Calling Memory into Place

Dora Apel

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978807853
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forgetting? And how can inherited family and cultural traumas be channeled in productive ways?In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of "unforgetting"—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel's return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer.These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations.

Part I

Passages and Streets

1

A Memorial for Walter Benjamin

The general outlines of the inconclusive story are well known. On September 25, 1940, a small band of weary refugees made their way by foot over the Pyrenees in a nine-hour journey from France to the steep rocky coast of a small Spanish village on the northern Costa Brava in Catalonia, on the other side of the French border. The Jewish writer and critic Walter Benjamin was forty-eight years old. That evening, after securing rooms in a hotel, Benjamin’s papers were found not to be in order by the local authorities. Under threat of being sent back the next day and fearing internment in a camp, Benjamin died that night in his hotel room, a suicide resulting from a morphine overdose. The other members of his group made it safely to America. But there are odd elements to the story. A manuscript Benjamin carried across the Pyrenees disappeared. The suicide note, two, actually, that he allegedly left were destroyed by his traveling companion, Henny Gurland, who then rewrote them herself as she “remembered” them (one for her, one for Theodor Adorno). The coroner’s report mentioned no evidence of morphine. Other details do not mesh. Benjamin’s identity was confused with a Dr. Benjamin Walter, and his remains were placed in the Catholic part of the Portbou cemetery for five years, after which they were removed and placed in a collective grave. They can no longer be found. An article in the New York Times intimates that Benjamin did not commit suicide after all, but was murdered by a Stalinist agent—his traveling companion, Henny Gurland.¹

Dani Karavan, Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin, 1990–1994, exterior view, Portbou, Spain. (Photo: Gregory Wittkopp.)

A headstone was erected and placed in the Portbou cemetery in 1990, the year Israeli artist Dani Karavan began work on a monument next to the cemetery, Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin, completed four years later.

The road to Portbou from Barcelona is arduous, with many twists and turns around a mountainous terrain with a sheer drop, doublings back, and near terrifying moments when other cars or vans approach from the opposite direction on the narrow road. We rise higher and higher, then descend to the sea and the former fishing village. My fear that the way to the monument will be unmarked is laid to rest by a sign that proclaims “Walter Benjamin Monument” with an arrow. We enter a hotel across from the Tourist Information Bureau, which has postcards and brochures for the monument at the front desk, and pay double the rate of an inside room for one with a view of the sea.

We drop our bags and walk to the monument, arriving a little after nine o’clock in the evening. It’s still light out. A rusted steel portal provides the entrance to a corridor through the rock to the sea. The picture postcard at the hotel does not prepare me for the effect of this passage, the long flight of stairs through the steel rectangle ending above the water thrashing over the rocks below, visible through a thick pane of glass set two-thirds of the way down. The glass prevents one from accidentally falling—or from hurtling oneself down—but the pull through the glass is surprising, haunting, frightening.

Benjamin’s native German words are etched onto the glass at the top, translated at the bottom into three other languages, Spanish, French, and English: It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless. Though Benjamin wrote these words before the Holocaust, I nonetheless think of the gas chambers. But this monument is not intended for the unheard of and unheralded; it’s for Benjamin. Sitting on the steps in front of the glass, inside the sea of sound, water, and wind, I notice the blue sky behind me reflected as a rectangle on the water and rocks below, my own shadow within the rectangle, dark and anonymous.

Dani Karavan, Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin, 1990–1994, interior view, Portbou, Spain. (Photo: Gregory Wittkopp.)

The wind gusts up with a surprising power in Portbou; the mountains become a dense blackness. The beach along the quay is made up of sharp rocks. How was it sixty years ago crossing the Pyrenees on foot? At that dark moment during the night? The thought of flying off the narrow winding mountain road into the sea on our return the next day seizes me with terror again and again during the night.

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What is the function of the public monument? Traditionally, monuments are meant to yield resolution and consensus by providing a form of historical closure to contentious events. As a commemorative form, the public monument is meant to last forever as a repository for an “unchanging” collective memory. Think of Maya Lin’s Memorial Wall in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City. The debates surrounding them raise basic questions: What memory is to be preserved? How? For whom? In the nineteenth century, these questions were invariably resolved in the form of heroic figures performing symbolically noble acts or triumphant gestures in a manner consistent with the prevailing myths and ideology of the dominant culture. Thus, it proved impossible to remember slavery through the public representation of a black person; instead, Abraham Lincoln stood for all. In the second half of the twentieth century, after the profound disillusionment produced by the Second World War and subsequent wars, memorializing monuments have increasingly departed from the redemptive model, becoming nonrepresentational and more concerned with loss, mourning, and sorrow than with purity of purpose, heroic sacrifice, or other moral certainties.

