Pueblo Abroad: Journal Entry #1

Hello, faithful readers… It’s nice to know that some of you haven’t given up one me! I’ve been away on a trip through Germany and Austria over the past two and a half weeks—something I hinted at in previous posts, but didn’t really have the heart to fully (and honestly) hit you over the head with. At one point a few weeks ago, I thought that I might get a few posts written ahead of time and then post them out on the road, but that plan quickly fell apart.

Given my recent travels and the sometime hankering for a more ‘study-abroad’ type of blog, I’ve made a decision to publish a series of posts from today through April 30 (next Monday) focusing on some of my thoughts—artistic and otherwise—that I had over my travels. Recorded in my ‘arts’ journal, these entries will (more often than not) focus on a particular cultural place or experience.

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Part 1 – Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe

Retrospectively, it seems strange that in the course of my wanderings through art-based websites (and, more generally, through the odd world of the Internet itself) I have never stumbled upon any images or information about this memorial. While that might make me amusingly ignorant to some of you out there, it guaranteed me an experience that I suspect many you will not have had: I walked up the memorial having no idea what to expect.

If you have not seen this memorial and cannot so much as picture its basic layout, then I beg you to cease reading (I’m looking at you, Kayla). Think of this as a *spoiler alert*. Don’t read any further if you want an innocent experience of the memorial. I beg it of you.

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Now that we’ve disposed of the uninitiated (hopefully…), we can get down to business. Which, it turns out, might not be all that much. As it turns out, architect Peter Eisenman’s masterful, ‘deconstructivist’ work has been analyzed, poked, prodded, and deconstructed itself in so many ways since its opening in 2004 that anything I say might as well be recognized as redundant. That admission out of the way, I can’t help but want to discuss this memorial; it’s easily the most enigmatic architectural reflection on history, hatred, and human society I’ve ever experienced.

What helped my experience was the story that my friends Ben and Adam had related to me the day before visiting the memorial. Having arrived in Berlin a day earlier than me, they joined a walking tour of the city that brought them past the memorial. Stopping for a brief chat, the group and the tour guide were shocked to discover that a Holocaust survivor was among them. This older woman—I got no further description from Ben and Adam of her—became an authoritative presence; she ended up on the receiving end of questions about the experience of being at the memorial. One of the questions that someone in the walking tour directed at her was how it made her feel to see little children running across the tops of the ‘stelae’ of the memorial—jumping the small gaps between the sometimes 15-foot high granite blocks. The woman shrugged at the question and said that it may have been disrespectful, but they were too young to understand.

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Indeed, as we move further and further away in time from the Holocaust, that’s the key issue: understanding. As the collective memory of the Holocaust disappears and the remaining participants in that era die off (someone born at the tail end of May 1945 would be 66 years old today), the Holocaust becomes a tragedy more and more in line with the legacy of slavery in the United States. As awful as the era of slavery in the South was in the U.S., there’s no one around today to serve as witness to it. That’s not to say that slavery does not have a huge legacy in the U.S. today; it does!—but only that the horrors have faded and our understanding of the slavery world is slipping.

The same might be said of the Holocaust. Whether or not you, reader, agree, I personally feel divorced from the events of the Holocaust. So much of the rhetoric surrounding the Holocaust involves words like ‘unimaginable’ and ‘impossible’ and ‘beyond imagination’ and ‘inhuman.’ These things—by definition—are beyond us. No matter how many gag-inducing photographs we see, no matter how many heart-wrenching accounts we read, no matter how many personal narratives are pored over, we can never capture that experience—I, at least, feel that I can never properly understand. You all know that I’m one for imagination; I believe in the ability of a male writer to assume a female voice and vice versa. I believe in the ability of a black person to assume the voice of an Asian man. I believe in all these swaps and understandings across gender, culture, etc. But one of the exchanges I can never quite come to terms with is the attempt to encapsulate the voice of a Jew during the Holocaust if one is not already such. I would offer that Anne Frank’s diary stands as enduring testament to that notion.

A view of the memorial from the middle; photo by Taylor Coe

But all this is moving quite beyond the scope of the memorial…back to that old woman and her resigned acceptance of the children’s innocence. I focus on this brief anecdote because it attempts to divide everyone evenly into two camps: the innocent and the experienced. As innocent as I am not, I am not experienced either—at least, not experienced in the same way as this old woman.

This is all a prelude to my odd admission that, as weird and uncomfortable as it may have felt in the middle of the memorial—where the ‘stelae’ are 12-15 feet high and extend weirdly in half a city block in every direction and you see no one else in any direction and the brick ground below you pulses like a sine curve—it was also sort of thrilling and fun.

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That thought looks even worse in writing than it sounded in my head. Ouch. Perhaps I will be misunderstood—that would be a travesty. In admitting that my time at the ‘Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe’ was ‘thrilling and fun’ at moments, I don’t mean to undermine the power and meaning of the memorial or disrespect the memory of the people for whom it was built. My initial reaction to these fleeting feelings of excitement was repression; how could I feel anything so ‘joyful’ and ‘inappropriate’ as fun in this place?

A stranger ducks through the memorial's 'stelae'; photo by Taylor Coe

But it’s hard not to smile when Ben and Adam crisscross past me in the gridwork of ‘stelae,’ grinning broadly at me as they flash between granite blocks. And we’re not the only ones. I see smiles on other passersby, who blink past me among the stony stacks. There is even some muted laughter. And what’s so wrong with that? The more I considered these reactions, the clearer it became. These reactions were not ones of disrespect or distaste; they were evidence of the staying power of the human spirit, the will to move on. The motto ‘forgive but never forget’ has been a tagline of the Holocaust, but more appropriate might be the Proustian ‘forget without forgetting.’ Memory, as Proust has so glibly reminded me in the past four months, is not so simple as ‘remember’ and ‘forget.’ There is a type of forgetting where the knowledge sinks to the back of our minds and rests there—not forgotten and entirely disappeared—but dormant and present.  

So, ducking in and out of the memorial—thinking, reflecting, laughing a bit—I could not stop thinking of Proust and how our collective memory remembers, forgives, and forgets. Part 2 will return briefly to the memorial before heading below to the museum.

The memorial had rules posted on plaques on the outskirts; of particular interest is the regulation that "1. Throughout the year, entry to the Field of Stelae is at the risk of the individual." ; photo by Taylor Coe