69 Comments

1. Oyster:

I think your title says it all. It IS incomprehensible and every attempt to capture the true story, the true horror, falls short in some fashion and there will always be those who complain. I’m glad they try though, as any text regarding this inhumanity is disappearing from our school books more each day. Our younger generation will never benefit from the warnings if it isn’t remembered.

May 11, 2005 - 4:22 am 2. jedrury:

On a cold rainy March day in Berlin, I stood at the platform overlooking this Memorial and tried to make sense of its abstractism and could not. It lies south of the Brandenburg Gate, adjacent to the future American Embassy site and takes up a huge space. On reflection, I questioned whether my un-feeling were the result of the rain and cold or the design. The only sense of light, optimism, hope, possibility came from a few young trees sprouting in its midst.

I’ve not come to any firm conclusion except

a view that German art of the late 20th century reflects a nihilism and negativity and anti humanism so vastly apart from American optimism that German artists still struggle in the aftermath of their horrid history. This design speaks to that feeling.

Mimicking Tom Wolfe, I think I’ll wait ’til the art critics at the New York Times enlighten me.

May 11, 2005 - 4:37 am 3. reel cobra:

I was suspicious of the memorial and felt lee entheusiastic after reading that the New York architect thought that Nazi skinheads defacing it might “add to it”.

Then I learned that the company who won the contract to put an anti-grafiti coating was one that manufactured Zyklon B.

I don’t know http://reelcobra.blogspot.com/2005/05/nazis-defacing-german-holocaust.html

May 11, 2005 - 5:20 am 4. ed:

Hmmm.

Frankly I’m singularly unimpressed with this “monument”. The only monument worthy of such a subject would be a permanent reform of the virulent jew hating that is in ascendence now in Europe. Statues and grey stone blocks mean nothing. Particularly if people don’t bother visiting it because it’s ugly as hell, as I imagine will happen with this thing.

We live in an era of the absurd, rife with hatred and murder by the same people who once pretentiously proclaimed “never again”.

May 11, 2005 - 6:34 am 5. DSmith:

Abstract art was exactly the wrong choice, I think. One might argue that the philsophical movements that led to abstract art also led to other European “experiments” in Modernism…and that the Holocaust itself was one of them.

Myself, I find that “memorial” somewhat offensive. It turns 6 million human beings into so many abstract concrete blocks. Is that so very different from what Hitler was trying to achieve?

May 11, 2005 - 6:36 am 6. jedrury:

In an unconvincing piece, the Times struggles to tell us how to interpret the emptiness

of this “happening” piece of German soul searching.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/arts/design/09holo.html?oref=login

A more approachable memorial in Berlin would be to play “Schindler’s List” on a huge screen over and over and over to the tramp of the jack boots coming up those old wooden stairs.

A more intimate memorial is at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris where the memorials are as haunting as they honor Jews and other victims of German atrocities.

May 11, 2005 - 7:08 am 7. David Thomson:

ìThe memorial’s columns appear to be a field of gravestones sunken to varying depthsî

Appears to be? No, this abstract art interpretation is a waste of time. The lessons of the Holocaust should be clear and unambiguous. I suspect thatís tacitly what was not desired by those responsible for this project.

May 11, 2005 - 7:14 am 8. Neighborhood Bully:

I don’t have a big problem with it, but would rather see a huge billboard that simply says…

“We’re sorry and it won’t happen again”.

May 11, 2005 - 7:27 am 9. lindenen:

“One might argue that the philsophical movements that led to abstract art also led to other European “experiments” in Modernism…and that the Holocaust itself was one of them.”

I’ve long thought the literal dehumanizing of art that occurred in the 20th century when artists abandoned the human form as primary subject was a product of the same ideologies that produced Nazism and Communism. Perhaps the West will be healthy once more when fine artists reembrace the human form as subject and step away from the Rothko? (Although I really do like some of his paintings) Thank god for photography, film and tv filling the vacuum left by the absence of humanity in art.

May 11, 2005 - 7:42 am 10. maria horvath:

I am glad that the Germans are finally beginning to acknowledge what their fathers and grandfathers did as Nazis. I am afraid, however, that in the future this monument will become as clear in its meaning as is Stonehenge to us.

May 11, 2005 - 7:46 am 11. lindenen:

“”We’re sorry and it won’t happen again”.”

More like “We’ll make sure that next time we’re not directly responsible. We’ll just fund and appease the people who want to stage the next one. This allows us plausible deniability and, as you fight your would be murderers, we can cluck our tongues and project our self-hatred and guilt over the past onto you.”

May 11, 2005 - 7:47 am 12. Buddy Larsen:

One one hand, any memorial has–as Roger’s headline says–an impossible task, and as such Paul Siegel’s remarks goes to the quick. The whimsical monumentalism itself is an expression of the bizarre. What could be more correct than illustrating that the best memorial is a field of low squat heavy right-angled panzer-coffins that are there as a result of a single vision with a crushing centralized bureaucratic administrative power over space and time? Nazism, in other words, is what may be pictured. Paul Siegal’s feelings are the only authenticity possible, meaning that the memorial succeeds in the way it must, by failing.

May 11, 2005 - 7:59 am 13. David Thomson:

ìI am glad that the Germans are finally beginning to acknowledge what their fathers and grandfathers did as Nazis.î

When did this occur? On the contrary, I sense that many Germans perceive themselves to also be victims. Adolph Hitler supposedly snuck into power and imposed his will on the citizens. They were merely innocent bystanders and not even remotely responsible for the mass murders. And since the Jews in Israel allegedly persecute the Palestinians, perhaps they brought the Holocaust onto themselves?

What about those films showing thousands of Germans cheering Hitler and his Nazi party? Those people were coerced and had no choice but to do as they were instructed. Some of the sneaky Jews in Hollywood may have even spliced the film to make the Germans look bad. No, we are witnessing a disgusting revision of history—and this Holocaust Memorial is in some ways part of the new lie.

May 11, 2005 - 8:12 am 14. Duane:

I first saw this memorial in November 2004 while it was still being constructed. With the temporary chain link fence surrounding the construction site I thought it was just another high-rise going up. All the concrete blocks scattered here and there looked just like construction material.

When my fiancee (now my wife) told me it was the new holocost memorial I was a bit confused. The signage and viewing platform didn’t add much to my understanding either of the concept of the design or of the horrors of that which was being memoialized.

I had a 6 hour layover in Amsterdam on that trip and my tour of the Ann Frank House was much more moving and personal in a way this concrete block jumble never could ever hope to be.

May 11, 2005 - 8:14 am 15. Mikey:

I don’t get it. What’s the artist trying to say with the monumental blocks? In my opinion, public art ought to be obvious to the viewer. If an explanation is needed, the artist has failed.

I really do not get what is being said with a huge field of concrete blocks.

May 11, 2005 - 8:16 am 16. Buddy Larsen:

Mikey, maybe that’s the message, that since we can’t “get” the Holocaust, either, we must always beware of any power that can say “let there be a huge field of concrete blocks in the center of the city”–and then make it happen.

The ‘increase the contradiction’ idea can be reduced to ‘trust nothing’, which is the act of nihilism itself. But since no true nihilism would–by definition–actually honor the civic concept with the action and commitment needed to create the field of concrete blocks, the memorial maybe shows that there is something worse than nothing, that something like nazism can hide behind a notion like nihilism, but is in truth beyond it, so that you have to ask, what is this active, efficient, organized, dedicated anti-humanism, if not proof of the existence of evil?

