Oren Baruch Stier. Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. xviii + 278 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55849-408-4.

Reviewed by K. Hannah Holtschneider (University of Edinburgh)
Published on H-German (May, 2005)

In recent years studies on the representation and memorialization of the Holocaust have moved to the cutting edge of Holocaust research outside of the field of history.[1] Indeed, conceptualizations of collective memory are in vogue and are being examined anew for their potential to help understand and deconstruct the process of the "making of memory." Many studies are aware of the treacherousness of applying these concepts to concrete situations of Holocaust remembrance. The study of conflicts of memory, when collective memories are constructed by and for different groups of people who relate to the history of the Holocaust, has come to the fore, in particular when considering the relations between non-Jewish Germans and Jews. What does it mean to relate to the history of the Holocaust, which is a received history for the majority of participants in the discourses of memory and for most people relating to representations of the Holocaust, already mediated for about four generations since the events themselves? How does such transmission of memory work and how do different groups of people relate to representations of the Holocaust such as video testimonies and Holocaust museums and memorials?

These questions are also issues faced by Oren Baruch Stier, who, with his first book, charts the territory of Holocaust representation in four contexts: icons, video testimonies, Holocaust museums, and rituals of remembrance. The choice of these media reflects the concern of the author with the mediation of Holocaust memory through new technologies (video testimony and IT in museums) as well as via preferred or emerging media of Holocaust remembrance in public culture. This reviewer, in her own research, is interested in approaches to the ethics of remembrance--broadly speaking, in the question of how the representation of the Holocaust and thus the mediation of Holocaust memory can be responsible both to the people about whom the history of Holocaust talks and to the needs of contemporary audiences who (seek to) relate to this history. The viewers or audiences of Holocaust representation come from many different cultural, national, and religious contexts and bring with them many different interpretations of the "Holocaust," or, possibly, none at all. I am mindful in particular of the necessarily different discourses of memory inhabited by non-Jewish Germans and Jews. In an American context, visitors to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (USHMM), or Americans who are exposed to video testimony in their classrooms, are heterogeneous groups of people who come to any representation of the Holocaust with their own memories and stories, which may or may not include references to the Holocaust. Thus I am particularly keen to find clues in Stier's discussion about how such varied audiences are able to engage with the forms of Holocaust representation discussed in Committed to Memory, and about the ways in which criteria for an ethical remembrance of the Holocaust can be observed. Another concern in the current academic discussion is Holocaust denial. In this light, many informed readers would see it as a question of great urgency whether Stier's discourse regarding the mediation of Holocaust memory suggests criteria which critique the possibility of emplotting Holocaust memory as Holocaust denial.

Working at the intersection of "Jewish and cultural studies" (p. 18), Stier's interest is in "mediations" of the Holocaust, namely in the activities associated with remembering primarily among those not directly affected by the Holocaust, but somehow tied to its history, such as the Jewish community in the United States. However, he is also mindful of the ramifications of Holocaust remembrance in the wider community, though often "Produced by Jews ... to remember Jews," Holocaust remembrance is increasingly consumed by non-Jews (p. 18). He seeks to unpack the oft-quoted imperative zakhor! ("remember!") and to examine the "memorial strategies for representing the past and conveying its important reality in the present" (p. 19).

Stier begins his discussion by charting the history of conceptualizing collective memory in the wake of Maurice Halbwachs's seminal study. Negotiating the current terminological conflicts, he suggests "that any sharp distinction made between then and now, there and here, authentic and inauthentic, memory, rememory, and postmemory, detracts from the constructed and mediated nature of memory as a mechanism for representing the impact of the past on the present" (p. 14). Stier is interested in a portrayal of the mechanisms of the transmission of memory in different forms of Holocaust representation. His discussion assumes a context of collective memory which is almost exclusively Jewish American and is founded on what is assumed to be a shared basis of Holocaust interpretation. Stier mentions a number of times that large parts of the audience of representations of the Holocaust are non-Jewish, and that he hopes "that insights relating to Jewish issues will inform those relating to broader cultural ones, and vice versa" (p. 18). However, in practice he is surprisingly unconcerned with the collective memories brought to and initiated by these representations of the Holocaust by non-Jewish participants.

