On memory, memorials and meaning with guest speaker Prof James Young (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

[Music] Hello, I'm Paul Lee Worthy. Welcome to the Connecting Memories Podcast. I hope you enjoy the show. [Music] Hello, on the Connecting Memories Podcast, I talk to leading academics about memory. Memory is a key word in contemporary culture and scholarship. If the term "memory" is frequently invoked in academic research across many disciplines, across those contexts, it is often used to mean very different things. As well as asking my guest speakers to share some of their latest work with us, I ask each of them, what does memory mean in the context of their research? Who's memory do they study? And how? On this episode of the podcast, I'll be talking to distinguished university professor emeritus of English and Judea, and near Eastern Studies, James Young. Welcome to the podcast James. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. The Connecting Memories Podcast was launched in 2020 as lockdowns were imposed in many countries around the world in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The podcast not only provided a new online platform for the already established Connecting Memories keynote lecture series. It's also sought to create a communal space for scholars interested in memory to exchange ideas and engage with each other's thinking. The ongoing popularity of the podcast confirms the continuing desire for such a space, and so we're back with a new series. The format of the show remains unchanged with each episode consisting of three parts. In the opening segment, I ask my guest speaker to tell us what memory means to them and how they approach its study. In the second section, my speaker presents some of their latest research, and in the final part of the podcast, I get the chance to ask a few questions about their talk. And with that, it's time to introduce today's guest speaker. James E. Young studied at the University of California, receiving his PhD in 1983. He went on to teach at New York University and at Bryn Moore College in Pennsylvania, before moving to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1988. There, he served as professor of English and Judea, a Kineer Eastern Studies, and was founding director of the Institute for Holocaust Genocide and Memory Studies. He went on to become Distinguished University Professor and now Distinguished University Professor Emeritus. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Harvard and Princeton. Professor Young has been awarded many grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Grant, a Yad Hanadi Fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and he has been a visiting fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Professor Young's researchers ranged across narrative theory and visual culture, as well as what has become known as Holocaust Studies and Cultural Memory Studies. His monographs include the Seminole Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, published within the Anna University Press in 1988, At Memories Edge, after images of the Holocaust in contemporary art and architecture, published with Yale University Press in 2000, and the stages of memory reflections on memorial, art, loss, and the spaces between, which appeared with the University of Massachusetts Press in 2016. His oft cited and much fated book The Texture of Memory appeared with Yale University Press in 1993, and won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994. That year he was guest curator of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, entitled The Art of Memory Holocaust Memorials in History. The exhibition went on to be staged in Berlin and Munich. Professor Young edited the exhibition catalog entitled The Art of Memory, which appeared with German publisher Press Till this same year. Professor Young has written articles for a long list of prestigious academic journals such as Critical Inquiry, History and Memory, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Representations and the French Journal, Annel, Istoia, Cion, Socière, to name but a few. His essays and opinion pieces have appeared in news outlets around the world, including The New York Times magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, all in the US, as well as international outlets such as The Frankfurt, Algemein, Aitsidon in Germany. Professor Young's work has been translated variously into German, Hebrew, French, Swedish and Japanese. In the year 2000 he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Pozen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilisation, a ten-volume anthology of primary sources, documents, texts and images, covering Jewish culture and civilization from Biblical times through to the 21st century. Beyond his scholarly work, Professor Young has served on committees for a multitude of major commemorative projects around the world, advising, for example, the Argentinian government on its memorial to the Desasparasidos, as well as Germany, on what became the National Memorial to Europe's murdered Jews, and serving on the jury for the National 9/11 Memorial Design Competition in New York. Thanks so much for joining me on the Connecting Memories Podcast, James. