense of them, the idea of this rock that kind of holds the light that they used to feel like they held, and that also has this message

9:49of loss being something that is painful, but with every goodbye you learn, felt like kind of a way to have an ongoing message from her there so that whoever came, even if they never met her, they would know something about her and know something about the two of them and what they were together.

10:15Hi-Fi Nation will return after these messages.

Professor James Young

10:18I have to admit that Karen's intimate experience with grief, with memory, and with memorializing brought home something that I, as an art historian, was always incredibly curious about, and what brought me to this topic in the first place. I could never quite put my finger on how, at any given time, memorials are tasked with embodying two opposite experiences at once. A larger cultural history, what explains and captures an event in

10:52the past, and the personal, subjective memories that comprise that history. I mean, history is memory, and memory is us. It's a single story, and it's infinite stories, simultaneously urgent and timeless, private and public. It's basically an impossibility set in marble, or bronze, or sometimes in nothing at all. When tragedy strikes your family, on a scale like Karen's, or even in the smaller series of

11:25intimate earthquakes that we all have or will experience, we realize that it's on us to figure out how to remember, what objects to keep, what stories to tell.

11:39But when tragedy happens on a mass scale, affecting culture and rewriting history, we realize that it's best to call Professor James Young. My name is James Young. I am Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. James is a scholar and academic who has become one of the world's preeminent writers and sources on memorials. He has served on the jury for some of the most famous and infamous memorials in the world. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the U.S. Holocaust Museum,

12:10the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, the 9-11 Memorial, just to name a few. Yeah, my last book is called The Stages of Memory, Reflections on Memorial, Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between. And it begins with a long chapter on my role in the jury for the 9-11 Memorial. James is referring to the mass shooting in 2011, when a white supremacist, anti-immigrant fanatic

12:41killed 69 children on a Norwegian island, and another 10 people in Oslo, where he blew up a government center. Norway, unlike the United States, has virtually no history of mass violence of this kind. So when it happens, they don't know how to process it. So they call James. James is the guy you call because his 35-plus years of experience working on these committees has given him unique insight into how to see the role of subjective memory in creating something

13:15that is meant for the public. And specifically, what it means to translate lived experience into and onto a memorial that will allow other people to remember, or at least to understand. When I think of memorials, I think of them in stages. In a way, the memorial has already begun, whether or not you've mandated it. The families have already begun. They've already kind of marked the spaces on the island where their kids were killed with little flowers and votive candles and pictures

13:49and teddy bears. And they were talking about taking down the cafe building, where about 20 of the kids were kind of trapped and killed. I said, well, I understand the instinct just to scrape this away and start fresh and new. But this building means a lot to the family. The building has meant a lot to these kids. It's like the center of life at the summer camp. I think probably you want to find a way to

14:20integrate some part of it. Start with the parts that the families have already kind of sacralized for you. What James knows, and the people in the grips of grief do not, is that conflict is part of the memorializing process. There's supposed to be a side that wants to tear down the building where an unspeakable tragedy occurs. And there's supposed to be another side who wants to enshrine that building, that bullet hole, as a reminder to the world of what happened. James's job is to give the community

14:55permission to work through that conflict without having to think about the stakes involved in the ultimate goal. Once they actually have permission not to worry about the final result, then they're actually open and receptive to all kinds of ideas, interesting ideas and art and the process itself. And I said, just put your faith in the process and it'll be fine. But how do we not worry about the final result? I mean, what else is left?

15:28I was particularly drawn to James's work because of my own experience with Holocaust memorials, both from an academic perspective – it was the focus of the bulk of my graduate work – and from a personal perspective that led me to pursue that work in the first place. Walking into Holocaust museums and memorials reduced me to an open wound. I found them unbearable, but I couldn't not go. And I also realized that some affected me more than others – and especially one in particular,

15:58the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. I lived in Berlin from 2005 to 2006, the year after I finished my undergrad degree, and the year after the memorial opened, when the city felt like it was still dilating to accommodate it.

