The Problems of Remembrance

...A year later the United States Holocaust Memorial Council was set up to implement the commission's recommendations...

...Their presence and the story of their compilation—told by Linenthal primarily through Eliach's reminiscences—enable one to achieve that state of mimetic approximation to the unimaginable that lies beyond the numbing horror of pilesof bodies and the abstraction of statistics...

...Philosophical and political differences among the council members led to the rejection of several designs for the permanent exhibit, and a consensus was arrived at only after Elie Wiesel resigned the chairmanship of the council in December 1985...

...Although memory can never be assured by a single entity and must be sustained by a host of discourses, the Holocaust Museum is successful precisely because it goes to the limits...

...If the purpose of memorialization is expressed in the phrase "Never again...

...James Ingo Freed's building speaks as much through its use of materials as through its memory-laden construction of space...

...It has supplied the master maps to reconstruct cultures, both national and universal...

...It came close to resigning en bloc in 1985, though, when President Ronald Reagan during a trip to Germany visited the cemetery in Bitburg where SS men are buried...

...Although the notion that memory is instructive and redemptive had to be one of the bedrock assumptions of the Holocaust Museum, Linenthal himself is clearly not of the school of redemption through remembrance...

...But the early years of wrenching intellectual debate, Linenthal argues persuasively, were necessary to the process of creation...

...then Linenthal's discussion of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, which was in full public view at the time of the museum's dedication ceremonies and triggered official Jewish protests, appropriately demonstrates how memory became an unwelcome burden for Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton—and, I would add, for those in the Jewish community who mil-itantly reject any comparison of the Holocaust with the Bosnian tragedy...

...This, he points out, has served to strengthen rather than weaken the image of the Holocaust as a centrally Jewish experience...

...Perhaps the most moving pages of Linenthal's book are those devoted to Yaf-fa Eliach's collection of photographs of Jewish life in her childhood Lithuanian shtetl, Eishishok (Ejszyszki...

...Whether it will preserve public memory in the longrun or eventually become invisible?like so many other monuments to historical events—remains to be seen...

...It has helped to articulate tradition and nationhood, heritage and public memory...

...and the complicity of the churches in America's "abandonment of the Jews...

...the controversy over the failure to bomb Auschwitz...

...It not only shows how memory is preserved but how it is formed by weaving architecture, open space, artifacts, images, documents, and filmed testimony into a coherent, unforgettable whole...

...All the multiple frustrations—over the appropriate building, the range of horror to be displayed and the victim groups to be includeri—laid the groundwork for the post-Wiesel years of conceptualizing, collecting and organizing the elements of the exhibit...

...The appointment of the commission was at least partially due to Carter's troubles with the Jewish community...

...Linenthal's incisive description of the many schemes that were rejected gives depth to the story told by the museum, to its spatial and temporal sequencing, and to an ethics that balances respect for the dead and the needs of the survivor generation with those of the general public who know the Holocaust only through what they have heard or read...

...The museum presents the Shoah as a concrete tragedy, removing it from the realm of a theological mystery "owned" by the Jews and from a currently popular postmodern esthetics that instrumentalizes the Holocaust as the ultimate emblem of Western modernity...

...From the project's inception in 1978, when Jimmy Carter established the President's Commission on the Holocaust, narrow identity politics has clashed with complex questions about the politics of memory: Where are the boundaries of inclusion in the Holocaust0 How wil I the museum deal with Gypsies and homosexuals...

...And the United States Holocaust Museum is cause for optimism...

...Columbia...

...But the champions of life and renewal against the dead weight of the past have always attacked it as a symptom of ossification and forgetting...

...The Jewish population of Eishishok was wiped out by German Einsatzgruppen in two days of September 1941...

...At the same time, the pictures avoid inducing a facile cathartic empathy that falsely promises redemption through memory...

...Linenthal's detailed account of the internal and external pressures that built up at various planning stages is an object lesson in ethnic politics in the U.S...

...Edward Linenthal's meticulously researched, compellingly written and generously illustrated book tells the inside story of the protracted struggle to create a museum that evokes the pain, humiliation and devastation of the victims of the Final Solution...

...In the book's concluding pages, Washington's inaction in the Bosnian genocide is contrasted with the 1993 actions of the Christian community in Billings, Montana...

...Both those who feared a Disneyfica-tion and those who feared a chamber of horrors have been proved wrong...

...In a similar vein he takes up the late and initially halfhearted acceptance of the Gypsies in the planning for the museum, the relation of the project to African and Native Americans, and the unsettled ambivalence about the museum's being both "Jewish" and "American...

...But politics intervened in more external ways as well...

...today...

...Mounted on the walls of one of the chimney-like towers in the museum, these family photos from a lost community provide a powerful contrast to the museum's overwhelming documentation of devastation and death...

...after the War, often with the help of government agencies...

...Even more fascinating are the chapters dealing with the changing architectural approaches and with the development of the permanent exhibit...

...The Americanization of the Holocaust comes full circle in a politically meaningful way...

...So have those who would sanctify the Holocaust by declaring it beyond depiction through images and objects...

...The United States Holocaust Museum, opened in 1993 adjacent tothe Washington Mall, is a paradigmatic case...

...author...

...Ethnic representation on the commission (especially of Polish and Ukrainian Americans) was of course directly related to the matter of the museum's exhibits...

...Aware of the fragility of public and personal memory alike, he remains sober and penetrating in his discussion of omissions from the exhibit—including the thousands of perpetrators who made it to the U.S...

...Linenthal thus ends on a note of hope...

...As archive, monument and memorial it exemplifies the contested nature of an institution meant to preserve and construct memory...

...There the memory of the Holocaust was effectively mobilized to counter an outbreak of racist violence against the town's blacks and Jews...

...Linenthal's work stands out from the recent proliferation of such studies...

...What is the relation of the Holocaust to American national memory...

...The debate over whether, where and how to represent the Holocaust in this country brought to the fore a gamut of moral, political, religious, esthetic, architectural, and archival issues...

...While Western governments have failed to understand the imperative of a multiethnic nation in Bosnia and may still be haunted by that failure in years to come, Linenthal suggests that American democracy will live or die by its ability to affirm ethnic, racial and cultural differences with courage and compassion...

...Reviewed by Andreas Huyssen Professor of German and Comparative Literature...

...The author celebrates those who—like Michael Berenbaum and Sybil Milton?advocated the inclusion of "other" victims and comparisons with earlier instances of genocide...

...Twilight Memories " THROUGHOUT modern history, the museum has been embattled...

...At the moment, however, there can be no doubt about its positive reception, even though the spectacular mise-en-scene of some artifacts (the box car, the shoe exhibit) has elicited legitimate criticism...