Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin

I. Dekel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137317827
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Analyzing action at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, this first ethnography of the site offers a fresh approach to studying the memorial and memory work as potential civic engagement of visitors with themselves and others rather than with history itself.

1

Navigating Experience

§1 Studying the Holocaust Memorial

This chapter begins by defining what it means to experience the memorial, so as to lay bare the emotional and moral expectations the site has for its visitors and visitors have from the site. We will then look at the ways the memorial’s space (§2) and landscape (§3) are employed in its experience, and how, as an invented, new memorial, new practices of revisiting memory develop in it. This will provide the basis for the theoretical shift I propose (in §4) from thinking about memory work through the lens of trauma transference, to thinking about it through acts of mediation and speakability.

1.1 Defining experience: entering the memorial

The memorial is a site of urban tourism, and particularly memory tourism around several eras in the history of Berlin, Germany and Europe, including: the history of Prussian architecture (Koshar 2000); World War II (Confino 2006; Jordan 2006); and the GDR (Boym 2001; Ladd 1997; Till 2005). The developing practice of memory tourism within the new Holocaust Memorial quarter is closely linked both to the history of Berlin and to exhibitionary complexes in and around Berlin. It is a space that enables wandering in the discourse about memory, leisure and pastime, accidental tourism, and play (Dekel 2009a). These acts of wandering do not disconnect visitors from the urban surrounding, which Stock (2007) argues undergoes a recreational turn; an environment used by mobile individuals, located in an area full of other new memory sites such as the new Memorial to Homosexuals Murdered in the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum and the Memorial to the Murdered Sinti and Roma.

The conditions of entry to the memorial and the action in it are non-explicit by design This sets a pendulum between the embarrassment of facing a conventional void and tolerance toward practices such as running, playing hide and seek, eating, sunbathing, and their interpretation by visitors and employees alike. Guides often encourage their groups to talk about their experience of the memorial: ‘Here everything goes. There are no wrong answers.’ By so doing, they ask for a public sense-making in the memorial, which then becomes an enactment of discourse. The utterance ‘Everything goes’ implies openness for interpretation, while also avoiding any fixed interpretation that may be an obstacle both to the role of the guides and to that of the memorial.

In writing about the memorial as a space of personal transformation through photography, play and observation (Dekel 2009a), I addressed the ways in which those activities formulate rules of engagement with the site and with the Holocaust, and showed that certain forms of questioning the legitimacy and necessity of the memorial are in fact deemed inappropriate and some, such as total obliviousness about the Holocaust or blunt anti-Semitic reactions, make the guides and hosts invite the visitors into the Information Center. Most of the emotional responses from memorial workers I have encountered were directed at Germans, exceptions made for Israelis and Jews. Hosts and guides in the site either say that the it is not for Israelis or Jews or that it is there to respect them, and thus that it is ‘for them’ in a form of Wiedergutmachung.¹ In any case, Jews and Israelis in particular are not seen as part of the memorial’s fabric. As such, they can act according to their own rules, are not asked to respect the rules of the site, and are observed only insofar as they state that they like the place or are moved by it.

The particular architecture of agency that develops at the memorial is manifold and conveyed in dialogical exhibition (databases), oral history (testimonies) and what is required from visitors: first, the movement, in space, between past and present; then the need, and often failure, to feel or express one’s feelings about the site, which visitors often then reflect on with guides in guided tours and workshops. My analysis here is grounded, on the one hand, on the audience-oriented performance that the dramaturgical theory illuminates (Goffman 1961, 1974) and, on the other, on the subject at the core of Habermas’s (1984) communicative action theory, one that directs action toward shared under-standing. At the center of dramaturgical action and communicative action stand the means and forms of communication, with their outcomes for agents, social structures and institutions. Through this lens, I will examine texts that communicate about the Holocaust Memorial, its exhibits and its architectural form. This analysis takes into account the acting subject, whose actions and utterances are self-conscious insofar as they respond to other forms of action at the site and not necessarily to social constraints (Warfield Rawls 1987). At the same time, it considers her speech acts within a certain communal and historical context. Communicative action occurs among actors capable of speech, and is both located in, and dynamically corresponds with, the site. The visitors’ ability to create a new style for action in the memorial, perform this style, face the circumstances of this act and direct it toward visible or imagined others, are crucial in the analysis of engagement with the memorial.

Goffman (1961) divides face-to-face interaction into focused interaction, or encounter, where two or more people actively agree to sustain a single focus of cognitive and visual attention, as in a conversation or a board game. Unfocused interactions are interpersonal communication that occurs solely by virtue of people being in one another’s presence, observing each other. At first glance, it seems that in the Holocaust Memorial visitors are engaged in unfocused interaction. They did not agree to meet there, and they usually do not talk to each other. However, its routinized manner, the shared visual and cognitive focus of attention (as evidenced in the act of constant self- and site documentation) and the rituals of entrance to the site, all blur the boundaries between the two and point to a multi-focused encounter.