May 11, 2005 - 9:06 am 17. Michael B:

“These days, with anti-Semitism appearing on the landscape again, even in the American academy …”

Precisely, in fact one could perhaps more accurately say “especially in the American academy” since they have a disproportionately prominent voice that receives respect, too often uncritically one suspects, in other quarters, not the least of which resides in the halls of power, both domestically and in international forums, including the ME. The Juan Cole’s of the world, the late Edward Said’s, many others, amply testify to this reality that receives purchase, politically, in those and other quarters.

Anti-Israel actions are not, eo ipso, synonymous with anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, once the gloss and veneer is removed, they occasionally are, far too occasionally, even if it must also be allowed that such is no simple or unadorned anti-Semitism, reminiscent of images we know all too well, from the era of WWII. Instead, it’s a form that has been updated – as all PR and propaganda must be updated – and given a sophistical gloss that only tenured academics and quasi-intellectuals can provide.

May 11, 2005 - 9:09 am 18. ahem:

What a sick, ugly memorial. Blow it up.

The point is not to make the Holocaust’s numerous victims fade into the mass, gray anonymity of the grave, but to remember them for the unique, vibrant and valuable people they were in life.

Awful. Absolutely awful.

May 11, 2005 - 9:15 am 19. Michael B:

Too, the ever thoughtful and well informed John Rosenthal at Transatlantic Intelligencer has been commenting on aspects of this in a number of recent posts.

May 11, 2005 - 10:11 am 20. Kevin P:

Roger:

The fact that an attempt was made is good. The evil nature of the act can never be portrayed in a work of art. But I think this work is more about the artist then the victims. The were similar complaints about the Vietnam memorial and some veterans are still upset about it. But the artist introduced the people she was memorializing by putting their names on the Wall and doing it in chronoligical order.It has been a very moving tribute for veterans and non veterans alike. This piece in Berlin smacks of narcisism because it is so obtuse. When you have to have a ten page article to explain the meaning of the piece it ends up drawing more attention to the artist then the victims. My biggest fear is that 100 years from now the blocks will become a playground for children during the day and thugs at night because the site gives of no apparent demand for reverance. I am not saying that it had to be a traditional realistic statue but this has as much connection to the slaughter as the recent drape presentaion in central park. You could put that piece of art in place of the blocks and construct some sort of rambling disertation on how it relates to the holocaust. When you have to rely completely on the artists explanation and you can’t look at the piece and draw some sort of coherant connection on your own then the effort is a failure.

May 11, 2005 - 10:23 am 21. goldsmith:

I’ve long thought the literal dehumanizing of art that occurred in the 20th century when artists abandoned the human form as primary subject was a product of the same ideologies that produced Nazism and Communism.

___

One might argue that the philsophical movements that led to abstract art also led to other European “experiments” in Modernism…and that the Holocaust itself was one of them.

It takes a profound ignorance of the history of art and its relationship to Nazism to make such statements. The Nazi party made it clear through the first “blockbuster” traveling exhibition in history called “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) that they considered modernism and abstraction a symptom of the Jewish corruption of culture. It included such notable modernists as Marc Chagall, Edvard Munch, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, K√§the Kollwitz and Max Ernst (currently the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The “art” that the Nazis preferred is exactly the kind that you propose as an alternative to abstraction, the heroic, “classical” realism practiced by two of Hitler’s favorites, Josef Thorak and Arno Breker.

I happen to dislike most memorials, especially when they are ostensibly memorializing such monumental and complicated and horrible events such as the Holocaust. They inevitably fail their stated goals, and it is certainly legitimate to criticize the present memorial’s style as failing those goals more profoundly than another type of memorial. But i’d be cautious using such feelings in formulating ill-informed theories of the origins and meaning of modern art.

May 11, 2005 - 1:04 pm 22. Ralf Goergens:

David Thomson and Mariah Horvath,

qwe owned up to what our fathers and grandfathers did decades ago. In fact, holocaist denial is illegal in Germany.

lindenen and others: There is nothing dehumanizing in abstract art per se. The idea of abstract art is to capture the essence of what is depicted by the use of some simple elements.

May 11, 2005 - 1:19 pm 23. Michael B:

Related issue, re, the “American academy.”

Roger Kimball has an article in today’s WSJ entitled Retaking the Universities. Forward looking, intellectually disciplined, aggressive strategies coupled with well tempered legislative initiatives are needed.

Imagine (assuming one has the imaginative genius up to the task) some point in the future where sincere, transparent, thoroughly honest critiques take place in academe, shorn of sophistical pretension and gloss and the ideological superiority invoked with the Left’s not at all untypical anthoritarian zeal. Well, I said it would take an imaginative genius.

May 11, 2005 - 1:37 pm 24. Mikey:

Buddy Larsen:

Ah. The artist is a self-aggrandizing twit who is full of crap. That’s my take.

I’m sorry, but monumental abstract art in public places does nothing for me. It conveys nothing, it says nothing (except what a monumental waste of space and money). The artist is holding a monologue in a foreign tongue, which is not particularly edifying or anything of any worth.

No story, ano admonition, no sense of loss, or of horror. Just stupid, puzzling, concrete blocks stretching out in the center of a city.

A monumental shrug of the shoulders, a scratch on the side of the head and the viewer moves on, touched not in the least.

May 11, 2005 - 1:42 pm 25. Buddy Larsen:

Mikey, I’m not trying to needle you, but, if there was no puzzling monument, you wouldn’t be pissed off at the huge disconnect between this monument and what it is meant to portray. Think of other art forms–say film or literature–there’s always the problem of depicting the unacceptable in an acceptable manner. Music does it by very short discordancies, followed by harmonic resolutions. Most other art forms and popular entertainments do the same thing, less obviously: contrast and resolution. Visual representational arts like painting and sculpture can’t do this explicitly, they have to do it inside the head of the viewer. If that’s so, then your take is maybe exactly what the artist had in mind–that anyone trying to depict such an enormity is automatically a self-aggrandizing twit, and that the end does not at all justify the means. The theme is what, if not madness itself?

May 11, 2005 - 2:05 pm 26. exmaple:

Ralf says:

“There is nothing dehumanizing in abstract art per se. The idea of abstract art is to capture the essence of what is depicted by the use of some simple elements.”

The elements are simple but is it abstract art? I think of abstract art as a catch-all title for depictions of things not as the eye sees them. Normally. I can experience this monument as “abstract,” yet they stones are readily experienced as graves without any prompting from experts or knowledge of the artist’s body of work for reference point.

The comments here, almost a debate with art history, make the monument, for me, intriguing. One could feel this the artist intended to speak to all these influences and debates. It can be experienced as the denouement or “end result” of the interplay of politics, humanism and art in the twentieth century.

On the wires photos show aerial views. The sense of graveyard is not abstract at all. There appear to be cavities in the tops of some:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050510/481/wber10705101538

Meaning? Maybe mechanical reasons.

The aerial view shows the monument has a planned wavy, textural appearance. Attracts the eye and evocative. Depending on flight routes the artist may have intended a regular interatction with air passengers, an eye catching introduction to Berlin before landing.

May 11, 2005 - 2:40 pm 27. ricpic:

Several commenters have agreed with the received wisdom about it being impossible to commemorate the holocaust with a piece of figurative sculpture. I don’t buy it.

Ironically there is a tremendously moving figurative statue by a German artist, Ernst Barlach, to the German war dead of the first and second world wars. It hangs – a robed woman suspended in space with her eyes closed and her hands crossed over her chest, above a stone slab inscribed with the dates of those two wars – in Cologne Cathedral.

I have no idea what shape a piece of figurative sculpture would take to adequately commemorate the holocaust. That lies with genius. But to acquiese in the notion that it can’t be done is an abdication of human possibility.