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome you to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I look forward to the conversation. So to get us started, I'd like to begin with the same questions that I ask each speaker on the Connecting Memories Podcast. Could you please tell us a bit about your research, how you came to study memory, how memory features in your work, and how you approach the study of memory? I'm glad to. I was trained really as a literary historian, though I had two undergraduate degrees, one in psychology and one in literature, comparative literature. And when I began my dissertation research, knowing that it was going to be on what we were calling at the time, Holocaust literature, that is literary responses to the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and the collaborators to Errol Bortou. I realized that I needed to look at the ways that narrative itself systematically organized both history and memory of this history. And so from the very beginning, I understood there to be a split between that which happened and how that which happened is passed down to us. The narrative, the photographs, the film, photography, memorials and museums. And this kind of realization dawned on me as I was doing a very early primary research in the various archives and libraries, beginning with a fellowship I had at Yvo Institute for Jewish Research in New York City in the late 70s and early 80s. The materials there were in combination the languages of Yiddish and Hebrew, German, French, Romanian, Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, every possible European language. And in navigating both the gigantic collection of the Tivo, which used to be an 86-week fifth avenue just across the park from where we now have a place in the Upper West Side. I have to be like completely on the librarian, Dina Abermovic, who was a petite woman of about 92, who had also been one of the librarians in Vila, who were a lot of the collection came from the Tivo. And as she began to show me around, I understood that there was something tactile and viscerally engaging going on, that the sources of these books, their smell, their texture, the various languages that I was having to kind of core through to penetrate them, was also a kind of portal into them and a little bit of a memory blanket away from them as well. And here she showed me, for example, L.E.V. Zels' Yiddish memoir on which night was eventually based, but a very, very different memoir, "Undi Veltat-Guschwigen" and "The World was Silent", which was in fact about four times longer than the French and English versions of night that he later wrote, and which he published in Argentina in a year's press in 1956, fairly early on. And I was just understruck by the difference between this memoir and night itself on which it was supposedly based. The memoir being angry beginning with its title and unforgiving, finding very little redemption, in fact, in the end, night ended up getting written according to, I would say almost a Catholic calvary kind of stations of the cross. In fact, even had the great philosopher, Catholic philosopher Moriak write a foreword to it, so that it was almost written for a French Catholic consumption in a way. And in kind of discovering these small things, I realized that I was going to have to look very carefully at how languages themselves organized memory, how the different genres would organize memory, the diary being very different from the memoir, the memoir, fundamentally different from the novel, even though you have rhetorical [BLANK_AUDIO] aspects of the novel in the memoir, rhetorical aspects of the memoir, the novel, rhetorical aspects of the diary, yeah, informing both these other genres. And then of course, theater, poetry, historical narrative, historiography, all creating structures of memory and understanding and meaning. And here's where I think the second great revelation came, reading the diaries, whether it was honor fronter or haim Kaplan or Emmanuel Rungleblum's notes, finding that in fact, there was a power in that how they understood events and wrote them down, actually not just reflected their understanding, but shaped their understanding, and may even have led to actual responses in real time, depending on how they understood the events around them. Haim Kaplan would lament in his diary that how was it possible to write about such incoherate things in such a coherent narrative that even to give it that kind of coherence was to betray the incoherateness of events. And he would put his pen down, kind of paralyzed, and then he would pick it back up. But and yet still we must go on and I must record this scroll of agony. And these kinds of reflections were quite common among the diaries in all kinds of languages, including Rungleblum and the Irish. And this then led to my own understanding of what then I was about to do. So I'm trying to understand the literary sources of both Holocaust history and memory, distinguish between them on the one hand, and then write them down myself, understanding that even the language I would be writing in was going to begin to shape how I understood these events, and would surely shape the ways that my readers were going to understand these events. And so I even included a chapter on the names of the Holocaust, how show Ah and Dritte Horben and Holocaust all conveyed and organized very different meaning, depending on the traditions they came from. And there was nothing ever neutral about any of these ways of referring to the mass murder of European Jewish history we'll go to. So from New York I went to Poland and Germany and began researching the archives there at the Institute for Tychuschiktor in Munich, at the Bundeslauhe of Inban. And even went to Terazien, where the organizers of the Memorial there at the museum had documents from UTC. And of course, spent much time at the Institute, the Jewish Institute in Warsaw, before heading to Krakow and then to Auschwitz and Birkenau. There's a library at Auschwitz, called Auschwitz I, distinct from Birkenau, located in one of the barracks. And they would, they didn't have a copy machine then, this would have been from 1980, 1981. But they were glad to bring out these crumbling notes and pages to me to let me read and transcribe, including the Zonderkamato diaries. These diaries written in kind of little mouse type Yiddish handwriting on these little teeny scroll pieces of paper which were stuffed in tin cans and buried, just outside of the gas chamber complexes at Birkenau, described what was happening to