Part 2 – The Information Centre
Pressing onward through some of
my reflections from the past weeks, I want to take a moment and remind you all
that the following series of entries has its genesis from a journal of mine and
that—for better or worse—you’ll have to accept them more as ramblings than as
polished pieces of social and/or historical commentary. There will be
contradictions and bad arguments and shifting perspectives. A friend emailed me
this morning, concerned about my approach to collective memory with regard to
the Holocaust; she seemed worried about my discussion of ‘understanding’ and
the implications it has for those who did not directly experience the Holocaust
(along with other important historical movements, etc.).
As someone interested in the arts
(and, more narrowly, someone who [too infrequently] makes art of his own), the
issue of experience is one I struggle with daily. Must we experience something
in order to have an understanding of it? My friend wisely pointed out—and I
will paraphrase and work off what she said—that memory is something crafted
over time; we do forget and we craft
narratives based that have been simplified and even altered. It is entirely
possible to ‘understand’ those narratives; I can ‘understand’ the narrative of
the Holocaust as it exists within film culture—from Life Is Beautiful to The Boy
in the Striped Pajamas to Au Revoir
les Enfants—but can I understand the Holocaust in the same way as that
woman in Ben and Adam’s tour group who lived
through it.
The easy answer is, of course not. But there are some
difficult problems lurking beneath the surface of that answer and, for now,
I’ll leave them be. (I’m frightened that I will lose the thread of this entire
post if I go snatching for fish that I’m sure are there, but not so sure that I
can catch.)
~
Beneath the ground level of Peter
Eisenman’s impressive memorial, there is an Information Center. In terms of
both exhibit and architecture, it provides an apt contrast to the memorial
above. Although I used the term ‘exhibits,’ there were really no ‘exhibits’ to
speak of. The walk through the center—consisting of 5 or 6 rooms in total—was
entirely text, photographs, lighting, and audio installations. I won’t bother
with a rundown of the content; you all know the crude outline of the Holocaust
[for a long refresher, here’s the
Wikipedia page LINK] and I couldn’t do the exceptionally researched and
perceptive rendition given of the Center justice by butchering it here. Like the
‘stelae’ above, Eisenman and the curators continued the aesthetic of veiled
symbolism.
‘Stelae,’ for those who were
confused by that term in the last entry, are monuments that have been popular
amongst a wide array of cultures, from the Maya through the Ming Dynasty in
China. They were used as funerary markers, but they also functioned as commemorative
or didactic texts. The ‘stelae’ constructed by Eisenman could be either
funerary, commemorative, or didactic above ground, but below ground—where their
imprint is seen in the ceiling of the Information Center—they became clearly
funerary once I entered the second room of the center.
In that room, panels of
lights—the same shape and size as the ‘stelae’ above and lined up directly with
their granite brethren above—gave individual accounts of the Holocaust. In
almost all the cases, these scraps of writings, which came largely from
diaries, journals, and letters, were found on the bodies of deceased Jews. Here’s
an example from Herman Kruk, whose journals have been published as a book, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania,
available through Yale University Press:
What is my life even worth if I remain alive? Whom to return to in my
old hometown of Warsaw? For what and for whom do I carry on this whole pursuit
of life, enduring, holding out—for what?
~
The curious thing about this room
of lit panels is that, despite their being made of similar material to the
floor, no one walks on them—mirroring the walking patterns of those who are
walking above through the ‘stelae’ field. The light is somehow sacred and other
and I see only one woman trod on the corner of a panel during my 15 minutes in
the room. The light affects us in all kinds of ways. If there’s one face-value
criticism that I might offer of the center, it’s that the badly lit rooms make
all the text they offer extremely difficult to read. On reflection, though, I
began to think that the lighting was part of the point.
These stories are hard to read, but the lighting
choices allow the Information Center to reinforce that quality. After nearly 45
minutes in the rooms of the center, my eyes were tired and exhausted and
literally aching for some sunlight. They’re not making it easy for us and I
respect that.
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