Volume 67, Issue 7

Young Addresses Students at Annual Book Project
by Yoni Gross

In the aftermath of September 11, Yeshiva has designated the topic of this year’s annual book project as “Writing in the Wake of Trauma: Responses and Responsibility.”  For the semester’s final event, James E. Young, Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, visited Yeshiva on December 4 to discuss his writings, particularly The Texture of Memory, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994.

The discussion centered around how people in general, and nations in particular, use monuments to create a national memory of traumatic events, such as the Holocaust.  In a slide show that depicted holocaust memorials from Berlin to Jerusalem, Professor Young showed his audience a variety of styles and philosophies for creating monuments for tragedy.  He also explained how “these things are located in political time for political utility.”  

One example of this feature was the monument erected at Auschwitz by the Polish government.  Records of the executions at that camp show that perhaps as many as 2 million people were killed there during World War II, and that approximately 1.2 million of those were Jewish.  The monument erected by the polish government, however, is dedicated to the four million people executed by the Nazis.  Young explained that this falsification served the needs of the Polish government at the time by making the site a place of national tragedy by claiming that far more political prisoners were executed there alongside the Jews; this, in effect, made the Jewish deaths seem fewer by comparison.

Young went on to address the problem faced by Germany in memorializing its actions during the Holocaust.  Germany is faced with a dilemma that has never been posed to any nation on earth before: how to memorialize your country’s own worst crimes.  In the past, nations have hidden such incidents from national memory.  As the professor pointed out by way of example, we don’t have any memorials on the Mall in Washington, D.C. to the slavery of African Americans before the Civil War or the near-total destruction of the Native Americans who populated this country before the arrival of Europeans.  Germany, however, is pressured by the world at large to remember its past crimes and to create an official national memorial of some sort.  

Young mentioned that it was because he was able to identify the problems with memorializing the Holocaust in Germany that secured his appointment by the Berlin Senate to the five-member commission for Germany's national “Memorial to Europe's Murdered Jews.”  When offered this position, Young told the Senate he believed the task was best dealt with through the annual competitions held in Berlin in recent years to find a proper memorial.

During the lecture, Young showed a brief film, depicting a major point of Holocaust memorial in Israel, the one minute of silence on Yom Hashoah.  Filmed with multiple cameras in the busiest parts of Jerusalem, it is a dramatic representation of a nation joining together to remember an reflect.

The two-hour presentation was a varied and informative look at the many different types of memorials people have erected to remember this tragedy, as well as the many ways nations choose to remember their own histories.  His final point, however, was that we cannot simply erect a monument, and have that stand in place of memory.  Monuments serve as mechanisms, and if a monument becomes an excuse to forget an event, then it has failed in its purpose.

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