their families, to their friends, their children and parents often. And I realized that as they spread out, you know, before me that again, the tactile sensation of trying to preserve the paper, literally without breaking it, they were such fragile pieces of paper. And deciphering the very small Yiddish handwriting. And doing it on the site just about a mile and a half away from where they were dug up, I'm doing this in the in the barracks library at Auschwitz I. And I got up and wandered outside among the barracks and the barbed wire still standing. And I realized that's depending on where I read these documents, and how I understood that they were really kind of rooted in space and time simultaneously, but the time of course in a contemporary moment, but pointing back to some 40 years earlier, that I couldn't ignore the time and space, national narrative in which I was finding these and how they were being passed down to me in that way. And so at that moment I realized that I was going to have to write about both what was being passed down, the contact, and how it was being passed down to me, and the spaces and the times and the politics and the architecture in which I was handling these materials for the first time. And it would that would all become part of my study. So my book, first book writing and rewriting the Holocaust included separate chapters on historiography, diaries, memoirs, fiction, theater, poetry, video testimony. Also it would be constructed in very particular times and places toward very particular ends. And eventually there was a chapter at the very end on Monuments in Museums, Holocaust Monuments in Museums. And that of course opened the door to a dedicated study of Holocaust memorials in museums in art and architecture there after. So it was nothing I planned. I didn't sit down thinking, you know, I'm just going to leapfrog literature now and get right to the spaces of memory. But as part of the process, I couldn't really have the way to any longer the spaces in which I was doing this study. And that's what really set the stage for me then to think about a Holocaust memory in stages. And it's really it's multiple, multiple forms, you know, beginning with little scraps of paper and diaries going all the way through survivor testimony, you know, after the event and including clearly the kind of testimony that children of survivors and grandchildren of survivors that is also passing down to us now. Fantastic, thanks so much for that James. And now we're going to hear more from Professor Young as he presents a talk entitled The Memorialist. In our first evening together as jurors for the decmal to Europe's murder Jews in Berlin in 1998, we sat down to dinner at a restaurant to get to know each other and they the other jurors had all known my work very well. There was a good reason, all kinds of good reasons, politically and academically for them to ask me to join this little five member search committee, if you will. And they asked me, so I heard Professor Young, what was the first Holocaust memorial you ever saw? And as I thought back, I realized that it goes way, way back to 1976 when I was a backpacker in Europe where I had spent about a year and a half trekking and tramping and hostiling and doing research preliminary research for my dissertation. And so I kind of begin the story as a memorialist, right here that it actually began with a late September 1976 train ride from Amsterdam to Copenhagen with a pilgrimage stop in Newback to visit Thomas Moms' Woodenbrook's house holding tight to my 1976 edition of Let's Go Europe. But let's go as my guide in map. I found Thomas Moms' Woodenbrook's house. But after getting hopelessly lost and soaking wet in the stadium's Yadda drizzle, I missed my night train to Copenhagen. I was kindly directed to Lubek's Youth Hostel, but when I tried to check in, I was told firmly that it was full for the evening and that I would have to try the hostel in Trevamunda, a small village nearby in the Baltic coast. After an hour in vain, trying to get you right to Trevamunda, I marched back to the train station and caught a small commuter train to Trevamunda, surrounded by boisterous gymnasium students returning to the Trevamunda homes. A small group of students guided me onto a small ferry boat across the harbor where the river Trava emptied into the Baltic Sea to a little place of their village surrounded by the sea, the river and the East German frontier. The Youth Hostel is there, they pointed, about. 300 meters down Mecklenburg, Launstrasse, about 100 meters before you get to the Russian wall, by which they meant the East German border. If you can't find the hostel, please come back to a single show you where it is they said, is one of them slipped through a small wooden gate between two tall hedges. Of course, I couldn't find the hostel, which is actually closed for the season. And so we turned that little gate, defeated and drenched to the bone. I knocked in the door of the house nearest the gate, in a middle age rosy-cheek gentleman answer, he took one look at me and call for his daughter, Vybka, to come downstairs. I recognized her as one of the students who had guided me this far. They took my soaking worth face jacket, backpack and hiking boots and put them all in a bathtub. Within minutes they had spread a dinner of cheese, worse cold cuts, bread rolls and pickled cabbage, all washed down with bottoms of a look-pills, which I registered gratefully as an omen of my own good luck. The 16 year old Vybka called her boyfriend Peter to come over to meet this American backpacker, the first American they had ever met. And we stayed up well past midnight, sharing stories of our families during World War II, which turned out to be our common obsession and all any of us wanted to talk about. Vybka's father, Friedrich, was drafted as an 18 year old into the German Navy in 1939, was badly injured in the German invasion of