Stier "wish[es] to highlight the ways in which Holocaust memory is adopted and appropriated through complex and serious strategies of embodiments by those who engage in and produce that memory" (p. 19). To that end he discusses the creation and uses of Holocaust icons such as the railway car (notably Safdie's memorial at Yad Vashem) and human hair (on location at Auschwitz and in the discussion about displaying it elsewhere). Further, Stier examines the use of icons in both Art Spiegelman's cartoon Maus, representing Spiegelman's engagement with his parents' experiences during the Holocaust, and in Emily Prager's novel Eve's Tattoo, in an effort to determine strategies of relating to the Holocaust by engaging its symbols in a contemporary setting. The author defines icons from a religious studies perspective using "the term icon because of its religious connotations, which speak [sic] to the issue of the presumed sanctity of Holocaust symbols and, especially, artifacts" (p. 41). According to Stier, an icon is "a mediator of memorial experience and ... a model of sacred engagement and embodiment" (p. 32). As such "Holocaust icons ... are thus 'living,' embodied distillations of Holocaust images, of the 'Holocaust' itself" (p. 44). Icons stimulate the memory of the viewer: "we as visitor-voyeurs must be able to trace a path through the icon to memory to discover our relationship to the past" (p. 47). As such an icon is a self-conscious referent to something beyond itself, which challenges its audience to examine their relationship to the past it represents. Tracing the path through the icon to the past is the process of mediation initiated by one's encounter with the icon. When properly encountered, Stier argues, the mediation process facilitated by an icon obliterates "the distinction between then and now, there and here" (p. 45).

The following discussion of the iconic mode of representation in Maus and Eve's Tattoo highlights two effective uses of icons to generate and pass on Holocaust memory to their readers: "The Maus volumes themselves become iconic here, standing in, at least, for Spiegelman, for other mediators of memory and providing an important link to the Jewish experience of World War II, writ archetypally via the author's particular technique" (p. 54). What Maus achieves in a Jewish context of reference, Eve's Tattoo provides for a non-Jewish audience where the issue of appropriation of Holocaust memory is always tangible. Eve's project of remembering a victim of the death camps by tattooing the number of Auschwitz inmate "Eva" on her arm turns into a complex story about the propriety of Holocaust memory and interpretations of the term "Holocaust." This is an engaging chapter and Stier has provided us with a rich analysis of the representation of the Holocaust through icons, uniting the discussion of media as diverse as monuments, photographs, cartoons, and written text. Stier's discourse relies on the representation and its audience sharing a context of Holocaust interpretation--thus the icons of railway cars, human hair, and tattoos evoke a tapestry of associations and provide a link to historical narratives which can be explored through these icons. Only Eve's Tattoo--by revealing that the tattoo, representing the victim "Eva" in fact belongs to a non-Jewish German who was a fervent Nazi and was deported to Auschwitz and tattooed "by mistake"--uses icons of the Holocaust to challenge precisely what these icons stand for. While Stier is aware that icons are open to misuse he posits that, rather than censoring their use, one should ask "How are Holocaust icons positioned in order to convey certain commemorative messages" (p. 30)?