16:15Because if you've never been there – and you'll know this if you have been there – it's a huge, utterly unavoidable memorial. Which is exactly how it's meant to be. If you walk down Unter den Linden in Berlin – a main thoroughfare comparable to the Champs Elysees in Paris, or Fifth Avenue in New York – you culminate in a plaza that houses three inexorable pillars of German history. To your right, the Reichstag – the seat of German government. Directly in front of you, the Brandenburg Gate – an 18th-century neoclassical

16:49monument topped with a bronze horse-drawn chariot that presided over the Prussian Revolution, bombed out World War II ruins, and most recently, the reunification of Berlin after the wall fell. And to your left, a series of 2,711 pillars that expand over five acres like a mass cemetery of headstones – the Holocaust Memorial. You can't possibly take this entire memorial in at once, and no one is expected to try.

17:21A lot of people don't – they really just want to get to work in the morning without necessarily confronting their cultural shame. But it's hard to not be aware of it, just by dint of the sheer amount of space it takes up – both physically and even intellectually. It's referred to colloquially in German as the Holocaust Mannmahl – Mannmahl translating directly into Memorial. But the translation for the entire English name – the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe – is Denkmal für die Emordeten Juden Europas. Denken means to think.

17:56And so a Denkmal is, essentially – and by design – a memorial that makes you think.

18:12And you can't help but think as you move through this space. But what you think about is your own business. And it's what makes this memorial controversial. I, for one, would come here over and over, whenever the mood struck. When I felt the need to indulge in that isolated post-college expat exhilaration – or total loneliness, depending on the hour. The point is, the memorial served whatever purpose I needed at any given moment. It held space for whatever state I was in. Because it's

18:46too much and too abstract to be any one thing. It's physically disarming – simultaneously disorienting and peaceful – and constantly changing with the light, with the seasons. As soon as you walk into it, you feel the quiet crunch of pebbles beneath your feet. The ground dips and the pillars rise. You're alone, lost in the sameness of the grid almost immediately. And if you go with someone, you lose them pretty fast. Or you're alone, and you might

19:17feel lonely. Or you might appreciate the quiet that falls over the space, created by these sound muffling pillars. If you're claustrophobic, maybe you're in hell. If you sit atop a pillar and look out over the waving field, you might feel free. The sheer space of this memorial, the design of it, its materials, invites these highly personalized experiences, not just for me, but for everyone who visits it. And it raises what might be a troubling question. How is an experience this

19:52personal about the Holocaust at all? Your experience of it is the act of remembering. Your movement through it is the act of remembering. This is Professor Michael Hayes of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I do remember the kind of full sensorium. I remember it had a particular smell. I could feel the heat that the sun was radiating off the blocks. Every sense was being, you know, addressed. Sound, smell, heat. And it was really something. And it snows in Berlin,

20:27and it completely changes. The light changes. The reflections change. Michael, besides being a scholar of memorial architecture in his own right, is a close friend of Peter Eisenman, the architect of the Berlin Memorial, and well acquainted with Eisenman's process. His architecture from early on was a very intentional struggle with the difficulty of making meaning in our own time. With this memorial, Eisenman changed the language for how we talk

21:02about representing the Holocaust, and even memorializing mass death more broadly. Eisenman made his memorial abstract rather than representational. If you want to see a representational Holocaust memorial, go to the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum. There, you're forced to see representations of death. The physical horror of the relics, those enormous piles of glasses, and the leathery smell of an unbearable number of empty shoes. You're even directed to walk through a boxcar. And we're used to

21:34seeing something tangible that makes us recoil, something that we respond to emotionally. Eisenman created something abstract and, oddly enough, rational, even in its randomness. He's the architect who brought structuralism and structuralist linguistics and the whole idea of deep grammars, deep structures. And he tapped into that, this idea of a deep structure, and tried to find, well, what might the deep structure of the Holocaust look like? And for him it was repetition,

22:09randomness, relentlessness. It was his word, reason gone mad. I mean, even the number of pillars in the Berlin Memorial, 2711. It creates something that feels rational, but is actually intentionally meaningless. There was no attempt to try to make six million or some, some symbolic numbers. It's random, which I think is important. It's absolutely, relentlessly repetitive. And yet it's completely systematic. But think about what that is. The Holocaust was a

