The Last Page
Gitlin, Todd
COLLECTIVE MEMORY goes up for grabs wherever people suffer from dispossession and feel the call of pride. Memories are not born but made, remade, not natural but "constructed, " and like the...
...For all the regearing of textbooks in recent years, for all the troubled minds on the question of "whiteness," America strangely lacks a serious, centrally placed museum on slavery, and more generally on the multiple experiences of African Americans...
...Surely Kosovo and the West Bank abundantly illustrate the point...
...No doubt there would be horrendous disputes about just how to tell the frightful story and just how to end it...
...Since the Smithsonian canceled a Hiroshima memorial show, there's been a panic on in Washington, a flight from exhibits that anyone might disagree with for any reason...
...The story of slavery and its sequels is not just a story for blacks, just as the Holocaust is not just a story for Jews...
...It's meant to be a thorn in the flesh of the Germans...
...No doubt other groups would lay their own claims...
...Where, I've wondered for some time, is the national museum on slavery...
...It's not for the Jews," he said emphatically...
...No doubt a museum on slavery and racial oppression would be contentious...
...Some African Americans have been heard to say that life is hard enough without a vivid display of the brutalities that marked most of the history of the Africans dragged to this continent and the history that befell them here...
...But whites aren't the only obstacles...
...A thorn in the flesh of the Germans...
...TODD GITLIN 128 DISSENT / Summer 1999...
...In 1995, employees of the Library of Congress protested a photographic show, "Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation," that documented the buildings where slaves led their lives around the plantation manors, juxtaposing photos to the texts of slave narratives...
...The original design by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra envisioned a vast field of spiky stones, a field of thorns...
...Forgetfulness has its virtues, as long as what the forgetters agree to forget are grievances that blind them to the legitimate grievances of the other populations...
...No Whitney Museum ejaculations of white guilt, draped as art, can remedy the lack...
...People, even—or especially—a wronged people, can drown in spiritual irredentism...
...Even Rochester, New York, for many years the dwelling place of Frederick Douglass, and later his burial place, lacks a museum devoted to this exemplary man...
...Habermas's ripping phrase came back to mind during another recent conversation, this one about the lack of a national museum of the African-American experience...
...Memories are not born but made, remade, not natural but "constructed, " and like the memorials constructed to overcome memory, they are—and of necessity must be—contested...
...But painful as officially sanctioned memory is, the alternative, a smiley-face theory of history, is worse...
...Employees protested that the show made them feel bad, whereupon squeamish Library administrators took it down...
...After a demurral from Gerhard Schroder's newly elected social democratic government, along with leaders of Germany's Jews, the field was scaled back and a library of Holocaust archives added...
...That there is not yet room on the Washington Mall for a thoughtful exploration of the core national trauma is a sign of evasion— white evasion, mainly...
...The president of an AfricanAmerican Cultural Association told a reporter, "An exhibit is supposed to celebrate something positive...
...No doubt a thorn in the flesh is disturbing...
...Not long ago, I asked Jurgen Habermas his view of the dispute over a Holocaust memorial in Berlin...
...An excess of memory can drive people mad...
...Habermas, a center of moral clarity in Germany for some thirty-five years now, told me that he preferred the original, more drastic design...
...The Library also plucked four antilynching cartoons out of an exhibit of NAACP graphics, saying the images were "difficult...
Vol. 46 • July 1999 • No. 3