The central feature of Dani Karavan’s monument to Walter Benjamin, its memorializing function, like much contemporary art about the Holocaust, is predicated on the impossibility of a satisfying historical closure. There are other elements, too, dispersed around the area—an olive tree and a steel cube among others, but these take on the status of sentimental knickknacks cluttering the main idea. The steel passage itself invokes the uncertainties of the historical role and political agency of the individual. Is there another path, one that does not lead into the depths of the sea? The stairs that go downward also go up. Might Benjamin have resisted the gravity of despair?

2

“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”

Four years after the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer, Brown’s father led the rebuilding of a street memorial on the spot where his son had been shot to death. Immediately after his death in 2014, there were several makeshift memorials for Brown, consisting of stuffed animals, baseball caps, candles, balloons, and flowers. These were destroyed several times. One memorial burned while police watched and claimed they could not put out the fire; another memorial was driven over. A tree and dedication marker planted in a nearby park were vandalized when part of the tree was cut off and the marker stolen. Ferguson police representative Timothy Zoll described a new memorial on Canfield Drive around a telephone pole near the spot where splotches of Brown’s blood still stained the street as “a pile of trash.” He was suspended after the Washington Post quoted him. Each time the street memorial was destroyed, members of the community rebuilt it, and protests against the killing went on for months. In 2015, a year after Brown’s death, the city finally embedded a permanent memorial plaque in the sidewalk near the spot where he was killed.¹ This, however, did not prevent the rebuilding of the street memorial in 2018 on the fourth anniversary of the killing, one of several commemorative events. The street memorial keeps Brown’s memory alive, invoking the presence of the departed, the injustice of his death, the grief of the bereaved, and the importance of place when a violent and sudden death has occurred, and communicates all this with the public.

What is the significance of the permanent plaque embedded in the sidewalk by the city when cities have not installed such markers for the thousands of other young black people murdered by the police? The plaque may be seen as a concession wrested from the city, which must have realized that destruction of the memorials would not prevent their reconstruction. Although the city claimed the piles of flowers, balloons, and teddy bears were a traffic hazard, the greater problem with the street memorial was that it inverted the memorial function of providing closure to a painful event, instead serving as a form of ongoing protest that would not allow the killing to recede into the past. The street memorial was not meant to provide closure, but to prevent it.

Scholars postulate that the increasingly pervasive appearance of roadside memorials constructs new forms of mourning, that the old rituals no longer seem sufficient, especially when death is sudden, violent, and senseless. While most roadside memorials mark traffic fatalities and may be understood as public places for private grief, Michael Brown’s street memorials are the opposite, becoming public places for collective grief; we could regard the street memorial as a traumatic liminal space for transformation from passive victimization to activist memory, and in this way, a forum for community consolidation.²

In other words, those who build and gather at the street memorials refuse to allow Michael Brown’s brutal killing to be forgotten. Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch, who led the highly criticized investigation into Brown’s death and did not file charges against Officer Darren Wilson, was ousted in 2018 by black Ferguson City councilman Wesley Bell, who vowed criminal justice reform but has resisted pressure to reopen the investigation into the killing. Brown’s mother called on the Missouri governor to reopen the investigation in an online petition with sixteen thousand signatures, despite receiving $1.5 million from the city in a wrongful death lawsuit.³

People gather at makeshift memorial for Michael Brown on Canfield Drive where he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson; Ferguson, Missouri, August 30, 2014. (Photo: ginosphotos/iStockphoto.com.)

In an amateur photo taken at the site, mostly black community members gather, adding more objects to the growing tokens of mourning or paying their respects through their presence near the site. A woman approaches holding a young girl by the hand while several young men solemnly contemplate the memorial, one protectively crossing his arms. The photo is taken at a random moment, the mourners affectively connecting to the death site as an act of embodied and collective memory.

The protests began immediately after the killing and spread across the nation. Time pictured the protest on its September 1, 2014 cover with an image of a single protester on her knees in the road with her hands up, facing a flash bomb set off by police. Despite the defiance in her locked elbows and flexed wrists, the posture has the quality of lone sacrifice. It represents one of two dominant kinds of images in response to the murder of Michael Brown: black protesters with their hands up in the posture of surrender, or police in riot gear sometimes aiming weapons at the protesters. In solidarity with the demonstrators, sympathizers from around the country posted photos with their hands up on social media such as Twitter’s #handsupdontshoot, while the chant of “hands up, don’t shoot” became a constant refrain on the streets of Ferguson and in demonstrations from New York to Los Angeles.

The “hands up” gesture is equivalent to an animal in a fight baring its neck, its most vulnerable part, signaling defenselessness and submission. According to Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson, Brown was shot with his hands up, facing the cop that shot him six times, with the final, fatal bullet entering the top of his head, suggesting he was going down or on his knees. The gesture of surrender, then, failed to do its work, exacerbating the outrage at the killing of an unarmed black teenager by making it seem even more vicious and gratuitous.

The summary execution of a black man by the police is a common occurrence in America, and the cops routinely suffer no consequences or else get a slap on the wrist, indicating the official ...