Holocaust Icons

Oren Baruch Stier

• Verlag: Rutgers University Press
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813574042
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire de l'Holocauste

The Holocaust has bequeathed to contemporary society a cultural lexicon of intensely powerful symbols, a vocabulary of remembrance that we draw on to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible horror of the Shoah. Engagingly written and illustrated with more than forty black-and-white images, Holocaust Icons probes the history and memory of four of these symbolic relics left in the Holocaust’s wake.
 
Jewish studies scholar Oren Stier offers in this volume new insight into symbols and the symbol-making process, as he traces the lives and afterlives of certain remnants of the Holocaust and their ongoing impact. Stier focuses in particular on four icons: the railway cars that carried Jews to their deaths, symbolizing the mechanics of murder; the Arbeit Macht Frei (“work makes you free”) sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, pointing to the insidious logic of the camp system; the number six million that represents an approximation of the number of Jews killed as well as mass murder more generally; and the persona of Anne Frank, associated with victimization. Stier shows how and why these icons—an object, a phrase, a number, and a person—have come to stand in for the Holocaust: where they came from and how they have been used and reproduced; how they are presently at risk from a variety of threats such as commodification; and what the future holds for the memory of the Shoah.
 
In illuminating these icons of the Holocaust, Stier offers valuable new perspective on one of the defining events of the twentieth century. He helps readers understand not only the Holocaust but also the profound nature of historical memory itself.

1

Different Trains

Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance

If I could include it here, I would begin with a musical excerpt. When Steve Reich conceptualized Different Trains, his work for string quartet and tape, he reflected on early childhood memories dating back to 1939–1942, when, following his parents’ bicoastal separation, he would visit them with his governess, traveling back and forth by train between New York and Los Angeles. “While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.”1

In his composition, Reich used several speech excerpts from testimonies by three survivors, all roughly his age, recorded by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and the William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the New York Public Library. He added other recorded reminiscences from his governess and from a retired Pullman porter, as well as recorded American and European train sounds of the 1930s and 1940s, prerecorded string passages, and a live string quartet to complete the layers of the work. But rather than fit the oral history recordings into his musical concept, Reich notes, he fit the music to correspond to the pitch and rhythm of selected speech samples. In this way, the speech recordings “generate[d] the musical material for musical instruments.”2 Structurally, Reich divided his piece into three: part I, America—Before the War; part II, Europe—During the War; and part III, After the War. Part I features speech excerpts from Virginia, Reich’s childhood governess, and from Mr. Davis, the retired train porter. They include, for example, excerpts in which Mr. Davis says, “From New York to Los Angeles” and Virginia says, “Different trains every time,” repeatedly. Part II highlights reminiscences from the three Holocaust survivors, Rachella, Rachel, and Paul. For example, we hear Rachella say, “into those cattle wagons, for four days and four nights, and then we went through these strange-sounding names, Polish names, lots of cattle wagons there.” Part III includes excerpts from all five, merging America and Europe and, as its title indicates, erasing the distinction between the two locales.

Musicologist Amy Lynn Wlodarski, in her close and thorough reading of Reich’s piece, complicates Reich’s presentation of his work and our reception of it. Wlodarski recognizes the special technique behind the composer’s “‘speech melodies,’ Reich’s term for a type of musical transcription that attempts to replicate the distinctive rhythm, intonation, and inflection of human speech. . . . By deliberately maintaining the acoustic integrity of the sound clips, Reich respected the semantic meaning of the testimonies and amplified them by using the speech melodies to generate musical motives for the live string quartet.”3 However, Wlodarski’s remarkable, painstaking reconstruction of the source testimonies for Reich’s work uncovers heretofore hidden compositional decisions reflected in editing choices and even two significant transcription errors that affect the meaning of the work. Because these decisions are hidden from the audience’s view, the reception of the work is impacted: “The perception that Reich presents the archival evidence in a straightforward and unsentimental manner facilitates acceptance of the work as documentary rather than dramatic”; this perception is intensified by the minimalist aesthetic of works like Reich’s, which intends to display a kind of “musical objectivity” and “self-referential impulse,” often utilizing repetition to draw focus onto the “musical object at hand.”4 What is ultimately produced, in Wlodarski’s incisive interpretation, is “Reich’s own Holocaust testimony, one crafted from the voices of witnesses other than himself”; the composer’s “techniques of selection, suture, and substitution alienate the distinct accounts from the experiences of the survivors, assembling them as Reich’s own personalized remembrance. His psychological engagement with their traumatic stories is traceable in his editorial decisions, which reveal his involvement as a secondary witness.”5 In some respects, the notion of secondary witness is itself problematic, as it assumes the primacy of so-called primary accounts, often historical or testimonial, which raises the latter to a presumed level of unmediated discourse that rarely, if ever, actually occurs. But the sense of secondariness embodied in the various adoptive, vicarious, and imaginative retellings of the Holocaust still has something to teach about the belatedness of such testimony. For Wlodarski, Reich’s problem is that he “seems unaware that testimony inherently straddles the boundary between the aesthetic and the true and that his framing of primary witness creates a secondary one,”6 and we should certainly bear the risk of such ignorance in mind.