May 11, 2005 - 3:12 pm 28. Buddy Larsen:

Well put, ricpic. Maybe it’s closer to the truth to say that we ourselves can’t imagine it.

May 11, 2005 - 3:21 pm 29. lindenen:

Ralf Goergens, maybe I didn’t explain myself well. When I said “dehumanizing” I meant that the human as main subject, or Humanity, had been removed. Essentially erased from the work. In place of the individual is now nothingness.

“It takes a profound ignorance of the history of art and its relationship to Nazism to make such statements.”

No, it doesn’t. Not when you’ve studied both, which I have. Those artists you mentioned all kept humanity in the picture. There are human figures in their work. When I say that the erasure of individual humans from the art makes me think of communism and Nazism, I mean that erasure of the human individual in modern art mimics the erasure of the human individual practiced by both systems. From Picasso’s Cubism to those stupid cubes beloved by 70s Minimalism, the attempt to square the human, to essentially make a round peg fit into a square hole, is reminiscent of the worst habits and ideas of 20th Century totalitarian ideologies. The denial of our imperfections, our human lumpiness in favor of pristine right angles and nothing else has always struck me as anti-human.

“The “art” that the Nazis preferred is exactly the kind that you propose as an alternative to abstraction, the heroic, “classical” realism practiced by two of Hitler’s favorites, Josef Thorak and Arno Breker.”

That evil, heroic classical realism. More of that filthy stuff. Hitler also liked dogs and was a vegetarian. Does liking dogs make one a Nazi? As well, he was a bad painter, are all bad painters suspect?

I’m going to have to quote the much hated architect Leon Krier at you. His statement is describing the Nazis use of classical architecture but his comments also apply to classical art:

“For, in total contrast to what we have wished to believe since 1945, Classical architecture was not one of the means by which the daily propaganda maintained its reign of terror over the masses. On the contrary it was the civilized face, the aesthetic and cultured faÁade of this empire of lies, and was used by the regime to implant its totalitarian rule in the captivated soul of the masses. Classical architecture is quite simply incapable of imposing terror by the force of its internal laws. As a part of the totalitarian system, it was chosen only as an efficient form of lie and deceptive promise.

“… In the wake of ideological repression, Classical architecture has become both the unknown ghost and the tragic victim. Undoubtedly there are very human reasons explaining this process of equating the images of Classical architecture with those of destruction and tyranny, but this does not extenuate the fact that the equation is based on incorrect logic: it confuses political ends and cultural means.”

Hitler also had Leni Riefenstahl on staff. Should we detest movie directors? Turn away from documentaries? Maybe all films should be abstractions instead of consisting of human individuals?

May 11, 2005 - 4:38 pm 30. truepeers:

Spot on, Lindenen. Modernism is not about seriously sharing in the humanity of the victimary or heroic figure (compare romanticism) but about toughening one up for the kill, about continually reworking the scene, that one may share in the revolutionary project of building the New Man. Auschwitz is the extreme result, whatever the limits of the not-very-sophisticated Nazis in participating in the cultural avant garde that helped set the stage. What the highbrows did on canvas, the middlebrows, in resentful identification, did in politics.

May 11, 2005 - 6:10 pm 31. lindenen:

Thanks, truepeers. Lysenkoism.

Placing the blame on the artform instead of the artist absolves the artist of any responsibility for their work. The creator of the work isn’t to blame! Hitler isn’t to blame! Those damn Corinthian columns are! They’re seductive.

May 11, 2005 - 7:20 pm 32. Buddy Larsen:

Truepeers, well-stated. As it will do with everything else, a perverse political doctrine will automatically displace art. Art-as-politics…and vice-versa (see ‘Franz Kafka’) was apparently a quite conscious theme with Der “artist” fuehrer. But even without the aesthetic input from the dictator, ‘nazi art’ would’ve surely been just as hateful toward ‘decadent modernism’; non-aryan artists were decadent-by-genetics, and art (being in the ‘folk’ realm) needed to look not forward but backward, back to that earlier mystical First Reich. Fuehrer favorite Arno Breker’s work is, to anyone who really looks at it, as dead as the original Greco-Roman classicism was–and is–alive.

May 11, 2005 - 7:47 pm 33. cubanbob:

The proper monument in Germany should be a simple one, along the lines of the Vietnam War monument in Washington.

Black granite slabs with the names of the victims by country and year. It should have the name of the victim, year of birth, year of death, age at death,

place of residence before deportation,method of death,place of death and a small description of that person. example husband,father,brother,son,doctor or wife,mother,sister,daughter etc..

Reason for being killed: Jew, Gypsy, Homosexual etc. followed by the captioned “Murdered in the name of the German People by the German State.”

Nothing abstract about this monument. A clear reminder to the German people why they and their history is unique among all nations and why they can never escape their past. And a cautionary tale for the rest of humanity.

May 11, 2005 - 9:48 pm 34. Robert Schwartz:

Peter Eisenman is a big name among contemporary architechts. His first 2 big projects (and he has not had a whole raft of them) are here in my town Columbus, Ohio.

The first one is the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio state University. Not only was it very expensive but the tore down a very nice old Armory building to build it. It was ugly and almost useless for its purposes as the galleries were misshapen and had excesively large windows glaring on and ruining the exhibits.

The second project was the Columbus Convention Center, which looks like a railroad shed that has had a bad case of arthritis. Walking through it induces nausea.

Eisenman is typical of modern architects in that his buildings are about him and nothing else. So is this monument. Its a momument to Eisenman’s ego. To bad, Germany needs a Holocaust memorial.

May 11, 2005 - 10:49 pm 35. Buddy Larsen:

The test is the people using the building, alright. Just as the Berlin work is under test now. Cubanbob’s proposal is irreducibly serious. Wonder if 2000 lives can be thumbnailed on each one of the concrete blocks?

May 11, 2005 - 11:00 pm 36. goldsmith:

That evil, heroic classical realism. More of that filthy stuff. Hitler also liked dogs and was a vegetarian. Does liking dogs make one a Nazi? As well, he was a bad painter, are all bad painters suspect?

Leaving aside the snide non sequiturs in your comment, lindenen, I have to take issue with your assumption that my comment somehow suggested a hostility toward true classical art. It did not. On the contrary, I would happily sit with anyone and speak of the glorious influence of the classical age upon everyone from Palladio to Josiah Wedgwood to Picasso. What I was implying with my comment was that there is no innate link between abstraction and political tyranny any more than there is such a link between Nazism and classicism. But I also don’t believe that the Nazi architects and especially the sculptors were classicists; what they produced was a shadow of classicism. I see no legitimate lineage between the LaocoÔøΩn and Thorak or Breker. Just because art depicts a human body in a recognizable way does not necessarily make it either morally superior (or inferior) to abstraction, nor does it make something “classical” in any sense.

I don’t happen to see this as an either-or proposition. I can derive pleasure from Ad Reinhardt and Gerard David. Not to say I consider them equivalent, or even generally comparable, but I don’t believe one is an invalidation of the other.

I’m not endorsing Eisenmann’s memorial; I haven’t seen any images of it that give any comprehensible sense of what it looks or feels like, so I will reserve judgment. As I said before, I don’t really like memorials of this sort (the Lincoln Memorial is different, being a memorial to a single historical figure, not to 6 million people, half unknown to us) and “genius” or not, I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly depict the enormity and complexity of the Holocaust in a piece of architecture. It’s a task larger than any Western art has ever chosen to face, and bureaucratic Germany would certainly never approve of the results if someone was able to do it.

