1. Dr. Ruth Kluger on Memorialization
“The camps are part of a worldwide museum culture of the Shoah, nowhere more evident than in Germany, where every citizen, not to mention every politician who wants to display his ethical credentials, feels the need to take pictures at these shrines or, even better, have his picture taken” (63).

2. “Do we expect that our unsolved questions will be answered if we hang on to what’s left: the place, the stones, the ashes? We don’t honor the dead with these unattractive remnants of past crimes; we collect and keep them for the satisfaction of our own necrophilic desires” (64).
“Perhaps we are afraid they [the ghosts] may leave the camps, and so we insist that their deaths were unique and must not be compared to any other losses or atrocities. Never again shall there be such a crime” (64).
“In our hearts we all know that some aspects of the Shoah have been repeated elsewhere, today and yesterday, and will return in new guise tomorrow; and the camps, too, were only imitations […] of what had occurred the day before yesterday” (64).

3. “The museum culture of the campsites has been formed by the vagaries and neuroses of our unsorted, collective memory. It is based on a profound superstition, that is, on the belief that the ghosts can be met and kept in their place, where the living ceased to breathe…” (66)
“Or rather, not a profound, but a shallow superstition. A visitor who feels moved, even if it is only the kind of feeling that a haunted house conveys, will be proud of these stirrings of humanity. And so the visitor monitors his reactions […] admires his own sensibility, or in other words, turns sentimental. For sentimentality […] means looking into a mirror instead of reality” (66).

4. Questions to consider while looking
Aesthetics - why are certain materials, shapes and colors chosen? What do the varying degrees of realism and abstraction and symbolism do or represent?
Affect - How do the space and its objects make you feel?
Staging - How does the space work in relationship to the human body and the spectator?
Do you agree with Kluger? If yes/no (or both), why?

5. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas
Designed by architect Peter Eisenman and Engineer Burro Happold
4.7 acre site with 2,711 concrete slabs
Finished in 2004; cost approximately 25 million euro
Monument has been criticized for commemorating only the Jews
Novelist Martin Walser has cited the monument as part of his broader critique of Germany’s “Holocaust Industry.”

9. Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation
Architect: G.H. Pingusson
1962
Memorializes 200,000 people (Jews, communisits, homosexuals and résistants) deported from France to German Concentration Camps

14. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Museum Building designed by James Ingo Freed (a survivor)
Dedicated in 1993
Nearly 30 million people have visited the museum

15. Replica of a Holocaust train boxcar

16. Three story tower lined with photographs of pre-holocaust daily life in the small Lithuanian village of Eisiskies. Population of about 3,500 Jews. The people of the village, together with around 1,000 Jews from the surrounding area were rounded up and shot in 1941 by German SS and Lithuanian helpers.

17. Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem
Name from Biblical Verse: "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (Yad Vashem) that shall not be cut off." (Isaiah, chapter 56, verse 5)
Established 1953
45 acre complex containing various memorials
One of Yad Vashem's tasks is to honor non-Jews who risked their lives, liberty or positions to save Jews during the Holocaust.

18. Korczak and the Ghetto’s Children

19. “Torah,” cast bronze sculpture by Marcelle Elfenbein Swergold

21. Holocaust Memorial - Miami, Florida
Memorial opened in 1990
Designed by Kenneth Triester
Controversy: Daniel Pearl’s name added to the monument in 2007

24. Budapest Memorials: “Tree of Life” “Whose Agony is greater than mine”

25. “Shoes on the Danube Bank,” 2005 Gyula Pauer and Can Togay

27. George Segal’s memorial (1984) in Lincoln Park, SF

29. “[…] art and literature can be a home for those without citizenship, because they remind us of our common race, the human race, and the sop you up, yet simultaneously feed you, like a magic sponge. They make you part of what you see and hear and yet let you stand back and choose” (198).
“The various Shoah museums and reconstituted concentration camp sites do the exact opposite. That’s why I find them hard to take: They don’t take you in, they spit you out. Moreover, they tell you what you ought to think, as no art or science museum ever does. They impede the critical faculty” (198).