Norway, and hospital in Bergen, for the duration of the war. He had been born in Trava, Munda, a submarine base before and during the war, and was returned to his home village in April 1945, where he continued to recuperate in a hospital on the preval overlooking the river Trava and the harbor beyond. Were galed by stories of Nazi atrocities and evil told by the Norwegian doctors and nurses who tended him for four years, he described himself as a hollowed out egg shell by the time he had returned home. Coming of age during the Nazi Reich, he came to understand during his convolessence in Bergen that all he had ever known and believed had been alive. And then in the first days of May 1945, he watched his barge after barge loaded with living concentration camp prisoners to strike uniforms, drifted down the river, passed his hospital window into the harbor. Invited to stay with the Zurbier family as long as they wanted. I stayed for another week, going with Vibkan Pier to their Gennazim and Lubbock for a couple of days where I was asked to speak about the upcoming US presidential elections. On one of the days when I stayed home to read and write in my journal, I had bursting with war history and memory that I didn't even know how to process. Friedrich asked me to take a ride with him in his little VW golf. He spoke little English at that point. My spoken German was pretty elementary. We drove for about 20 minutes to a little town called Nijendorf, then to a narrow beach at Timondorf or Strand on the Baltic Sea. After gazing to sea for a few moments, Friedrich led me to a grove of trees surrounding a rough oval-shaped stone with Gothic-driven script, which read. The Dengstata through the Optha de Katasthrof SS Kaparkona. A short text followed, also carved in the stone, according to my diary, I was read in part in German. On the 3rd of May 1945, the Royal Air Force bombed and sank the German cruise liner SS Kaparkona and two other ships, the Dylbeck and the Deutschland and Lubeck Bay near Neustadt, killing 8,000 set Haftliger from Neuen Gama, Haftliger being prisoners. Neuen Gama being a very close concentration camp. The Katastrophe indeed, part of a much larger Katastrophe to remember thinking. Then I asked Friedrich what he thought the Katastrophe was. He looked the stone and it was clear that he was very familiar with this place and with this particularly event which I was learning about for the first time. Again, from my notes in relatively poor German, I recall his answer. The first Katastrophe is that these concentration camp prisoners from Neuen Gama and Dora Middelbaugh included many who survived the death marches from camps in Poland and most of them were Jews. To survive the concentration camps and the death marches until the last day of the war, only to be killed by the Royal Air Force, which mistook these ships for troop transports with escaping SS officers, that was the first Katastrophe you sent. The second Katastrophe was for the local residents of Timindorf or Strat, Neustadt and Neuen Dorf, who spent their entire summer and fall collecting and bearing the bodies of the victims as they washed ashore for many months in mass graves near these beautiful beaches. He gestured to what I now recognize from buried amounts covered by brush and trees with further small stone markers nearby. None of this history, however, was included on the memorial stone. As to where these Hiflinga had come from and where they were going, there was no clue. Friedrich knew the story well as a local who had actually seen the prisoner of the Lady Barges come down the river Trada on their way out to the cruise liners. Dessons of prisoners who had jumped into the icy waters were saved by local townspeople on their fishy and pleasure boats, many being reassured by their rescuers that there would be no more camps for them. Since Neustadt was now occupied by British soldiers. These were the last two days of the war. When I asked Friedrich where he thought the ships were headed, he replied that nobody really knew, but that he suspected the SS had planned to take the ships in as far enough to see as possible before scuttling them, killing the cut-set inmates and thereby hiding their last victims beneath the waves. This simple stone, a multifaceted monument that can seal much more than it remembered would nonetheless be a revelation to me by first Holocaust memorial Hiflinga. So in our meetings around the decmal process in Germany in 1997 and 1998, I spent a pretty good part of the time describing the span of years between that 1976 wet September night and the Holocaust memorial boom that was really now going to culminate in this single national memorial for Europe's murder Jews to be built in Berlin. The span of years between 1988 and 1998 was, I told them, a period of exhilarating and often agonizing memorial ferment in the US and Europe, Israel and South America. A brief catalog might include the fall of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain on November 9th and 10th, 1989. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall of this communist era monuments and those in Eastern Europe. In 1993 exhibition entitled "Monumental Propaganda" curated by the Soviet emigrate artist Komar Melemyd and what to do with the authoritarian monuments of the Soviet era. The advent of Germany's counter-monuments challenging the conventional monuments pretensions to permanence and authoritarian certainty by artists like Horst Horwisel, Jochen Gerritz, Esther Schalev Gerritz, Stee and Schnok, and Misha Oman among others. Poland's post 1989 debates on how to preserve Auschwitz as a site of a Jewish and national Polish martyrdom. The opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, the debate around Daniel Liebis can deconstruct this design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The 1994 opening of the exhibition "The Art of Memory" Holocaust Memorials in history and the