22:46highly rational, highly modern industrialized murder and bureaucratic. And it was relentless, but it was also completely random. I mean, what I think the memorial has at a deep structural level is actually a kind of reminder that the Holocaust was rational. And that's one of the horrors of modernist rationality was the technology is also a technology of, of death. Okay. What does this really mean? Representational memorials can more easily and more bluntly

23:21tug on our emotions. They create a kind of gut punch shock and awe as we look back at grainy black and white photos of a historical event, an event that feels like it's from another time and place and wonder how could people do this to one another. And then we just go on with our day in our present moment, disturbed maybe, but oddly unburdened by the comfort that it's not our present reality. But abstract memorials do the opposite. They disrupt our present realities by viscerally

23:54disrupting our bodies, like the Berlin Memorial does. Did you notice that the stelae tilt very slightly? They're not absolutely plumb. They're not absolutely vertical. And the way the architects did that, it was one of the compositional devices. There's, there's a grid on the ground that's absolutely repetitive and every, every block has the same footprint and the ground undulates. It intentionally, Eisenman said this, he said he wanted to, to make a wound in the German earth.

24:30And so the grid undulates on the ground, but then, and you can only see this when you're higher up, there's also an implied plane across the tops of the stelae and they too undulate. And then the other thing is the two grids that regulate the top of the stelae and the bottom are slightly misaligned. And that's where the tilt is produced.

24:58What it does is very subtly and almost subconsciously animate the things, it makes them a little less inert. They're a little bit less, because they are very inert, but they, they're a little bit animated because as you move through, you see those undulations. I thought that was absolutely fascinating. It's a very simple compositional trick.

25:23This is what Michael means when he talks about making meaning in our own time. This is a memorial that agitates us, our minds, our physicality, as we experience them. These are the memorials that resonate. And this physical disruption, the way it catches your step in real time, intentionally makes the past present. Because we realize that we're not looking back at a historical event with critical distance.

25:55We're experiencing something that is present. We're projecting our own subjective stories onto an otherwise narrativeless neutral screen. Whether it's the blank stelae of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, or the reflective black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC, or most recently the 9-11 Memorial. The two enormous building footprints turned into deep rushing fountains. This constant stream of water falling, commemorating the buildings that fell and now aren't there, and inviting us to use our own memories of what

26:29was once there to truly feel the loss.

26:34But of course, that's only if you knew the buildings when they were there. And this is where abstraction can hit its limits. You can only make sense of an abstract memorial as a memorial if you have some kind of living memory of the tragedy that the materials and shapes and structures elicit, or prompt or cue in you. What happens to a memorial when those living memories start dying off?

27:03We'll return to the rest of Tamar Avishai on Public Memorials after these messages.

Abstract Memorials

27:11Before we continue, a little message. Slate is having a holiday sale. For a limited time, we're offering our annual Slate Plus membership at $25 off for your first year. Think of it like this. You pay $10 or $15 per month for your music and streaming subscriptions. With Slate Plus, for less than $4 per month, you can get member-exclusive episodes and segments from us and other shows like Slow Burn, Amicus, Slate Culture Gab Fest, and more. There are no ads on any of our podcasts,

27:45and you have unlimited reading on the Slate site. And best of all, you'll be supporting our show and Slate's journalism. Sign up for Slate Plus at slate.com slash hi-fi plus. Again, we're giving you $25 off your first year as a member through December 29th. So sign up now at slate.com slash hi-fi plus, or click the link in the show notes. The question of abstraction used to drive people crazy. James Young again. James is talking about how much abstract memorials depend on viewers

28:19themselves making meaning out of the memorial. That's actually the question confronting, I think, almost all the contemporary memorial designers. I mean, I've kind of taken away this notion that most memorials, even contemporary ones, might last just about as long as the generation that built them, that there might be a shelf life of about 70 years. A shelf life. I mean, this is the rub, right? There's been a tremendous amount of controversy

28:49surrounding these abstract memorials because they draw attention to shelf life, to the fact that remembering ends when memory ends. After all, who is doing the remembering? What happens when you're expected to project your own memory of something onto a memorial, but you have no actual memory of it? That's a real problem.