Wlodarski’s nuanced reading of Reich’s piece is instructive for my analysis in at least two ways. First, Reich’s avowed concern for authenticity in incorporating actual audio recordings into his work reflects an underlying interest, discussed in the introduction to this volume, in using authentic Holocaust objects for its representation. Even if, as Wlodarski has shown, Reich’s execution of this objective, to a certain extent, “effectively supplant[s] the survivor’s interpretation of the Holocaust with his own reading of its cultural and literary tropes,”7 the underlying interest in authenticity is not undone. Indeed, even primary witnesses are seen to make aesthetic choices in shaping their own narratives. Second, the close analysis of Reich’s work reveals the extent of his affiliative postmemory driven, in large part, by the iconic power of the Holocaust-era train; in turn, that sense of affiliation may obscure a range of decisions made in secondary witnessing contexts.

Reich therefore does an interesting thing in Different Trains, something I want to use to introduce and frame this chapter. Aside from creating the music itself and its haunting, repetitive cadences, and aside from remarkably transposing the experience of deportation to music, Reich presents the image of the Holocaust-era train as iconic. In creating the music of memory, Reich suggests that the image of the train can be a vehicle for engaging the role of the Holocaust in contemporary culture and identity. He suggests, through his method of composition, that it is the symbol itself (in this case, the train) that determines our interpretive approach to it. In Reich’s imagining, memory coalesces around the symbol, not vice versa.8

The Aura of the Artifact

The symbol, in this case, is also and essentially an artifact, and Reich’s use of it points to its iconic value and significance. What happens when we view the Holocaust-era railway car, a material remnant of World War II, as itself an icon of the Shoah?

In general, material artifacts of the Holocaust are among the most powerful signifiers of that era, because they carry and convey the material trace of authentic experience (they are indexical, in Peirce’s typology). Typically, Holocaust artifacts are of three types; the most common are remnants derived from the human experience of the period, usually exhibited in museums and memorials in multiples meant to convey the enormity of the Nazis’ crimes: eyeglasses, shoes, suitcases, prosthetic limbs; all of these point to the mass murders and wholesale destruction of the Shoah by indicating the absence of the human bearers and wearers of these objects. A less commonly encountered type of Holocaust artifact is the relic: known largely through photographs due to their often gruesome nature, these artifacts point to mass death more directly—and metonymically, as parts of a whole: piles of hair shorn from female victims, teeth, emaciated corpses piled like so much cordwood, or masses of ashes flecked with human bone fragments. Finally, many Holocaust artifacts are unique objects related more obliquely to human experiences: desecrated Torah scrolls would be included in this category, as are objects buried by victims and discovered after the war, such as diaries or family heirlooms, as well as artifacts of historical significance, such as a Danish rescue boat (on display at the USHMM) and the milk can in which were preserved portions of the “Oyneg Shabbes” archive on life in the Warsaw Ghetto compiled by Emanuel Ringelblum and his team—also on display at the USHMM. In many respects, the Holocaust-era railway car straddles the first and third of these types: on the one hand, it is an artifact directly related to victim experiences of the time, in this case representing and indeed embodying the experience of deportation, and conveys something of the gravity of that experience, repeated countless times, through the absence of its human cargo; on the other hand, the fact that there were a variety of railway cars used for deportation during the Holocaust, along with the disparate details of each instance of deportation, renders each example of a railway car in its historical context unique.