Jewish Museum in New York City, which I served as curator, and which eventually traveled to Berlin and Munich. The failed 1995 competition for Germany's national bank ball for Europe's murder Jews and the subsequent and successful new competition for the bank ball in 1997 on Wissjury, I also serve. The complete redesign and recreation of Israel's Yad Vyshen Memorial Museum in the light of the phenomenal success of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and all the while artists and architects, critics and historians began questioning the purpose and function of this Holocaust memory boom and whether memorials had begun to serve less as instigation of memory and more as substitutions for intervention against contemporary wars in genocide. This concern found early and profound expression in Jochen Gerritz's and Esther Schalev Gerritz's disappearing 1986 monument against fascism and humbork. This 12 meter tall lead covered column was designed to sink a meter and a half at a time as sections were covered with the signatures of visitors. In 1993, it finally disappeared altogether, helped better to remember a vanished people than by a vanished monument. The artists hoped that by vanishing, the monument would return the burden of memory to those who came looking for it. And they made clear their own explanatory signage at the monument that it was meant to provoke action, not quietude. The inscription of this harbour, Hamburg monument, red, we invite the citizens of harbour and visitors to the town to add their names here to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names covered this 12 meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day you will disappear. completely and the sight of the hardwood monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice. And this last line has stayed with me from the moment I saw it. To the artist's minds, the monument was not only still a red lent of its conserved but fascist and authoritarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but to the extent that any monument substituted itself for action against new and unfolding injustices, it would have to be considered an extension of the crimes it purported to be memorializing. Like Yoko and Esther, I was also preoccupied with both the utility and futility of monuments. Their potential for inspiring action on the one hand and for complacent self-satisfaction on the other hand. I worried about what the consequences of all this looking back and all this memory work would be if it took us out of the present moment and made us look away from unfolding genocides in the world around us. Toward what ends were we commemorating the genocide of Europe's Jews, if not too worn that because it happened then it can also happen now to others. Here I recall watching on television, L.E.V. Zell's April 1993 dedication speech for the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton sitting behind him on the day. Like many others I was surprised but pleased when as he near the end of his speech, V. Zell stopped and turned toward the President and First Lady saying, Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since from what I have seen referring to Serb-Rudden prison camps of emaciated Bosnia and Muslims in Bosnia, Herzegovina during Serbia's ethnic cleansing program in 1992. We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country, these self-concluded, for which he then received a loud share at Round of applause. But then I saw and heard something else as well. As the television cameras panned to President Clinton, it was clear that he was deeply moved by the appeal, his eyes glistening, his head nodding with clinched jaw, but he had not yet acted to tort the unfolding mass murder of Bosnia and Muslims by Serbs, then two years in the making. I imagine hearing words that he never actually said. But L.E., we are doing something. We're here with you remembering the Holocaust. We were getting it all backwards. Not only did I fear that we were turning a Holocaust memory into a kind of national self-congratulatory spectacle, but would a Holocaust memory was becoming a substitute for real action against contemporary genocide, instead of its inspiration. Apparently, I wasn't the only one with such questions. Not long after it's opening in 1993, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum established as part of its mission and mandate, what they called a "community of conscience" at a center for the prevention of genocide. Both seeming answers to this question. Their stated aims include early warning of impending genocides in mass murder and policy formulation for governments to intervene and new and fully genocides around the world. But of course, this raised still further questions, including at what point do words of warning, like artworks, of warning, move from the symbolic realm to the concrete field of policy and even military action. Two years later, these questions continued to haunt me as events in the Balkans grew desperate and then devastating. Between July 11 and 22, 1995, the world washed in a horror as Serb forces rounded up and murdered in mass, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in and around Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, Herzegovina, and what the UN had declared a safe zone in full view of blue helmeted Dutch UN soldiers stationed there to protect this safe zone. 20,000 other Bosnian Muslims were expelled from the same region by Serb forces and were amounted to a genocide of the cleansing of Bosnian Muslims from lands that served for claim. Four years later, Serb forces launched yet another ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians, the last remaining Muslim population and what they call greater Serbia, forcing nearly a million Kosovo Albanians to relocate and concentrate in a corner of Kosovo, where it seems certain they would be destroyed. This time, President Clinton