May 12, 2005 - 12:24 am 37. goldsmith:

And as mentioned before in this thread, Eisenmann stated that he didn’t think there should be any particular measures taken to prevent graffiti:

He also said this week he would be unperturbed if the finished memorial became a target for graffiti artists. In an interview with the German weekly news magazine Stern, the architect acknowledged that “there are these destructive feelings once in a while,” but he added, “we cannot keep everything squeaky clean. That would be the same behavior as in the 1930s.” Eisenman previously said he didn’t want the 2,700 steles to be treated with a special anti-graffiti-agent, maintaining that sprayers would find a way to paint on the stones if they really wanted to. [source]

If someone writes graffiti on the blocks, it would be a pleasant surprise if instead of the neo-nazi/islamist anti Jewish rhetoric that I fear will appear, they took the germ of cubanbob’s idea and start writing the names of the murdered and the party responsible, in the same way that the west side of the Berlin Wall ended up covered with anti-soviet, anti-communist graffiti.

May 12, 2005 - 12:36 am 38. gumshoe:

“I don’t get it. What’s the artist trying to say with the monumental blocks?

In my opinion, public art ought to be obvious to the viewer.

If an explanation is needed, the artist has failed.

I really do not get what is being said with a huge field of concrete blocks.”

-Mikey

as an expressive trope,

abstract blocks floating on an uneven “sea”

might have been more appropriate to a memorial for the Titanic’s victims.

peter eisenman has always been a self-infatuated,

decidedly hermetic,and intellectually-elitist practitioner of architecture.

you’re not supposed to “get it”.

that his memorial to the holocaust is bleak and incomprehensible says more about its author than the people and events it commemorates.

“This piece in Berlin smacks of narcissism because it is so obtuse.

When you have to have a ten page article to explain the meaning of the piece it ends up drawing more attention to the artist then the victims.”

-Kevin P

i couldn’t have put it more succinctly.

its always been my gut-level response to Eisenman’s other works,as well.

as a mixed blessing,works of architecture take on different meanings over time:

“The were similar complaints about the Vietnam memorial and some veterans are still upset about it.”

-Kevin P

….but quite a few Vietnam Veterans are not.

the place has become a gathering spot and one of shared identity.

for those familiar with architecture,

a brief comparison of Eisenman’s work with that of Lou Kahn’s

could serve as a sharp demonstration of an excessively “over-intellectualized” practice of architecture,

contrasted with one that seeks to support and encourage human dignity through built expression.

Kahn was a regular user of abstract geometries,but the result is an expression of

wholeness and integration,not fragmentation and alienation which has been Eisenman’s preference thoughout his career.

same brush and canvas…completely different results.

“I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly depict the enormity and complexity of the Holocaust in a piece of architecture.”

-goldsmith

the poster who remarked that the preserved camps hold that place as the definitive reminder,

may have already addressed your comment,goldsmith.

May 12, 2005 - 3:37 am 39. gumshoe:

in addition,

the program for a holocaust memorial

is almost destined to attract a narcissist.

the temptation to bathe in the dramatic spotlight

such a commison offers

is simply to great.

mere mortals

would feel a sense of humility

in the face of the task.

May 12, 2005 - 4:00 am 40. gumshoe:

“the poster who remarked that the preserved camps hold that place as the definitive reminder,

may have already addressed your comment,goldsmith.”

Correction:

it was Paul Siegel who made that observation.

May 12, 2005 - 4:05 am 41. gumshoe:

link to Yahoo News Slide Show of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial…144 images

http://story.news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/wl/050405berlinholocaus

May 12, 2005 - 6:15 am 42. gumshoe:

this Yahoo News photo(27 of 144) gives a fairly good view of the extent of the site…

http://us.news3.yimg.com/img.news.yahoo.com/util/anysize/345,http%3A%2F%2Fus.news2.yimg.com%2Fus.yimg.com%2Fp%2Fap%2F20050510%2Fcapt.wber11305101626.germany_holocaust_memorial_wber113.jpg?v=2

May 12, 2005 - 7:24 am 43. charlotte:

Is meaning is malleable and whatever you make of it? Eisenman says his work is strongly influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, Chomsky, and Derrida, and so one wonders whether this Deconstructivist is in touch with people and wanting to challenge their perceptions, or just having some fun at their expense. There seems to be enough contemptuous conceit in his gimicky creations (or are they deconstructions?), many of which have a funhouse quality to them, for me to be convinced his architecture is about respecting people, their experience and truths. Eisenman once laughed about how people get so disoriented in some of his spaces that they vomit.

This holocaust memorial looks like a labyrinth designed to have its participant-viewers lose their bearings and become overwhelmed by the large massings. Is making people feel lost, small and confused, as in rats through a maze, a bleak statement about the human condition and this specific history, or an expression of disregard for people and contempt for meaning that moors us? Both could be true at the same time, maybe. (And, do an artist’s motivations and intentions ultimately matter when viewers are free to ascribe meaning to a work independent of intention and based on their own experience and feelings? Which takes us back to ‘is meaning malleable’–)

May 12, 2005 - 8:08 am 44. charlotte:

Don’t post quickly when your kid is wanting the computer NOW. Above should read “Is meaning malleable” and “convinced his architecture is NOT about respecting people”.

Whatever we may think we know about an artist’s intentions, stated or subconscious, and whatever we may know about the Holocaust, history and art, we’re still left with our visceral reaction to his work. To me, Eisenman’s monument feels like a fascistic reminder and rendering of fascist times, which may or may not be appropriate. But it appears to lack counterpoint and an enjoinder to be mindful of the human spirit, to remember and do better. People committed atrocities, not an ideology and people died, not abstractions. This blight of a monument seems both to blame fascism and succumb to it at the same time.

May 12, 2005 - 10:16 am 45. Carol_Herman:

THIS. IS. SO. UGLY!

Does it have something to do with dominoes? A memorial to German STUPIDITY! Yup. They killed Jews. And, others. Absolutely removing the genetic links that had (once upon a previous time), included Germany in a philosphical link with progress.

Just as Stalin did! (And, maybe? China.) You think you can kill your intellectuals and have anything to brag about when your country goes into intellectual declines?

Nobody needed this eyesore.

May 12, 2005 - 2:01 pm 46. Catherine:

I didn’t know a thing about this monument until I saw the photos in the TIMES, and read the first paragraphs of the article, which included these lines:

The memorial’s power lies in its willingness to grapple with the moral ambiguities arising in the Holocaust’s shadow. Its focus is on the delicate, almost imperceptible line that separates good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence.

That’s when I stopped reading.

May 12, 2005 - 3:38 pm 47. Buddy Larsen:

Nice insight, Charlotte, “…seems both to blame fascism and succumb to it at the same time.”

And Catherine, that is one of the more unGodly sentences I believe I’ve ever, ever, read. It is shocking.

May 12, 2005 - 6:00 pm 48. truepeers:

Shocking, and sad really. Too many people have lost their way. Redemption and renewal will come in working through the guilt that blocks so many from finding moral truths and exemplars to follow. We need an anthropology-history to reveal the basis of postmodern “white guilt”, guilt for the mass victimization of those chosen by, and reduced in their nakedness to, the marks of their race; and then to show us the wisdom to identify and follow positive role models. Only in understanding will people get out of what is seemingly represented in Berlin, a maze of mimetic anxieties and guilt.