While I would concur with this suggestion, the question arises as to whether Stier's discourse has, on the one hand, been sensitive to the different backgrounds of the audiences of Holocaust icons and, on the other hand, whether he has addressed the possibility of misusing such icons for the purpose of emplotting Holocaust memory as Holocaust denial. What do icons suggest to people who have no or only minimal historical knowledge of the Holocaust? Arguably, icons work only when their iconic and "sacred" status is agreed on by those who refer to them. However, many of those exposing themselves to Holocaust icons may bring different interpretations of the history of the Holocaust with them, which may dispute the status of the icons as "sacred." This is easily imaginable when thinking of non-Jewish audiences, but in the Jewish community, too, there is disagreement about the interpretation of the "Holocaust"--its centrality to contemporary Jewish identity and its understanding as a "religious" event--and thus of the iconic status of the images. More worryingly, iconic mediations of Holocaust memory could, using the methods described by Stier, be deployed for the opposite ends and be emplotted as narratives of denial. Positing that the Holocaust is a "sacred reality" (p. xiii), Stier may counter, is protection enough. However, we have seen that this is problematic when considering the varied backgrounds of the audiences of Holocaust memory. Is he positing criteria for the evaluation of Holocaust representation and mediation which guard against the use of Holocaust icons to tell a story of denial? This question also arises with regard to Stier's analyses of videotestimony and Holocaust museums.

Video testimony is the next medium of mediation analyzed, and Stier examines the work of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (VHF) and the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. While the former aims at a wide general audience, the latter, one of the oldest collections of video testimony, targets a scholarly market, and this is reflected both in its framing technique and in the policy of restricting access to the testimony material. Stier offers an erudite discussion of the different strategies of filming testimony. His main interest lies in discovering the processes of mediation of memory when engaging with these representations of the Holocaust. Following Felman and Laub,[2] the author suggests that "Holocaust videotestimonies ... offer the viewer the desired epistemological content in their framework for the repetition of trauma and the performance of memory" (p. 89).

In this context Stier's exploration of the impact of information technology, in particular the CD-ROM, offers a novel contribution to the discussion on the future of Holocaust memory. The CD-Rom Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust, produced by the Shoah Foundation, uses testimony recorded by the VHF. Stier concludes that the CD-Rom domesticates the Holocaust by making it "into a commodity, a product absorbed into the technological web all around us. In giving the viewer choice and almost endless navigability, the VHF may be detracting from the (already complicated) temporal and spatial reference points of testimony" (p. 106). However, the author suggests that "rather than suspect the video medium for leading us away from memory and tradition ... we must realize that testimonies like these may actually lead us back to a more solid and grounded sense of the presence of the past and to a clearer feeling for the importance and relevance of Holocaust memory" (p. 108). Even if this is the case and one is aware of the framing strategies of this "more solid and grounded sense of the past," Stier continues to suggest that, as with the icon, the border between insider and outsider established by the TV screen "is really an artificial dividing line. What must happen, what ... does happen, is that, from both sides, that frame is broken, violated, disrupted. The survivor speaks across it, directly to us, and asks us to remember her story, to fold it into some aspect of our own historical, social, and cultural awareness. And, equally important, we, in watching the testimony, enter her frame of reference and, in some small way, attempt to understand, apprehend, even embody the horrors she witnessed" (p. 108). As in the chapter on icons of the Holocaust, Stier assumes here that the viewer of testimony is willing (and able) to share the context of representation, however briefly, with the witness. It is not clear that this attitude can in fact be taken for granted. While the protected context of the Fortunoff Archive may guarantee such consensus, the release of video testimony into the commercial context of CD-Rom distribution and the preparations by the VHF to make video testimony accessible on the internet do not. Stier himself is aware of this. He suggests that the aim of using video testimony is to produce knowledge of "the trauma of survival or witnessing" (p. 107), best achieved through watching unedited full-length testimonies. However, the achievement of this aim is complicated in "any case where the frame of testimony offers an alternate (and possibly redemptive) narrative orientation to that intended by the witness. But as long as the 'secondary witness' is sufficiently sensitive to the primary voice and her testimonial bond to it, false consolation may be kept at bay" (p. 107). This seems too much to hope for. Again I am struck by the clarity and erudition of Stier's analysis and disappointed by his apparent reluctance to offer a discourse of memorialization that would develop criteria for an ethics of Holocaust remembrance. Holocaust deniers engage similar images and representations of the Holocaust and could employ these to form a discourse of memory that aims at the obliteration of Holocaust memory proper. The mediation of Holocaust memory through video testimony may be misused to the same ends since the frame of testimony, at least in its electronic navigability, allows readings that undermine the entire frame of reference. There is a sizeable body of literature on this topic, notably in a religious studies context, which could have been engaged.[3]