acted. Marshall and NATO forces to begin a withering 78-day bombing campaign of Serb forces in Kosovo at in Serbia proper, beginning on March 24 and ending on June 10, 1999. On May 13, well into NATO's Operation Allied Forces, as it was called, President Clinton justified NATO's assault on Serbia with these words. Though Slobodan Milozovic's ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic extermination of the Holocaust, the two are related. Both are vicious, premeditated, systematic oppression fueled by religious and ethnic hatred. Six years after the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust by Mojave Museum, when LVZL employed President Clinton in the world to stop the Serb genocide and ethnic cleansing of Bosnia Muslims, NATO forces stopped the near-certain genocide of Kosovo Albanians at the hands of the Serbs. Now, of course, the largest monument in Prostina, the capital of the new state of Kosovo, is to President Bill Clinton, a memorial to genocide, prevent it. As it turns out, Germany's national decimal for the murder of Jews of Europe also had baked into its very origin, the capacity for acting in the name of Holocaust memory. In September 1998, federal elections were called in Germany right in the midst of intense national debate over whether or not to go forward with building the design for Germany's national decimal for the murder of Jews of Europe, for which our competition, design jury, it chose impeter isomens waving field of stelae. Winning a 43.8% plurality, Gerhard Schroeder's social democratic party, invited Yoshka Fisher's green party into a governing coalition. But by then the decimal had become a political flashpoint, with Schroeder and his minister of culture Michael Noman declaring that they would not go forward with the decimal, which they identified too closely with Helmut Kohl's previous government. Yoshka Fisher, however, agreed to join the coalition only on condition that the decimal be built after all. He would go on to become the government's vice chancellor and foreign minister and mounted a string of his campaign for the German Air Force to join the state of allies in Operation Allied Force arguing in a part that given Germany's past, he was especially obligated to intervene in what was certainly unfolding as a new European genocide. For the first time since World War II, the German government allowed its warplanes to cross over its borders, sanctioned now by the memory of a genocide once perpetrated in the national name. On June 25, 1999, 15 days after the end of Operation Allied Force, with his intervention's fresh in mind, a full session of the German Bundestag convened in public view to debate and finally vote on Berlin's decimal for the murder of Joseph Yer. Both opponents and proponents were given time to make their cases, each presentation followed by noisy but civil debate. Finally, by a vote of 214 to 209 with 14 abstentions, the Bundestag approved the memorial in four separate parts. One, the Federal Republic of Germany would erect in Berlin a memorial for the murder of Joseph Yer on the site of the former ministerial gardens in the middle of the city. Two, the design of Peter Eisenman's field of tele would be realized. Three, an information center would be added to the memorial site. And four, a public foundation would be established by the Buddhist time to oversee the building and continue maintenance of the memorial and its information center. Six years later in May 2005, Germany's national memorial to the murder of Joseph Yer was dedicated and opened to the public. Over the next few years, I would be asked to serve on the jury for the National September 11 memorial and to serve as an academic advisor of the National September 11 museum. I would also be invited by the Norwegian government and its labor party to advise them on how to commemorate the terrible mass murder of children at a labor youth camp on the island of Utaia and the destruction of the government center in Oslo by a white nationalist anti-immigrant fanatic in July 2011. And I would be asked to advise the Jewish community in Pittsburgh on how to commemorate the 11 victims of the deadly anti-symmetric attack on the tree of like synagogue on October 27, 2018. In all of these cases, we would need to ask toward what national, political, social, and aesthetic ends are remembering these victims of terror. What will be the policy consequences of these memorials and how will we and future generations be shaped inwardly by them? Will these memorials actually move us to stand up and act against national ethic and racial hatred or will they culminate only in themselves? Fixed places where we We greet endless. in repetitive loops. But even these civic questions must necessarily follow the more conventional, if essential personal needs of mourners grieving lost loved ones, according to their cultural and religious traditions. They cannot be exclusive of each other, but they need to be added to each other. In morning one loss, our therapists tell us we mourn all of our losses. To what extent will such mourning allow us to internalize and manage this terrible loss? To what extent will such mourning enable us in our own ongoing lives? And to what extent might it disable ongoing life with paralyzing grief? The memorial needs of those most directly affected by these terrible events very greatly. Most of the family members of 9/11 victims will gratefully visit the National September 11 memorial in museum in Lower Manhattan. But most other New Yorkers will never visit it. Between 6 and 7 million people from around the country and the rest of the world, however, will visit the memorial every year. The congregants at the Tree of Life Center are wonder whether their tragedy must be more both locally by families of murdered loved ones and community as one more terrible anti-Semitic act in a long history of longest hatred. They wonder also whether their tragedy