May 12, 2005 - 11:26 pm 49. Buddy Larsen:

Maybe that’s it…not the blocks, but the spaces between them…the maze may be the essence of the thing. The blocks are the past, time and what has been done in it, and they create a maze in space, for the people of the future to ask how will we not get lost again? And maybe the thing is to warn that some will never ask the questions, and so will surely enter the maze and that getting lost is to be chased by a murderous evil, but that if decency and the future (played by a mother and child in a similar maze in the prophet Stanley Kubrick’s film “The Shining”) can only continue trying to stay a few steps ahead of it, Evil can be contained (as in Kubrick’s illustration, the frozen, encased in ice, murderer/familiar played by Jack Nicholson was contained).

I know that’s artsy-fartsy stretching–but such a line of thought would maybe help answer Charlottes’s question about how to regard something that appears to exist only as a warning against itself.

May 13, 2005 - 5:58 am 50. Boojums:

It has been sixty years. The race-guilt is now being passed down to the fourth generation born since WWII. Now I know you have to let it go sooner or later. You know that, right? You really can’t engender a race-guilt that continues for all eternity, can you?

You know that no people can continue to beg forgiveness or they will go crazy, stop reproducing and let other races that are not stupid enough to carry the guilt overrun them and take their land, right?

Sooner or later the pathology has to disappear, or it will leave a race twisted and self-hating as 2000 years of enforced Christian race-guilt for killing Jesus perverted Jewish thinking and culture. And that was wrong, correct?

So how many more years? How many more Holocaust memorials? How many more made for TV movies? How long before you can give up the anger and the rage?

How long before you let the Dutch defend the Dutch nation, the Belgians defend the Belgian nation, the Germans defend the German nation, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the English, French, Irish? How long?

And what will you do when LICRA, the ADL, and all the other organizations say we are racist for defending our nations as you defend yours in Israel? Will you denounce them the way you denounce CAIR? Will you at least have the decency that Theodore Herzl had and grant us the right of national survival in our own lands that you insist on in yours? Can we speak of the “demographic problem” the way Israeli legislators doo right out there in the Knesset? Or must we keep our borders wide open, keep building shrines to the Holocaust and keep apologizing … over, and over, and over again?

May 13, 2005 - 12:25 pm 51. Boojums:

I will make a prediction. Within ddays, certainly, weeks, the monument will be vandalized. It is dark, funereal, arranged like the the Casbah, with a thousand little corners to hide behind.

People who would otherwise go to prison for speaking their mind under the new European hate speech laws will be drawn as if by gravity to this site of secular sacredness, a site more holy, more orthdox, more “right” than any church in all of Germany. For anything scrawled or painted there will have a massive impact.

And they will desecrate it. They will blaspheme against the Holocaust. They will chisel pieces off, apply stickers with Holocaust revisions, print swastikas, even urinate on it — mark my words.

And most bizarrely of all, they will do this even though they know their own people will suffer, even though they know their own race will be called out for Appell, will have to stand for hours in the cold and the rain, will have to share their guilt, grovel, apologize and make good.

And it will take a while, but people will gradually understand: these young men (and they will be men) are doing it to reject, right a the source, the guilt that will not die.

And eventually, some German mayor, preacher, teacher, layer or the like, will say, “look, I’m not going to go down to the big anti-racism rally today … not again … not for the fiftieth time. I have better things to do than wallow in guilt and racial self-hatred. Why don’t you hire your own guards and pay for its upkeep yourself if it means so much?” And that will be the beginning of the end.

Mark my words. Two weeks? Three weeks? I give it a month, max.

May 13, 2005 - 1:12 pm 52. truepeers:

Boojums,

You are absolutely right that the guilt has to be worked through and gotten over, that is what my post was saying. And yes, Europeans needs to start defending their nations and talking about their demographic problems. I say this as someone whose Jewish family was almost totally destroyed by the Nazis, and who has lost and mourns, among other things, the language and culture of many of my forebears – German, in its bourgeois, Bohemian, form, which is to say the whole pre-war cultural mix of Czechoslovakia and the old empire which has been destroyed.

But being freed of guilt means seeing things in their proper balance. I think the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, has the best line on nationalism: it’s like whiskey; taken with water it makes you mellow; taken neat it knocks you out.

Ultimately, I don’t see how any sophisticated Jew can be against nationalism: it is our great gift to humankind, the alternative to living under the thumb of empires, or within the tight cultural limits of the pre-monotheistic tribe. The fact that my Jewish forebears did much better (at least in its later years) under the Austro-Hungarian empire than in the Wilsonian age of national self-determination, is testament to the paradox that Taylor was alluding to, and which needs to be respected. It is a paradox with which Israelis grapple in their own way, most accepting the emergence of a Palestinian nation where none previously existed.

If Europeans have lately undergone a period of anti-nationalism, alienating themselves to bureaucratic Brussels building, well they should now see this as their own bloody, if understandable, fault for not dealing honestly, right after the war, with their history of resenting Jews because of Jewish priority in the history of nations and monotheism, to put the basis for the resentment in its most simple terms. The solution is not to now turn against this history of nations and nationalisms, but to see it for what it is, and embrace it at its best. THis would include embracing the Jewish origins of nationalism.

It is undeniable that the Holocaust has had a profound influence on postmodern culture. It is not just Europeans who struggle with the “white guilt” of Political Correctness, a guilt in large part rooted in the Holocaust. It is an American specialty. Thus, future generations, if they are to be historically literate, will need to remember this central historical event – the key to undertanding the timing of things like the American civil rights movement and the rise of the post-colonial world. This is not to suggest that future students should feel great personal guilt, beyond a general knowledge of human sinfulness and its specific implications for their national histories. Yet there needs to be some way to teach about the event and its cultural repercussions. A certain number of museums and memorials are thus in order.

But I am with you, Boojums, in wondering whether this Berlin memorial is a good idea. Its symbolism bothers me for reasons many have already mentioned. Perhaps it would have been better simply to have a space to celebrate Jewishness, the survivors, Jewish survival, and to mourn the loss of German-Jewish culture, without which German and European culture is forever impoverished. Impoverished because Jewishness is the key to understanding and appreciating your own religion, secularism, and nationalism.

May 13, 2005 - 1:18 pm 53. truepeers:

Buddy, not exactly artsy-fartsy stretching. A sign is just a sign, could mean anything. Inevitably it is not equipped to tell its own story. So the story teller is always stretching in telling the sign’s story. But if there is one story that should be told about the HOlocaust, it is that of survival. It is this that those big stones seem to work against. Maybe that’s why we want to see it as a maze?

May 13, 2005 - 1:29 pm 54. charlotte:

Truepeers,

Buddy could explore cosmic mystery or explain why 2 + 2 = 4 and always be eloquent and entertaining.

You also always get it, so thanks for answering Boojums. You were much more patient with his impatience and tolerant of his intolerance than some of us might have been. I cannot understand why he asks whether we’ll “let them” address their demographic problem and “grant them their national right of survival”… What do the Holocaust “shrines” and our country or Israel have to do with their self-imposed open borders? Perhaps he’s saying that keeping past atrocities committed against German/European Jews in the public arena is preventing Europeans from tightening their immigration laws.

But why? Are some Germans making the influx of Muslims and Middle Easterners into their country a matter of racial and religious inferiority, or one of cultural and political incompatibility and non-assimilation? I wonder if the non-assimilation argument is considered code for, or too close to, the charges of inferiority and the practice of scapegoating. They don’t seem equivalent to me, but perhaps enough Europeans are hyper-vigilant about any issues of race and religion because of slippery slope fears. At any rate, Boojums sounds as if he is blaming Jews and their sympathists for inflicting both Holocaust memorials and hordes of Muslims on the German people. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism in Europe appears to be on the upswing. Between the German nationalists and the Muslim immigrants, Jews are getting squeezed, again.