Stier discusses the representation of the Holocaust at the USHMM, and at the Wiesenthal Foundation's Beit Hashoah--Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles (MOT). He points to the problematic aspects of engagement with the Holocaust in the traditional museological setting of the USHMM where the narrative centers on original artifacts and where the architecture and display blur the boundaries between museum and a memorial's sacred space. Here one would wish for a more detailed analysis of the mediating process of memory for both Jewish and non-Jewish visitors. While Stier offers an informed critique of the representation of the Holocaust in the USHMM, he does not dwell much on the ways in which the setup of the museum and the display engage a visitor. The reader finds a more complex analysis of a mediating process in the context of a museum in the discussion of the MOT. Here, the changing organization of the exhibition space, the display, and the use of interactive technology are carefully analyzed as the reader follows Stier on his visits to the MOT. However, despite his informed criticism of the representations of the Holocaust in both museums, Stier concludes that "Museums ultimately serve to tell stories, to find ways of speaking out of the silence that is the abyss of the past and of conveying such speech to visitors" (p. 148). Having identified what is problematic in these two American contexts of Holocaust representation and mediation of memory, where would Stier like mediation to go? What could be different? His criticisms, cautiously formulated, are somewhat unfocused. It is striking that Stier, although noting that the majority of visitors to both the USHMM and the MOT are non-Jews, does not once leave the confines of a specifically Jewish context of mediating Holocaust memory. In particular in the context of the museums, this seems an odd omission. Stier appears to operate in a context in which there is a consensus about what is meant by the "Holocaust," or at least a willingness to absorb the narratives identifying the Holocaust that are represented in the variety of media Stier discusses. Into this context speak icons, testimony, museums, rituals. However, what happens when this agreement on what "the Holocaust" is cannot be guaranteed? What happens when the visitor or audience of the representations of the Holocaust do not share this context of reference, do not belong to the American Jewish community and hence do not share the communal context in which such Holocaust memory is generated? Susan Crane notes that while museums "deliberately forge memories in physical form ... the minds of the visitors ... may also contest the meaning of the objects, histories, and memories provided by the museum. Prior memories and meanings may resist the museal collection."[4] Again the issue of Holocaust denial springs to mind, and it would have been useful had Stier addressed the suggestion that Holocaust museums may not be effective in combating narratives of denial.[5]

Following the mediation of Holocaust memory in museums on American soil, Stier broaches new ground with his discussion of the annual March of the Living which takes groups of American Jewish youth to Poland and Israel. He is mindful of the ideological underpinnings of the march which construct a strongly Zionist narrative where the focus of remembrance is on Israel, the sites of the former death camps in today's Poland being a staging post for the reinforcement of Jewish identity in the present: "The March of the Living, as an ideological and religious experience, is an excellent example of commemorative performance in which the desire for memory has outrun the need for history" (p. 184). Stier appraises this quality of the march, and suggests that "The shared aspect of ritual may help explain the success of the March of the Living in fostering a greater sense of Jewish identity in its participants. Here, memory is ultimately self-reflexive, creating a new discourse for memorialization dependent on ritualized engagement and embodiment" (p. 185). "It is exactly that kind of powerful sense of affiliation, I would argue, that is at the heart not only of the march agenda but of all other forms of Holocaust commemoration as well" (p. 189). Stier's discussion of the March of the Living is the strongest analysis in the book, following his criteria of discovering the process of mediating Holocaust memory best. This is largely due to the medium of ritual performance in which participants in the march engage with representations of the Holocaust at the same time as they enact their own performances of the memory mediated to them through the representations. Stier, following the March of the Living as an observer-participant, can accompany the process, note the reactions of the group, and test them against the aims formulated by the creators of the project. The March of the Living is thus a coherent process of representation and mediation of memory, observable in a way in which icons, videotestimony, and museums are not because there the mediation of memory is not observable other than for the researcher himself.