is one more dot on this era's map of the canonical anti-immigrant racial hatred and white nationalist terror beginning with the July 22, 2011 attacks in Norway, continuing to numerous anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim attacks in New Zealand, Canada and California, continuing with anti-immigrant attacks in El Paso in 2019. Or is this tragedy in Pittsburgh to be remembered as part of America's epidemic gun violence? Can DeColombi, Newtown or Lando and Dayton? Or do these memorial maps overlap? And if so, how will their memorials allow for both private grief and civic meaning? Has commemorating the victims of these attacks inoculated any of these communities against further race hatred or gun violence? Or must we simply have space to grieve our personal losses, without turning our family's losses into civic lessons to be learned? As I wrote those words a couple of years ago, Turkey was preparing its own final solution to what it regards as its Kurdish problem and an American president and cleared the way. For more than a century, Turkey has denied its ethnic cleansing and genocide of our medias between 1915 and 1923. Unlike Germany, Turkey has not built into its national legacy the memory of a genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire during World War One. Unlike Germany, which invoked a memory of its mass murder of Jews during World War Two as its rationale for intervening, I guess the new and unfolding mass murder of Kosovo Albanianism and Serbs, Turkey has no memory of its mass murder or medias, which is to say that it has no memorial rationale standing in the way of its planned ethnic cleansing and mass murder of serious Kurds. But NATO does have just such a memorial rationale for intervening against Turkey's planned genocide of the Kurds, which is only amplified and hardened by the fact that Turkey is a member state of NATO. Will NATO allow one of its own member states to perpetrate a genocide of the Kurds and ally in its war against the Islamic State, or will NATO invoke its institutional memory of past genocides perpetrated by its own member states, Turkey during World War One, Germany during World War Two, as rationale for intervening against a new genocide now, an intervention in the name of such memory that is a memorial action which surely stands as the greatest of all genocidal memorials. Fantastic. Thank you so much for that James. Now, you talked about individuals actions on a day of remembrance in Israel, and you described this anniversary in almost spatial term in a similar way to how you describe monuments in memorials. Seems clear to me that an individual or multiple individuals actions are also a key part of your understanding of properly physical memorials, specifically in terms of their responses and their interpretations to the memorial. But then if we've got multiple individuals, we have multiple interpretations. So would it not be accurate to say that your interest is more in monuments that are able to accommodate multiple meanings simultaneously than classical monumental monuments, which are monoglossically celebratory rather than heteroglossic and polyvalent? I would agree with that completely, and I think the contemporary generation of memorial designers really goes out of its way to create mostly abstract designs, or perhaps garden designs, green designs, which will accommodate not just the single generation that built these memorials, but accommodate successive generations and their reasons for coming to these memorials. Many of these memorials do in fact seek to assign very specific meaning to the memories being in gathered there. But if they get too specific and too over determined, as used to be the case often in the very figurative and representation of memorials, then it kind of shut off possibility for new generations coming to these sites with their own reasons and with their own memories. I think this is one of the reasons that a memorial, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, succeeds so beautifully, and the way that Maya Lynn had opened a space in the landscape that she hoped would open a space with them, those who came to visit, to bring whatever memories they bring of America's fallen soldiers. There was room there to remember both the soldiers who fell, and the soldiers who were wounded, and the soldiers who survived and came home. There's room to remember our own tortured relationship with the war itself. As we look at our own reflections, the reflections of our faces become the only figurative forms in that space. It does become a little bit about us as well as the names that our faces are being reflected from on that wall. So she definitely designed a space meant to accommodate the generation of vets and their children and their children and those with no direct memory at all, of the Vietnam War at all. She wanted to find a way to formalize the concept of a memorial that you would move through and would not fix memory as a way to fossilize it or didn't it. But this is what I come to call a memory by means of a population where you walk in and out of it and memory is a matter of walking and talking or walking in silence or walking and touching the names of the walls we go by them. This was really one of the great and somewhat radical innovations of memorial architecture starting in the 1980s. And I think the whole generation of German memorial artists picked up the gauntlet in this case and forward, and taking it even further. It strikes me that what we're talking about here then is something quite different to the kinds of ideas about discourse management that sometimes come to dominate cultural memories that is discussions and scholarship. By that I mean the idea that a monument for example introduces not just the memory of a particular event but a valued memory of a particular event into public discourse. By doing so shapes that discourse and manages it in a certain