May 13, 2005 - 4:30 pm 55. charlotte:

From lindenen’s link in the Madonna thread:

BERLIN – Within hours of the opening of Germany’s national Holocaust memorial to the public, a vandal scratched a swastika into one of the 2,711 gray slabs, a spokesman for the memorial said Friday.

…Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial in the former no man’s land of the Berlin Wall is a labyrinth of narrow rising and falling pathways between the upright slabs in the ground.

It took 17 years of wrangling among German politicians over its design and message before it was finally completed.

Ahead of its opening, Eisenman said he recognized the memorial could not please everyone, and that he wouldn’t mind skateboarders, children playing hide and seek or even graffiti on the slabs.

Asked Monday if the project would be demeaned if someone scratched Nazi symbols on it, he was noncommittal. “Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t,” Eisenman said. “Maybe it would add to it.”

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is open to skateboarders and people jumping over the tops of the sarcophagus blocks, and Nazi defacement doesn’t necessarily demean the memorial to Jews murdered by Nazis. Meaning is whatever you make of it, according to Eisenman the Deconstructivist, disciple of Derrida, and noncommittal designer. There is nothing inviolable or sacrosanct in this exercise- it just is an exercise. Feel free to use, abuse, and experience this urbanscape installation in whatever fashion you wish.

Maybe some concertina can be strung around the camp if things get too out of hand.

May 13, 2005 - 7:57 pm 56. truepeers:

Charlotte, well I’ll let Boojums explain himself, but one of the interesting things about Germany is that they have retained a citizenship law with a racial requirement under which it is very difficult for the many Turks who work in the country for years to become German citizens. THe same goes for the Eastern European Jews who have recently been admitted to the country as refugees, which shows ambivalence over what Germans think they owe the other. Whatever political correctness, rights, and privileges people have to allow, it does not necessarily extend to full equality in citizenship. Anyway, I imagine Boojums may be Dutch; and they are dealing with the living legacy of an overseas empire which presumably makes their “white guilt” a somewhat different reality than in Germany.

I was just reading, on another blog, something on education by the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton. I think it is a good way of summing up some of the wider dynamics that may be behind B’s post and his apt recognition that this memorial is sure to attract vandals:

“Nietzsche pointed out long ago that, in a democracy, state institutions will quickly be colonised by resentment. (He used the French word, ressentiment, in order to emphasize the deep and pre-rational sources of the emotion.) Not able to win people by the normal means of cooperation, concession and mutual respect, the resentful will seek to co-opt the power of the state in order to break down resistance to their punitive goals. In the sphere of education the power of the state is enormous. Legal measures compel parents to educate their children, deprive them of any choice among the schools offered by the state, and impose a curriculum and timetable that transmit the secular and libertine morality best suited to inducing dependency on the state. I donít say that there is an intention to produce dependency on the state: dependency arises by ëan invisible handí, once the egalitarians have succeeded in taking control of the educational network.” http://rightreason.ektopos.com/archives/001466.html#more

Just as Scruton is talking about privatising, through civil society, the state school system, we also need ways of decentralizing the discourses of history and historical guilt. Blogs are good at this. On the other hand, I’m not sure this monument is a good idea because it will probably create more resentment than it will mediate. It is too centralized for our times.

BTW, when I said a sign or artwork is open to many interpretations, it is not to go as far as Derrida and to say that we can have no solid foundations for statements of truth. There are anthropological truths, tested in the laboratory of history. One is that the paradoxes inherent in the process of representation need not lead us to nihilism or Derrida-style mysticism. Understanding why representation is a paradoxical business is the road to real human understanding. E.g. knowledge of why a “sacred” monument simultaneoulsy attracts and repels the viewer/vandal is today available, thanks to thinkers like Rene Girard; and such knowledge is perhaps the best way to move beyond the guilt that is fostered by spending too much time focussed on centers of sacred attention. If Judaism is about exodus from the sacrificial center, there is something not very Jewish about this monument.

May 13, 2005 - 11:33 pm 57. charlotte:

Truepeers,

Of course, I agree re the many interpretations of an artistic effort/ statement, but those who commissioned the work hired an architect who plays with and who is quite dismissive of traditional and shared meaning. The commissioning of Eisenman was a reprehensible act of ambiguity on the part of the sponsors, one guaranteed to undermine any original intention of memorializing those murdered at the hands of the state. As it was then, it is now. No moral certainty, really. Whether this memorial should have been built is another question, but I hope the answer isn’t no simply because it might engender more resentments against Jews. It’s almost as if they were being blamed today for having been slaughtered en masse back then. Boojums is tired of the ‘Holocaust industry’ and thinks the Jews are hurting Europe once more.

At any rate, once the decision had been made to erect some kind of monument to Jewish victims of Nazi Germany, why select a form and siting of it that invites open and disrespectful society to do with it as it pleases? You mention how the idea of monument is “too centralized for our times” which might be true, but I hope not. Collective remembrance can be formalized in moving and beautiful ways, and at least it used to be a need for a culture’s sense of its own story. This monument could have been designed, placed and protected in ways that would have kept its alleged purpose true to its implementation.

Rather than being too centralized, this monument appears to have been installed in too informal a manner that invites too much of a decentralized experience of it, too much emphasis on individual viewers and their interpretations and personal whimsies and too little on a collective understanding that should be expressed, memorialized and given respect. Eisenman and his sponsors have succeeded (intentionally?) only in diluting and desecrating the Holocaust memory when they erect a skateboard park and cemetery where people are free to jump on and around the graves, the markers. I don’t accept that things held sacred by some will necessarily be defiled by others and that these are times for us to move beyond sacredness. I’m not Jewish nor particularly religious, but reverence and respect on both the individual and at-large levels seems healthy to me and a positive counterweight to the rebellion and anti-authoritarianism that we also need. Both are fine, but not in a memorial, unless it’s to Clinton or Kofi–

May 14, 2005 - 7:36 am 58. charlotte:

A terrific essay:

… whether done solemnly or (like Eisenman) playfully, the denial of sacred order implicit in therapeutic social order generally, and therapeutic architecture in particular, inevitably results in the reduction of moral and aesthetic judgements to the crudest issues of power. There is more than a little irony in this. The largely victorious battles fought against sacred order by pioneers of modern thought have been understood by the latter as heroic resistance to entrenched power by and / or on behalf of the politically and spiritually disenfranchised; but the victory they claim for the powerless is pyrrhic. Freud and Marx both saw religion–the institutional acknowledgement of sacred order–with tunnel vision, as a sanctifier of existing social orders and existing power relations. But they were only half right. Religion is also the ultimate means by which existing social orders are judged wanting, and thereby resisted, in the name of What is Right. The truth of our time and any time is that without reference to sacred order and its demands all intellectual criticism, all politics, and all social life– in many ways truly and intrinsically endless power games– are nothing but power games.

If nothing is sacred, everything is permitted: genocide, abortion-on-demand, dislocating architecture…

May 14, 2005 - 9:30 am 59. truepeers:

Charlotte, you may be right about the goodness of shared public reverence. Perhaps it is achievable, though I have doubts. FWIW, Iíll just leave you with my general thoughts on the problem of Holocaust remembrance.

As Stalin reputedly said, ìone death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statisticî, or, in some accounts, it is ìan argument among officialsî. In other words, mass murder eliminates, from public, also the stories of the victims, none of which can be remembered in order to satisfactorily illuminate the crime, one so horrendous to destroy the possibility of any tragic representation satisfactorily framing or containing the event. Today, the story of the Holocaust is largely told from the perspective of the Nazis, in terms of the series of resentful pronouncements and administrative procedures they conducted, or, less often, it is told from the perspective of the survivors (the solution of Schindlerís List), or of the very exceptional victim (e.g. Anne Frank); otherwise, there is really no way to remember the mass of victims as individuals with lives of their own.

