Inadequate Memorials

Richard Brody on the vagueness and striking imperfection of Berlin's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust:

The memorial also evokes a graveyard for those who were unburied or thrown into unmarked pits, and several uneasily tilting stelae suggest an old, untended, or even desecrated cemetery. The metaphorical possibilities are varied—too much so. The play of imagination that the memorial provokes is piously generic: something to do with death. It contrasts unfavorably with, for instance, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The latter is, in its details, an imperfect exhibit; there’s a little too much information dispensed with encyclopedic authority, a little bit of kitschy curatorial cleverness; but it is a true and specific memorial.

It recreates the persecution, the flight, the refuge, the life in danger and in hiding, the arrest, and the murder of Anne Frank as well as of other members of her family and their fellow-refugees in the secret annex. It’s a memorial to one of the murdered Jews of Europe. Eisenman’s installation commemorates the six million murdered Jews collectively; but there is no more a collective death than there is a collective life; an appropriate memorial would commemorate six million times one.