way. It seems to me that your interest in memory takes you away from this idea that a kind of univocal memory is embodied in one specific site and another univocal memory is embodied in another site. And towards one where each site is at least equivocal if not more multiply poly vocal. No, I would agree with that completely and go back to think of Keats's notion of negative capability. Being able to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the very same time, you know, without they're negating each other. And this I think is also a model for contemporary memorial discourse that these spaces need to be able to hold in mind, if you will, many disparate, you know, poly vocal kinds of memory and meanings. And that this disability to hold all of these competing memories at the same moment becomes the memorial's lifeblood. It becomes what animates kind of the beating heart of the memorial. traditional memorials that really wanted to fix memory and meaning for all time and perpetuity were kind of being ignored especially by my generation and I kind of approached memorials in the very beginning is kind of a skeptic of memorials, especially the traditional memorials which I just felt that unlike literature or poetry or oral history fossilized memory and meaning whose understanding of the events you know were relevant only for the generation to build them and become as Robert Musil said invisible you know to generations thereafter, you know, there's something invisible about a memorial and And I think the contemporary generation of artists and architects took their memorial assignments with all this in mind Not wanting to repeat what they see is really the very one-dimensional monolithic understandings of very very complex events and complex experiences and memories So how to create these spaces that accommodate all of these has become your kind of the memorial urge now We've talked a lot about multivoicitness and ambiguity or polyvalence Is it the case though in relation to for example Holocaust memory and given the important dictum of never again that some memorials have a desire and sometimes perhaps a duty to remember not just in perpetuity but also in singularity I Supposed my question is is there space for ambivalence for example in the case of a Holocaust memorial? There really has to be Because we need to ask that question or the memorial has to be able to for us to Ask the question toward what end are these events being remembered? Are we here remembering these events in order to ensure that Similar events never happen again, and that that's kind of the you know the premise the traditional premise of memorial But if so how are these memorials moving us to intervene? And if they're not moving us to intervene but they're only moving us to remember the same thing over and over again in this repetitive loop That we never escape To what extent did these memorials become part of what you know Freud would have turned kind of a melancholic response to loss as opposed to Enabling life to what extent Must we build memorials Holocaust memorials that enable for their life and not disable us with grief and grief and repetitive grief over and over again and So this is where I think this generation of artists and architects hopes that these memorials returned in the burden of memory To those who come looking for them will not be remembering for anybody or will that become a substitute for action? And this was this is the great skepticism of this generation spending all this time making memorials and museums as a substitute For acting to intervene in contemporary genocides is just an impossible condition of You know life after the Holocaust Which is why you know your skiffisher would point to the Holocaust Memorial and that process as a reason for intervening now to prevent another genocide in the case of the Serbs and the Coast of our Albanians and why current dictators tyrants Might be very interested in fact in ensuring that their societies Their national cultures do not remember crimes of past generations Which could actually remind us how to stop and prevent them You know this kind of brings to me to our you know current situation We don't know how it's going to unfold the Russian invasion of Ukraine But many people I know were very alarmed The moment that Putin declared that the National Memorial Project called Memorial in Moscow Remembering the crimes of the of the Soviet era and the mass incarceration in Siberia and the crimes of the NKVD That he had to get rid of that Memory of the former Soviet time in order to reconstitute a Soviet empire in in this weird way and That did kind of clear the way he had to get that off the table and it was just part of his preparation Just as part of the preparation was amassing all these forces and the borders before he could do that had to get rid of Memorial and begin rewriting actually the history of the Soviet Imperium and the Russian Imperium before he could go now President Zelensky of Ukraine of course have exactly right How can we say never again over and over for 80 years and then remain silent when one of the very first acts is the destruction of the Memorial of the new Memorial Center in Babin Yar. That's another warning for us as to the direction This war this invasion seems to be taking I'm afraid that's all we have time for in this episode of the Connecting Memories podcast My thanks go to today's guest speaker professor James Young Thanks for joining me on the podcast James for presenting your research and answering my questions about memory Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to hearing the rest of your podcast as well For more information about connecting memories and for news of all future episodes, please visit connectingmemories.org I hope you've enjoyed this podcast and I hope you'll join us again for the next episode of the Connecting Memories podcast series Thanks for listening goodbye [Music]