29:14Imagine, for example, standing at the 9-11 memorial today, which is called, poetically enough, reflecting absence. If you were born after 9-11, you look up and see just that. Absence. Nothingness. But I look up at the nothingness and I'm immediately transported back to my second week of college, watching the towers fall on TV, frantically trying to reach one of my best friends at NYU who was watching the towers fall from the windows of her own dorm room, and hearing the panic in her voice

29:46before all the phone lines jammed. I remember the queasiness of going to ground zero and looking up at nothing, because there used to be so much something. But if you never saw them there, you can't just conjure these feelings. To that end, I have a very different experience of going to the Vietnam memorial than my parents do. I see names that mean nothing to me except the abstract volume of them, and I see myself reflected in black granite. My Canadian parents see the infuriating news reports

30:23on American news stations, the loss of faith in institutions that they had trusted, the fear and shame in the faces of their draft-dodging friends. At least with representational memorials, you can didactically tell someone who doesn't remember exactly what the past was supposed to be like. With the abstract memorial, there's no actual memory being represented. There's no experience of remembering. And this raises another big problem for abstract memorials, too. Architects and

30:54communities that build them have no control over how the event is being remembered. And sometimes the communities want to have that kind of control. They might want memorials that, in the words of Michael Hayes, affirm. Could you actually define what you mean by affirmative? Yeah, I think the Lincoln Memorial, insofar as it is specifically for Lincoln and Lincoln's assumed accomplishments of reconciliation,

31:25of emancipation, of reasserting the greatness of America. To me, the Lincoln Monument is a very affirmative monument. It's very sober, but it is affirmative. And this desire for affirmative architecture, at least until this point, is largely why this simple, underdetermined design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial sparked an enormous uproar when it was chosen in 1982. Besides the fact that Maya Lin, its designer, was a 22-year-old Yale graduate student without an architectural credit to her name,

31:58and the xenophobic pushback against an Asian architect winning the competition, it wasn't a design that commemorated the war or its fallen soldiers with any sense of triumph or gratitude. There was no general on a horse, no phallic tower of victory. Instead, the memorial was described as so many had experienced the Vietnam War. A quote-unquote black gash of shame that was now given prime real estate on the Washington Mall and rose up from the ground like it was born from polluted water. And maybe this felt truer to the

32:34reality of the Vietnam War for so many of the civilians who had experienced it, and even for so many of the soldiers who had lived it. But there were a number of vets who found this statement on their sacrifice to be incredibly disrespectful and still do, and fought back immediately with designs for more heroic representations of their experiences. That's kind of why the discussion around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, it got skewed. It was completely politicized. James Young. And he wanted to turn, you know,

33:07the soldiers back into heroes and heroes only. And not some heroic and some unheroic, but only heroic. You know, African American, Latino, and white. Those are American soldiers. James is referring to Frederick Hart's bronze representational statues, Three Soldiers, which were added to Maya Lin's Black Granite Vietnam War Memorial as a compromise to protesters who wanted something affirmative. They wanted the vets, you know, to feel good about themselves.

33:37That's all understandable. It is understandable. It's a frightening thing to lose control of a cultural narrative if it affected you personally. This reframes the question of who is doing the remembering, and how long they're expected to. It reminds me of those Berliners today, three generations after the Holocaust, who walk by the Denkmal daily and are given permission by the abstraction to not feel a sense of cultural shame. Even if there's

34:08a larger social pressure to treat the memorial like a memorial. In other words, no push-ups on the pillars, no skateboarding through them. And it makes me think of my Jewish family members who feel like that's unconscionable. This idea that abstraction lets the perpetrators, even three generations later, off the emotional hook. The idea that a memorial can make you think about something other than the event itself. That kids can obliviously run through the pillars, shrieking and chasing each other.