In varying degrees, all of these Holocaust artifacts also bear within themselves a sacred aura, which contributes to their symbolic weight and communicative impact and, especially, their iconic value. How do these objects, placed in certain memorial and museological contexts, symbolically convey, contain, or embody the Holocaust—in other words, communicate its meanings? Two of the central themes underlying these questions are authenticity and emplacement: how, for what reasons, and under what conditions, Holocaust-era artifacts are selected and situated, and the Holocaust engaged, in memorial and museological settings. Let me illustrate the complexity of these issues, as specifically related to a museum visitor’s encounter with a railway car on display, with an anecdote from my own experience at the USHMM, drawn from the time I was a research fellow at its Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. Back then, I had the opportunity to debrief several university groups near the conclusion of their visits to the museum. In one group, from my home university, two students asked about the railway car’s authenticity. I asked them, in turn, whether they had seen the car’s exhibition label and what they understood from it. They both replied that they were still keenly interested in knowing whether or not the railway car had actually been used for deportation purposes; I reminded them that the evidence was inconclusive and asked them why it mattered. What struck me most was their response: one said that, had she known the railway car had actually been used to deport Jews, she would not have entered it, considering it akin to sacred or even taboo space, while the other said that, had she been able to confirm its deadly authenticity, she would have made a point of entering it, specifically because of its special, sacred nature. For both visitors, the possibility of the railway car’s authenticated connection to mass murder, and the proximity or residue of death, was essential to their complete museum experience, already enhanced by the size and nature of the artifact. This, I think, points to the railway car’s iconicity.

To better understand the second type of artifact (the relic), and, in particular, to better engage the issues of authenticity raised here, let me briefly examine a key precedent in the presentation of evidence at the Nuremberg Trial. As is well known, the chief strategy of the prosecution in this long trial was based on overwhelming documentary evidence, rather than on eyewitness testimony. But several spectacular moments of the trial, as Lawrence Douglas has shown, were devoted to the deployment of particularly gruesome artifacts derived (or purportedly derived) from human remains. Two authentic items were a shrunken head and a section of flayed, tattooed human skin, presented not so much as evidence but to function, “at worst, as grotesque artifacts offered more to satisfy voyeuristic impulses than to clarify questions of legal guilt.”9 That is, Douglas suggests, these remnants functioned more as symbols than as pieces of evidence entered into the legal record. For Douglas, they serve as representations of “crimes of atavism,” indicating that the Holocaust was an eruption of savagery in the midst of an otherwise modern and bureaucratic phenomenon; “by serving as an icon of atavism, the shrunken head presented an image of atrocity familiar to liberal jurisprudence: of the law as civilization’s bulwark against barbarism.”10 In this way, the head especially signified the uniquely atavistic nature of the Nazis’ “crimes against humanity.”

As if in response to the implicit symbolism of the shrunken head, prosecutors at the Nuremberg trial presented one additional artifact meant, in Douglas’s reading, to endorse a counter-argument for the nature of Nazi savagery. This was the presentation by Soviet prosecutor L. N. Smirnov of a now infamous bar of soap, allegedly produced from human fat, as evidence that Nazi barbarism involved the height of calculated evil and the commodification of the human body. Rumors of Nazi human-soap production had circulated in Poland at least since the fall of 1942, and during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 the rendering of human fat into soap continued to serve as a cultural touchstone, but no evidence has ever been found to support the claim that the Nazis ever did convert human fat into soap.11 Nonetheless, the symbolic value of the alleged soap as evidence persists: “If the head served as a figure of atavistic practice, the soap represented a grotesque triumph of the very logic of efficient production upon which the economy of civilization is based.”12

Although less gruesome, the Holocaust-era railway car functions symbolically in a similar manner—as an icon of modern, industrialized mass murder, an artifact instrumental in the processing of human beings into commodities, whose unusable parts were tossed, literally, onto ash heaps, the byproducts of a kind of manufacturing process.13 For Douglas, this “bureaucratic model of Nazi atrocity” is represented in Raul Hilberg’s historiography, which has “found expression in artifacts of extermination that have long since become quintessential icons of the Holocaust: a discarded canister of Zyklon B, a photo of railway tracks converging at the Birkenau entrance, a pyramid of eyeglasses.”14 To this list, especially owing to the strategies of the contemporary Holocaust museum or memorial, I would add the railway car, perhaps the supreme example of a Holocaust object become Holocaust icon.

Behind these questions concerning authenticity, evidence, and emplacement (all unique to the discussion of material remnants) are ideas about sacred space and materiality, about the religious engagement with sites of memory and mourning and about the impact on that engagement of decisions concerning emplacement and displacement. These bring up a series of issues that extend beyond the bounds of this chapter but that nonetheless hover in the background: these concern the meaning of property and its propriety, the specific treatment of sacred objects, fetishization, reproducibility, monumentality, mystification, and mythologization. I formulate my response to these issues by focusing on strategies of display and deployment that include the dis- and replacement of Holocaust-era artifacts in museum and memorial...