There are actions related to memory that are expected in the site, and many visitors discuss their adequacy, proliferation or lack. The question ‘What yields the action – visitors encounters or their consciousness?’ is at the basis of the discussion of the site’s work. For instance, an article in the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel celebrating one year since the opening of the memorial, the writer describes possible activities in the memorial as having to do with the visitor’s choice, personifying the memorial and connecting its newness to new practices of action developed in it.²

The memorial is a central point. Sometimes the tourists hop into the Field of Stelae, a little reminiscent of the skyline of Manhattan, to photograph or walk into the nothingness, in which one feels powerless, or can be afraid, or unafraid. […] Memory is also set free between the stelae. ‘The memorial casually gets a face through the people’. […] The stelae-jumpers have become seldom. It seems that school classes, differently from a year ago, know where they are. It is not a cemetery but a memorial.

The search for the proper set of actions results from the widespread belief that memory is itself institutionalized, or tends to get institutionalized. The most accepted model for analyzing collective memory action in Germany is the Assmanns’ Cultural Memory (Erll 2011: 27), which analyzes the interrelations between collective memory, political action and legitimation, and identity. New frames for understanding memory work are influenced and inspired by Aleida and Jan Assmann term ‘Cultural Memory,’ which stands for institutionalized forms of collective memory resting on media and rituals. ‘Communicative memory distinguishes and studies institutionalized memory forms that are based on everyday interaction and communication’ (Erll 2011: 28). The search for meaning, self-documentation and play seem to fall into the second category. In Chapter 4 we will discuss German memory politics in light of this assumed institutionalized culture of memory, and I illuminate a pendulum between the cultural and the communicative that endures and institutionalizes the latter. I will thus suggest turning our attention from institutionalized memory culture toward multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009), while also attending to the processes of mediation which alter visitors’ memories and relations to them. I will further suggest that this procedure can be cast as the cyclical performance of routinizing disclosure, meaning both the (well-discussed) issue of the strategy of avoidance to close off discussion about Holocaust memory in Germany and disclosure of one’s intimate relations to this memory.

Becoming engaged in activity at the memorial takes place in the performance of affect (or its lack thereof), and its documentation. My research, as well as that of a study of schoolchildren reacting to the memorial (Klein 2012), shows that the documentation of self-transformation complements the performance of affect. If they have not sufficiently reflected on their feelings, visitors to the memorial feel that they have not engaged with it properly. This was most starkly evident in guided tours and workshops for school groups: both the performance of feeling and reflection were routinized, but not shared with visitors that one does not know. In the process of becoming a routine, focused and unfocused interactions about memory and about other issues are publically discussed as related to memory. Such discussions about the moral career of the visitor in her ability to enter the site and undergo a proper mourning, contemplative experience will be analyzed in Chapter 3, and the discussions on minorities and how ‘they’ relate to the place will be delineated in Chapter 2.

An example from an interview with young visitors, who were part of a school trip from Bavaria to the memorial in July 2012, can demonstrate the presentation of feeling in relation to the site experience. I asked, ‘What do you think about the site’ and one pupil answered, ‘it is an impressive field, with lots of power. Through the jumping one loses the perspective.’ To my question, ‘What do you take from the memorial’ the same pupil answered, ‘people go into the memorial and through the concrete stone they experience hopelessness. It somehow has depth. There people are moved (affected/hurt); there people were marked and labeled.’ The pupil links visitors’ feelings in the site (impressed, losing perspective) to feelings experienced by victims, such as hopelessness, all tied to the experience in the Stelenfeld and its aesthetics.

This ‘propriety of feeling’ in visiting the memorial can be understood through the way that Goffman (1961) discuses spontaneous involvement in an encounter in terms of the degree to which one demonstrates a visible emotional entrenchment in a situation, rather than as a fundamental level of experience (Ostrow 1996: 342). Getting involved in an action can carry the actor into a situation that he can be aware of without the necessity to reflect on his action. As a special example of Habermas’s communicative action theory, the actor is aware of his action but is not willing to reflect on it rationally, even when communicating about it.

In the Holocaust Memorial visitors utter questions and assertions that seem silly even to them, and say that others say ‘silly’, unsatisfying things, as some told me, ‘just to say something.’ The utterances and attempts at assigning meaning are centered on the affect that the memorial arouses or fails to create in the visitor. Thus, many public activities in the memorial, whether rendered game-like or not, cannot be constrained to shared deliberation, in or outside of that activity. Moreover, we will see how ‘performed perplexity’ rules the interaction and delays deliberation, connecting the questions concerning what does one feel about and in the memorial, to what does one feel about the Holocaust. This question is the subject of much deliberation in other venues, such as the broadcast media, newspapers, books about the memory of the Holocaust and public surveys. In this, it is employed in its bare form of performed ‘speakability’: first about one’s feelings and action; and second, if at all, through a special symbolic index, about the Holocaust.