34:40That people use the pillars as public art that they can stretch out and sun themselves on. That a lonely post-grad like me can sit atop one of them and ponder my next move. That anyone can look out over this memorial and see only what they want to see. That seems to be the cost of a memorial that is too abstract. But that said, representation clearly has its limits too. Think back to those piles of glasses and shoes. For one thing,

35:12horror arouses a very different response than deep intellectual resonance. The realist representational monuments, the ones that are sculptures of a human figure emaciated, standing by a strand of barbed wire, bodies lying, you know, on the earth. Like George Segal's. Yeah, like George Segal. To me and to the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who's one of the people

35:43who thought about art after the Holocaust, thinks that that victimizes the victims again. It does damage to the memory of the victims by fixing those images in the heads of viewers and not allowing a process of working through. Michael is referring to the Holocaust Memorial created by the artist George Segal, who is known for his trademark blank faceless plaster figures caught in banal tableaus of

36:15daily life. Segal won a competition to create the memorial at California Palace of the Legion of Honor. The plaster figures, or here bronze castings painted white, depict a figure standing at barbed wire with a pile of bodies behind it. Because it's Segal, it's intentionally sterile and invites our projections. But it's also pretty gruesome, and about as deeply familiar and representational of the Holocaust as can be.

36:45And this is the other problem. Horror can lose its impact. Familiar images, in the words of the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, run the risk of becoming, like Michael says, fixed narratives, calcified, under glass. The horror of another generation, a story told and retold. It doesn't feel urgent or present. And this is representation hitting its own shelf life. As James Young says,

37:16If a design is so overdetermined and is remembering something so narrowly as the experience of just these individuals and this time and place only, then they haven't built into the design any way to accommodate the needs of a new generation. It's a risk. Using a memorial to tell a story. Letting memorials recede into history, further and further back. When I look at Frederick Hart's Three Soldiers at the Vietnam Memorial,

37:47I see the same figures that I've seen depicted in every movie that I've watched about Vietnam. Rain ponchos and camouflage. Sideburns and dog tags. I almost expect to hear CCR's fortunate son piped in. And I don't doubt that they look authentic to someone who was there. But to me, they feel like another generation. And to my kids, they'll look completely antiquated. A photo in their history textbooks. Calcified. Under glass.

38:21So what is the answer here? If, for example, neither the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or the Bronze Soldiers actually speak to me. What hope do I have of the war actually resonating for me? For my children. Is a shelf life for a memorial, whether it's 50 years, 75, 100 years, just something we need to accept?

38:47One solution might simply be a compromise. We're seeing this happen more and more.

Compromise and Solution

38:52A conflation between the abstract and the representational. And not just by adding some bronze soldiers to a black granite wall, but with the addition of explanations, information centers, museums. There's nothing, for example, in the design of the Berlin Denkmal that tells you that it's meant to speak to an event where six million Jews were murdered. But the museum below tells you exactly what it is being commemorated abstractly above.

39:23And the same can be said for New York. So you've got the museum below, which tells a very explicit historical narrative, concrete narrative as a foundation for the very abstract design above. And I think that yin and yang, the reciprocal exchange between the abstraction above and the hard history below, where they can kind of complete each other.

39:50And I think this completion, this yin and yang, is why this memorial is so successful. Because even though it's easy to miss in the sea of pillars, beneath the Berlin Denkmal, there's a small five-room information center. And it's my favorite Holocaust museum, if such a thing can exist. Because its focus is deeply human. It seems to understand how off-putting, for lack of a better word, horror can be. It aims for resonance. And not through abstraction,

40:28but by emphasizing the individuality of the lives lost. Reinforcing that these were real people, not faceless, emaciated corpses who were born to die in the Holocaust. In fact, there aren't any of those kinds of graphic camp liberation photos in the whole museum. Instead, there are family photos, smiling faces from before the war. There are handwritten postcards, so unique to each individual, the indentation of the pen. When people started reaching out to their family members outside of

41:01Germany and Poland, concerned about what they were starting to see happen. One postcard, the text tells you, had been thrown from a moving train. And there's one room in particular that always sits with me, where I always sit. It's an empty chamber with a few benches, where a name is projected on all four walls, along with the dates they lived. And there's a recording that plays, first in German and then in

41:32English, that tells the story of the person, everything that we know about them. Each name is allotted about 30 seconds total. They have three million stories, and it takes seven years to run through them. And that's only half of the dead accounted for. Half. And it still takes seven years. We're so used to the idea that one loss is a tragedy and six million is a statistic. But sitting

42:03there, hearing about this cobbler, that seamstress, a seven-year-old who would have fit in that small chair in Oklahoma City, who might very well have described himself as an eagle, and knowing that being in the room for that one name might as well be a once-in-a-lifetime event. You were given that brief, arbitrary moment to remember someone that you never knew. And you feel the compounding of that loss, being in the room for that one. And it's just, authentically, over and over.