Iwona Irwin-Zarecka's important book Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory describes how the framing of collective memories and the drawing of boundaries around communities often employs the creation of an Other against which the self-understanding of one's own community can be established.[6] In particular, memories of victimization create powerful identifications and facilitate the establishment of boundaries. The March of the Living, but also the USHMM, work with powerful representations of an "Other" against which Jewish and American identities respectively are legitimized and strengthened. A critical examination of how those narratives of "Othering" work would have been an asset to Stier's excellent observations. Even staying within a Jewish context of reflections on Holocaust memory, such a critical discussion would also have pointed to tensions underlying the mediation of Holocaust memory to (young) Jews at the USHMM and during the March of the Living. The March of the Living employs a particular Zionist perspective, suggesting that a Jewish Diaspora in Europe is an impossibility after the Holocaust, Europe (specifically Poland) being the "graveyard" of Europe's Jews. This narrative (contested in the Jewish community in particular in Europe) finds a complementary expression in a museum context in a specific interpretation of the representation of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem. Tim Cole suggests that "At Washington, DC, the 'Holocaust' is being portrayed as 'their' story. At Yad Vashem the Holocaust is being portrayed as 'our' story. And therefore at Washington, DC, there is a rejection of the twinning of 'Holocaust and Heroism' so central to the Israeli telling of the 'Holocaust' at Yad Vashem. It is the American troops and the righteous gentiles who are the 'heroes' and not the Jews. The Jews are 'victims' not 'heroes', and their story of victimization is revealed on the TV-monitors which we crane our necks to view."[7]

Representations of the past have a responsibility towards the past as well as the present. Which kind of memories are able to reflect such responsibility and which are not is, as Stier's discussion implies, always in flux and cannot be determined with a simple formula. In particular the expanding technological possibilities used in the process of mediating Holocaust memory open up new challenges and, as Stier points out, new dangers. Stier's book is characterized by careful analysis and close description. It may not be part of his stated task in this volume to develop criteria for the responsible mediation of Holocaust memory. Even so, the omission of any reference to the need for such discussion is disappointing.

Notwithstanding this criticism, Committed to Memory is a significant contribution to scholarship on the mediation of Holocaust memory. Readers who are familiar with discourses of collective memory and Holocaust representation will benefit from Stier's application of the discourse to the MOT, new media such as the CD-Rom, and the March of the Living. Those new to this field of study will also benefit from the careful presentation of current scholarship on more commonly discussed topics such as Holocaust iconography, testimony, and the USHMM.

Notes

[1]. To name but a few: Burkhard Asmuss, ed., Holocaust: Der nationalsozialistische Vlkermord und die Motive seiner Erinnerung (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2002); Bettina Bannasch and Almuth Hammer, eds., Verbot der Bilder--Gebot der Erinnerung: Mediale Reprsentationen der Shoah (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2004); Ulrich Borsdorf and Theodor Heinrich Grtter, eds., Orte der Erinnerung: Denkmal, Gedenksttte, Museum (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999); Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, eds., Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Ronit Lentin, ed., Representing the Shoah for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004); James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

[2]. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).

[3]. To name but a few examples: Michael Dintenfass, "Truth's Other: Ethics, the History of the Holocaust, and Historiographical Theory after the Linguistic Turn," History and Theory 39, no. 1 (2000): pp. 1-20; John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994); John K. Roth, ed., Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1999); Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

[4]. Susan A. Crane, "Introduction: Of Museums and Memory," in Museums and Memory, ed. Susan A. Crane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 9.

[5]. Tim Cole, Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the "Shoah Business" (London: Duckworth, 1999), p.187.

[6]. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance.

[7]. Tim Cole, Images of the Holocaust, pp. 156f.

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Citation: K. Hannah Holtschneider. Review of Stier, Oren Baruch, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust. H-German, H-Net Reviews. May, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10537

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