Before we connect the deliberative and the non-deliberative parts of the communication in the site, I would like to dwell on Goffman’s claims regarding the rules of irrelevance in focused encounters. In asking, ‘what perspective does a definition of the situation exclude when it is being satisfactory sustained?’ Goffman (1961: 19) looks at games and how their participants are willing to foreswear, for the duration of the play, their interest in aesthetic, sentimental or moral value of the equipment or rules employed. In applying Bateson’s (1955) ‘frame’ of play to such encounters, Goffman helps us see that the contours of movement and action in the memorial have to do not only with the aesthetics of the site, but with the developing rules of what being in it entails. Playing tag and then reflecting on that act are two forms of entering and leaving the game, or more interestingly, entering, then playing the game. Those who do not play hide and seek, as well as those who do play, use the rules of irrelevance as a boundary that seals them off from many potential worlds of meaning and action. As Goffman claims, just like in games, serious activities are world-building activities. In our case, the proximity of the serious and seriously performed and the game creates a third space of encounter. In this space, certain individuals are invited to play, some are deemed as not needing to take part, and some exclude themselves from activity or are excluded from it for lack of understanding and adherence to its rules.

Differently from a shared and mutually agreed-upon game, the participants-visitors in the memorial are not all playing together in the same ‘game’. Here we have to go beyond the limitation of the game metaphor and talk about ‘communicative activity’ (Goffman 1961: 35). In this light, Goffman (1961: 38) claims, we can see how a visitor to the memorial, through ‘spontaneous involvement in the joint activity,’ and in encountering the manner in which their fellow visitors experience the space ‘becomes an integral part of the situation, lodged in it and exposed to it, infusing himself into the encounter in a manner quite different from the way an ideally rational player commits his side to a position in an ideally abstract game.’

Throughout the seven years of its operation, how visitors behave in the site is the most reflected-on practice by all visitors and therefore interesting for us as a central loci of self-transformation, specifically as the performed liberation from old memory practices and connecting to other recreational touristy activities. Goffman (1974: 249) recognizes a paradox in the relations between play and its surroundings: ‘the assumptions that cut an activity off from the external surround also mark the ways in which this activity is inevitably bound to the surrounding world.’ In our case, the beginning of a visit is marked by entering the site, the time it takes to walk in it, play hide and seek, or rest on a stele from a walk and the rules of conduct written on the ground, available light and the touristy pavilion’s supply of refreshments: all shape the contours of action in it and how it is framed by those seemingly mundane spatial and temporal terms.

1.2 The transformation of experience: pedagogy in the Information Center

Upon entering the Information Center visitors encounter a quote from Primo Levi, the largest text in the site, written on the wall which opens the exhibition: ‘It happened, and therefore it can happen again. This is the core of what we have to say.’ If experience above ground at the Stelenfeld is facilitated by the distance between what one knows or encountered in places of atrocity, and what can be found in the Field of Stelae aesthetically, the Information Center also collapses the distance in time with this quote from Levi, adopting Levi’s survivors’ voice: this is the core of what we have to say. The visitors, together with the Memorial Foundation, enter the realm of observation of that which happened, with two additional statements in mind: (1) it can happen again; (2) the claim that this fact is the ‘core’ of what is to be said about what happened. This facilitates an immediate need for sustained reflection on that which happened but more so, on the danger that it will happen again, and what one can or should say about it. This practice of reflection in speech is situated in the experience of the site above ground, when most visitors, in guided tours as well as in interaction with hosts or in responding to the press, ask what this site is supposed to mean, what it symbolizes and how one ought to feel walking in it, searching, mournful or playful.

For German tourists, this site is part of a growing number of new sites they encounter in homeland tourism, in sites of memory in which atrocities did not take place. According to a public survey carried out in the Information Center in 2009,³ about half of the visitors to the Information Center are German and the other half from other countries. Since 2005 the number of visitors to the Information Center annually is steady at between 445,000 in 2007 and 468,500 in 2006. After 2007 the number of visitors has been growing, and in 2010 it was 461,000.⁴ There are no official numbers of visitors to the Stelenfeld as it is open at all times.

The pedagogical possibilities available to visitors at the memorial are:

1. Group guided tours

2. Audio tour through the Information Center

3. Workshops

4. Videoarchiv search and workshop

5. Materials for preparation and after-tour discussion

Workshops on offer include: ‘The fates of families’; ‘Self-testimony’; ‘Art’; ‘Why did it happen?’; ‘Places of killing’; Sinti and Roma’ ‘Homosexuals memorial’; ‘City walking tour of the memorial and other memorials’; ‘project day in the video archive.’ The most popular workshop is the one on families. The workshops take about three hours and are delivered in the Information Center’s seminar rooms, where the groups meet, hear an introduction to the memorial as a project and its history, and then focus on the topic of their choice. The students are then sent in small groups to the Infor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 - Navigating Experience
• 2 - Spheres of Speakability: Old and New Discursive Modes
• 3 - Memory in Action: New Ethics of Engagement with Holocaust Memory
• 4 - Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index