42:38And maybe this is the answer to my fears about being unable to reach out and touch the Vietnam War. After all, I didn't live through the Holocaust. It will always be history to me. But still, it's hard to imagine this room, so powerful, so present, and so perpetual, ever having a shelf life. And it made me think back to the decisions that Karen Crowlock made.

43:08So the final headstone ended up being the rose quartz with the poem. What's been really interesting is that I've actually gotten emails from people since it's gone into the cemetery, that people that have gone there to visit other people from the town have stopped and said, what's amazing is that it feels so much like them. That there was this new headstone that struck my attention because of the way it was kind of glowing in the landscape.

43:42And so I went over to it and was like, of course, that's the Crowlocks. Of course, that's what they were. That's what they were like when they were alive. Thank you so much for talking to me. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for opening this conversation.

44:04Tamar, do you think, in addition to pairing an abstract memorial with a museum, there's room to be a little didactic about an abstract memorial for future generations? Like, this is how you should experience it? This is how you should read it? Or do you think that defeats the whole purpose of having an abstract memorial? James mentioned when we had our interview that he thinks that the entire controversy surrounding the Vietnam Veterans Memorial could have actually been avoided if there had just been a plaque,

44:36you know, explaining what it was trying to say and what it was trying to do. And because there wasn't, it left the audience to try and guess why something so simple was saying something so profound and it was being hailed by art critics. And, you know, for then the average person or the average god soldier, it was really easy to dunk on for that reason. It's important if you are taking on the responsibility of representing memory even abstractly, that you're not alienating your

45:09audience and that there's something there that gives them a little bit of help for how it might be more, you know, emotionally resonant to interpret the memorial in this or that way. Thank you for your piece, Tamar. Tamar Avishai is the host and producer of The Lonely Palette, a show that returns art history to the masses, one object at a time. You can find The Lonely Palette

45:39on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We will be taking two weeks off for the holiday season. There will be no episode on Christmas and New Year's weekend, but we'll be right back afterward with a conclusion of season five with a three-part series on philosophy and monsters. Stay tuned and see you in 2022.

46:04This episode of HiFi Nation was produced and written by Tamar Avishai and edited by me, Barry Lamb. Executive producer of Slate Podcasts is Alicia Montgomery. Editorial director for Slate Podcasts is Gabriel Roth. Senior managing producer for Slate Podcasts is June Thomas. Managing producer for Slate Podcasts is Asha Saluja. Editor of Slate Plus is me, Chow Tu.

46:29Production assistance this season provided by Jake Johnson. Visit HiFiNation.org for complete transcript, show notes, and reading list for every episode. That's H-I-P-H-I-Nation.org. Follow HiFi Nation on Facebook and Twitter, and at the website for updates on stories and ideas. Before we finish this episode, a little bit of business of interest to HiFi Nation listeners.

47:01The Rutgers Center for Philosophy of Religion is announcing a summer seminar called God and the Space-Time Manifold, and they're looking for applicants. The seminar will take place June 13th through 24th in 2022, and will be led by Professors Dean Zimmerman, Brian Lefto, and Catherine Rogers. The primary question of the seminar is, how do scientific theories about the nature of time fit with different theological conceptions of God's relationship to the universe?

47:37Over 11 days in June, 12 philosophers of science and religion will be holding sessions at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The seminar is open to professional philosophers and grad students in philosophy. To find out more and how to apply, visit godandtime.rutgers.edu. That's godandtime.rutgers.edu. You can find a link to it, as well as how to contact the organizers, in our show notes.

48:13The seminar is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.