This was the Nazisí goal, symbolized by their admonitions to the killers to feel no remorse for, and to forget their victims, to eliminate memory of the Jews and thus to create a new world in which the resentment of the Jew that so fiercely troubled the life of Hitler and others could be forgotten and a new people without resentment could emerge. But while individual lives can be eliminated from the possibility of any satisfactory re-presentation, the impossibility of destroying the resentful scene on which oneís identity is based is demonstrated by the present Judeophobic situation unfolding in a Germany largely without Jews. Even had the Nazis won the war, Germanness would have remained conceptually tied to Jewishness and resentment. Resentment can only be transcended by a humility that understands our dependence on it.

Not only has the Holocaust destroyed the possibility of telling the victimsí stories. It has seemingly destroyed the possibility of continuing to produce a serious national high culture. Auschwitz destroys the aura formally accorded to high art because this aura depended on the tragic re-presentation of the exemplary victim, a dependence the Holocaust has illuminated and put into question. Humility is what we now need put at the center. The unseriousness of postmodernism, and our present dependence on popular culture to present serious ideas (e.g. South Park Conservatism) reflect the playing out of the implications of the Holocaust.

These are my general thoughts about remembering the Holocaust. How they should influence my reaction to this monument Iím not sure. As Iíve already said, I donít see anything particularly Jewish about it, though Judaism is not in any case a monumental culture. It seems to suggest memory from a remorseful German/Nazi perspective. And as such it will tend to invoke the desire for a serious national culture, something that the very event it remembers works against. This strikes me as a recipe for resentment. Thus if they should have a memorial, it should be one that celebrates the Jewish legacy and German humility, rather than making a problem of it. The Germans may be ready to mourn the evil in their past, but Iím not sure they, as a state, are ready to celebrate German-Jewish culture and history with anything more than a Jewish museum. So maybe we should leave it at that. I donít tend to think it is a Jewís role to demand the center of attention; it is better to serve in overcoming our common desire to control the center, so that we may embrace the meaning of exodus. The ability of the Jews in America to be seen as just another ethnic/immigrant group with the right to compete for all forms of status is unusual. It doesnít exist in Europe and, arguably, it can only exist there when the desire for a relatively centralized culture dissipates. But I hope youíre right.

May 14, 2005 - 10:00 am 60. truepeers:

If nothing is sacred, everything is permitted…

Yes, but it is wrong to suggest that the sacred can ever be eliminated. If we lose one figuration of the sacred, we will create another. It is fundamental to our anthropology, whether – and we can never know the answer to this, a question of faith – put there by God or whether invented by the first humans when they stopped being animals.

Our problem is how are we to live with the sacred. Generally, I think it is better to work to make each individual well-centered, in touch with the sacred within them, rather than to put our efforts into building massive centers of collective attention, which is not to say that we can expect, any time soon, to eliminate all centers of collective attention or our need for them. Got to run for the rest of the day…

May 14, 2005 - 10:06 am 61. gumshoe:

recent behaviour and events in Europe

(and elsewhere)towards Jewish people

might suggest against anything “soft” or remotely conciliatory,

….and yet the dismissive replies to Boojums,and the lack of anyone willing to defend his right to puzzle out his views here,

and the implications from truepeers that “only Judaism(and by association,he himself) has the keys to Everything,so listen up”…

…point to why the memorial ultimately fails:

-it contains no hope.

-it contains no healing or space to allow the *possibility* of healing to manifest itself.

THAT is a power game.

and a destructive one.

it is also a choice on Eisenman’s part.

the more i read and consider others’ views of the work,the more confirmed it becomes

as a pseudo-sacred simulacrum DESIGNED

for desecration:

an imitation graveyard

daring the simple minded to deface it.

people have long and easily confused justice with revenge.

-gumshoe

May 14, 2005 - 5:57 pm 62. truepeers:

Well Gumshoe, I assume people post comments on blogs to get a reaction and a discussion going. They are inviting a response, but if the implied assumption is that only positive, motherly responses are in order, then they are cheating and not really inviting a free response. I gave an honest response to Boojums, not very dismissive in my view, though not lost in postmodern relativism where everyone is affirmed and everything is good, because that kind of relativism is a lie. I certainly didn’t question anyone’s right to speech and never will. But I don’t think people are ever well served by being mollycoddled.

I think it should be clear from what I said that I am against people wallowing in guilt and pity – too much personal experience informs this – today’s Germans most of all. I think it’s time to move beyond the whole postmodern culture of “white guilt”, which stops so many people all over the world from achieving their best, and so I thought to some significant degree I was in agreement with Boojums. Stand up for yourself indeed.

As for this line -

“the implications from truepeers that “only Judaism(and by association,he himself) has the keys to Everything,so listen up”…

…point to why the memorial ultimately fails:

…

THAT is a power game.

and a destructive one.

it is also a choice on Eisenman’s part.” -

I frankly find this much more silly, almost reminiscent of a tired old kind of Jew-baiting, than anything else on this thread. I am Jewish, thanks to my mother, but, if anything, I am much more heavily influenced by Christian and secular ideas, than strictly Jewish ones, reflecting my paternity and the culture in which I live, not that I would ever deny the historical centrality of the Jewish discovery of nationalism and monotheism, or the relevance of the Mosaic revelation of an unfigurable divinity for this day and age when people are readily offended by the slightest hint that one culture’s figures are being given more attention than another’s.

But for anyone to deny the mere fact of Jewish historical centrality would just be silly, a form of cultural or historical illiteracy, which would leave one unable to explain things like why the Jewish-Palestinian dispute gets more attention and focusses more passions than any other national-territorial dispute int he world by far. Thankfully, you didn’t try to deny this centrality, though you seem to be troubled by the postmodern sensibility that any kind of historical firstness not be accorded to anyone, so as not to offend anyone else.

But postmodern guilt is just a license to make no sense of history. Ideas, like those behind monotheism, do inevitably happen first to someone and some groups and are not discovered by all simultaneously. This has historical consequences, such as the HOlocaust and the role of Israel as a pariah nation today.

As for holding the keys to everything, no way. I am much more of a one key man, a hedgehog not a fox if you’re familiar with that parable. All my ideas come from the same core idea – and it is not a religious idea, though it doesn’t exclude them either – which may be tiring to others; those who know me say I’m a walking cliche. But if you’re going to criticize someone’s idea, please show the logical limits of the idea in question, don’t think you will impress serious thinkers with postmodern victimary rhetoric about power games and shutting people out.

There is nothing more sinister in our present intellectual culture than the pervasive yet simply incorrect Foucauldian-Derridean idea that language, or representation more generally, is primarily a tool of power games. Power resides in the ethical, in real world organizations of people, not in the esthetic or intellectual which is a response to power. Real ideas come from the margins and only survive in the power centers over the long term if they are true and able to expand the freedom of the system as a whole. I can talk up a storm but I have very little power over anyone. The well-educated are not often among the most powerful and the most powerful are not often among the well-educated, and for a reason. Real thinking is about deferring our desire for violent appropriation of power and material wealth.

Now there’s a statement stated boldly, because that’s the least tiresome and most honest style; but if you may allow me a personal aside, I often discover that I am not right about many things. Yet I think that it’s right not to pander to the reigning esthetic of guilt and notions that maybe one is overstepping one’s proper place when one speaks boldly (encouraging others’ free response). And so I encourage you to engage my response whole heartedly and feel no guilt when you express an idea strongly, e.g. that I am off my rocker. I am not out to humiliate anyone, just to encourage good ideas. If the latter engenders the former, something is wrong. If I’ve gotten it wrong, please shoe me how. Otherwise I will just keep thinking that one of the problems with the postmodern culture of guilt is that it encourages many, and for little good reason, to feel humiliation.

May 14, 2005 - 7:47 pm 63. gumshoe:

truepeers -

i’ve found,for myself,it’s good

to have brakes and steering.

on that note,with regard to postmodern

nihilism and guilt…i think you would be surprised to discover

how much we might actually agree.

i doubt very much you would

enjoy hearing my views on the origins of monotheism or why the

Israeli/Palestinian conflict absorbs such a great deal of the globe’s attention.

i didn’t note in roger’s thread

where you yourself mentioned the following article,(linked elsewhere above in this thread i believe)so i don’t know if you have read it.

i came across it in the comments

the opening of the memorial has fostered,

and i found it eye-opening

because of the light it throws on the roots

of Mr Eisenman’s creative orientation and practice.

and of course,he is not the sole exponent

of the views or principles the article makes note of…we are living the legacy of the late 20th C…and the 90’s endlessly bred this stuff

to the point that some

ppl experience it as “all there is”.

____________________________________________

“PETER EISENMAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE

OF THE THERAPEUTIC”

http://www.thursdayarchitects.com/Texts/

petereisenman.html

_____________________________________________

May 14, 2005 - 9:44 pm 64. gumshoe:

take two:

“PETER EISENMAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE

OF THE THERAPEUTIC”

http://www.thursdayarchitects.com/Texts/petereisenman.html

May 14, 2005 - 9:50 pm 65. charlotte:

Gumshoe,

I linked to that “Eisenman and the Architecture of the Therapeutic” article just four comments above, and Truepeers probably did do a quick read already. He was very respectful in his answer to Boojums, even though (and here’s my “dismissive” point) Boojums seems to blame Europe’s open borders and immigration problems only on Jews, their sensibilities and post-Nazi guilt and rejection of race and culture based policy. He did not mention, never mind “puzzle out”, the fact that Europe had been importing these immigrants for labor, or that many Europeans are hostile to Israel, unsympathetic to Jews and have taken up the misunderstood Muslim/ poor Palestinian cause with great enthusiasm. In much of Europe, Holocaust guilt has ebbed while colonial guilt and multiculti interest are at high tide in European politics and elitist opinion, as Truepeers mentioned. Boojums is welcome to defend his position that Europe is catering to Jewish sensibilities at its peril, but he’ll have to do better if he doesn’t want to appear as if he is scapegoating Jews for Europe’s complex problems.

May 14, 2005 - 11:40 pm 66. truepeers:

Gumshoe, thanks for that link. I see now why you criticize Eisenman and fear my previous comments missed the point you were trying to make. You see, I know next to nothing about this man. If he is as big a publicity hound as the writer suggests, he has somehow been absent from my media haunts.

The unnamed writer of this article inclines me to dislike Eisenman, though I don’t know how fair this is. I would like to see and hear more before I judge him. But, if this argument is true -

“Eisenman argues that dislocating texts sever architecture not only from sacred order, but also from a classically presumed relationship to “truthfulness.” Architecture HAS traditionally symbolized–by its beauty and durability–truthfulness, in being ultimately symbolic of the presumed reality of sacred order. This reality has its consolations, to be sure, but its demands routinely produce forms of spiritual uneasiness (a.k.a. “conscience”) perhaps too easily passed over by those dislocating angels of the modern intellect so eager to save us from our supposedly comfortable and opaque inner lives. Eisenman’s own dislocating symbolic is allegedly opposed to the notion of representing truth in architecture. But essential to Eisenman’s strategy of the dislocating text is his intended architectural symbolization of the presumed truth of the absence of sacred order–or, to put it another way, the symbolization of the alleged truth of our times, including the notion that “it is no longer possible” to believe in God.” -

then I would have to say I think Eisenman is confused, but perhaps also his critic. It is easy enough to ignore the sacred, but it is not possible, in my view, to satisfactorily explain or define the human without reference to it. All culture entails a center-periphery relationship. This essential structure is inherently sacred and sacrificial, no matter how secular and profane a person you are in using it.

Symbols, like buildings, are neither true or false. They are either appropriate or inappropriate in pointing to the sacred or profane. Their appropriateness is a question of the role they play for the people who must use them. Questions of truth and falsity, as philosophers know them, entail forms of logic and representation that have evolved over time out of the sacred sign, and whose relationship to symbols (the ostensive sign is the most primitive form of language) is several steps removed from the primitive experience of the sacred or profane. But that’s not to say that we are served by forgetting that experience if we want to know on what our ideas are founded.

The philosopher/”theorist” can forget the sacred, but not the worthy anthropologist, just as the therapeutic culture this writer so correctly critiques can promise us a utopian “self-fulfillment” while forgetting the really serious work of actually explaining why we are resentful beings (we resent the rival who we feel has alienated us from the central thing/place/sign) and what we can reasonably do about it in a fallen world of human conflicts.

But when Eisenman’s critic writes -

“Religion is also the ultimate means by which existing social orders are judged wanting, and thereby resisted, in the name of What is Right. The truth of our time and any time is that without reference to sacred order and its demands all intellectual criticism, all politics, and all social life–in many ways truly and intrinsically endless power gamesóare nothing but power games.” -

I have to hesitate. The critic’s apparent fear of our falling out of the sacred is anthropologically unfounded. It’s not possible. Just as this writer was bound to come along to remind Eisenman of the sacred, anyone who thinks we could leave the sacred behind is fooling himself whether he is nominally for or against the sacred and transcendent. And, in my view, religion need not be the ultimate means for judging the social order. There is a kind of anthropology that can take equally seriously the sacred and sacrificial basis of human society.

While neither religion nor anthropology can answer the ultimate questions, resolve the fundamental mysteries, one may well choose either religious thinking or thinking about religion to approach these mysteries. Both can be very serviceable, or lacking.

If you want to know where my ideas are coming from, here are a couple of links. First, a recent interview of the anthropologist and Christian, Rene Girard, who made profound discoveries about the sacred. He provides a timely critique of relativism (if I may link a blog that has been derided here):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/ratzinger-is-right.html

Second, here is an article on recent Berlin architecture by Raoul Eshelmann. It would suggest that Eisenman is behind the ball in respect to what is being built in that city, where a post-postmodern, or “performatist” style that respects the sacred seems to be popping up everywhere (check out the many great photos, even if the article gets too heavy going):

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0702/arch2.htm

May 15, 2005 - 12:05 am 67. gumshoe:

thanks for the link

to the Girard/Gardels conversation,truepeers.

May 15, 2005 - 7:36 am 68. Buddy Larsen:

Charlotte, Truepeers, & all, thank you for this mind-bendingly good thread. My WiFi was fritzed all weekend, or I’d've bravo’d a dozen of y’all’s posts. Buncha gracious truth-seekers who can write…beats anything I ever saw! I like it!

May 16, 2005 - 1:21 pm 69. gumshoe:

question from an ignorant goyim:

how many pages are there in the Talmud?

is it a traditional (ie fixed) number?

thanks.

______________________________________

PS – charlotte,

thanks for your link to the Phillip Bess article on

“PETER EISENMAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE

OF THE THERAPEUTIC”.

your link here was most likely

where i discovered it first.

May 16, 2005 - 6:20 pm

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