Public memorials today are signs of hope

In Cambodia in 1988, at the killing fields of Choeng Ek, a memorial was set up to the thousands of victims of the Pol Pot regime. In Berlin, in the heart of Europe, a Jewish Museum opened in 1999 as a permanent reminder of the Holocaust. In 2004 in Buenos Aires, the ESMA building, where victims of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ were tortured and murdered, was turned into a Museum of Remembrance. As everyone knows, the true losers in military and civil conflicts are ordinary people, non-combatants — men, women and children whose lives are disrupted, maimed or simply blotted out.

Victors write their own histories and from ancient times victories have been made public on commemorative steles and reliefs. In one of the first recorded battles in history — for the city of Kadesh c. BC 1300 — Rameses II of Egypt triumphed over the Hittites. A stone relief crows over his success. Darius the Great, King of Persia c. BC 520, commissioned panels at Persepolis and Behistun to commemorate his military prowess. In Rome in AD 113 Emperor Trajan erected a column covered in 2,500 figures and constituting a detailed and uniquely informative account of his (successful) Dacian campaigns. In AD 2000 a Memorial Chapel was built at Pangbourne College (an independent school in England with strong naval traditions) to commemorate lives lost ‘to protect the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands’. Historians have remarked the dubious nature of that enterprise, including the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano outside the war zone.

Official accounts of history are needed to bolster public confidence in the State’s integrity. As George Orwell demonstrated in his prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

‘...if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”’(Orwell, 1949: 31).

Revisionist historians who lift up stones to unearth what traditional historians have chosen to ignore (Schama, 1989) or who question official accounts (Ferguson, 1998), are subject to the prejudices and hostility of earlier generations who prefer the sanitised versions. (See ‘Bloody History’ by David Herman in Prospect, June 2004).

A nation’s collective memory is also preserved in its Constitution, its language and religion, its educational curricula, its mass media, and in the currency issued by its government and used every day by its citizens. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the face of Big Brother is everywhere: on coins, stamps, book-covers, banners, posters, and cigarette packets. In order to rewrite the past, newspaper articles and history books were consigned to a ‘memory-hole’ (and, therefore, oblivion). During the 20th century the USSR and China rewrote their histories, notoriously ‘doctoring’ photos to alter circumstances that later became unacceptable. The Chinese Communist Party published How to Record the Annals of a Place, one of a series of handbooks to be used when writing local or national history. ‘Its instructions apply equally to those censoring histories, plays, novels, films and even what is published on the Internet’ (Becker, 2004: 85).

But this is not just a device used by totalitarian regimes. The temptation to delete unwanted or embarrassing collective memories is also present in democratic societies. ‘The Memory Hole’ is just one example of a web site dedicated to ‘rescuing knowledge and freeing information’, especially government files and corporate memos that expose things the public is either not supposed to know or is supposed to forget (see www.thememoryhole.org).

Traditionally public memorials reinforce the status quo. They validate sacrifice in the name of the nation. Statues of individuals honour heroism in time of war; collective memorials pay tribute to ordinary men and women who answer the call to duty. Without such memorials, without the recognition of commemoration and medals, a nation might have a hard time persuading people to risk their lives on its behalf. What, then, are we to make of the new kind of public memorial that seems to question war? Memorials that call attention to genocide and terrorism and ask ‘How did this come about?’ ‘Why was this not prevented?’ ‘How do we come to terms with what took place?’

Vienna: The Holocaust Memorial
In 1938 Adolf Hitler engineered the Anschluss (unification) that established the ‘Greater Reich’ of Germany and Austria. After the 1939-45 War the ‘Allies’ occupied the country and it only regained full sovereignty on the basis of a peace treaty signed in 1955, whose conditions included strict neutrality and the maintenance in perpetuity of a massive Soviet war memorial in Vienna. Austria has never fully come to terms with its role during the war, nor with its complicity in the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism was widespread (as it was in the earlier Austro-Hungarian empire) and the extermination camp at Mauthausen, where some 110,000 people were murdered, was opened as early as 1938.

Until recently Austria seemed reluctant to face up to its past. The Kurt Waldheim affair of 1986 and the later rise of Jorg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO) signalled the perpetuation of a mentality that refused to admit past mistakes. It came as a surprise, therefore, when in January 1996 the Austrian government commissioned British sculptor Rachel Whiteread to design a Holocaust memorial for the capital city. The result was the haunting ‘Nameless Library’, a sealed concrete room symbolising the Holocaust’s victims and their untold stories.

The monument was supposed to be unveiled on 9 November 1996, the 58th anniversary of the ‘Kristallnacht’ anti-Jewish outrages in 1938. But heated debate among Austria’s political and religious leaders split the Jewish community and delayed its completion. Construction also came to halt when work in the Judenplatz unearthed the ruins of a synagogue destroyed on 12 March 1421 (ironically the same day the Nazis entered Vienna 517 years later). Large numbers of Vienna’s 10,000-strong Jewish community felt that the ruins of the synagogue itself would make a fitting memorial. Eventually, the remains of the synagogue were preserved in its own subterranean vault beneath the square.

Finally Austria’s President Thomas Klestil unveiled ‘Nameless Library’ in October 2000. His speech referred to his country’s recent attempts to atone for the wrongs of the past and to the setting up of a fund to compensate survivors of Nazi forced labour. But he also conceded that such measures should have been taken years ago. Before the unveiling, Simon Wiesenthal, who has dedicated his life to reminding the world about Nazi crimes, said ‘This monument should not be beautiful. It must hurt.’

‘Nameless Library’ is a closed, windowless, single story building. Its outside walls are covered in rows and rows of books as if placed on the shelves backwards. One sees the edges of the book covers and the closed pages. Beneath the walls are plaques recording the names of the death camps and a dedication to the Jewish Austrian dead. At one end of the building a pair of doors are sealed shut — a metaphor of the finality of the Holocaust.

Rwanda: The Genocide Memorial
On 7 April 1994 the Rwandan people were plunged into a nightmare that shocked themselves and the rest of the world. Acting on the orders of political leaders bent on exploiting ethnicity as a way of hanging on to power, armed militias went into every part of the country and systematically massacred defenceless people, both Tutsi and Hutu opponents of the regime. Within three months, one million people had been killed. Such an imprecise statistic conceals the human tragedy of the deaths of wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, aunts and uncles.

First they killed men and boys. Then they moved on to the women. Educated Tutsis and moderate Hutu leaders in particular were targeted. Many families witnessed the murder of their loved ones, killed in cruel ways. Many were compelled to kill their own relatives. Survivors fled to the hills and swamps where they were hunted down. In the ensuing chaos many people were separated from their family and, to this day, do not know where they were killed or are buried.

The campaign of genocide also saw widespread rape used a strategy to destroy the social fabric of interpersonal relations in the community and to shatter the sense of security and identity of the victims. Among those who survived their brutal ordeal, the effects of HIV/AIDS are increasingly apparent. Many are dying of lack of medication, poverty, trauma and isolation. Many are leaving children orphaned for a second time.

Ten years on, the legacy of the genocide continues to haunt the country. At the end of the war over 130,000 people were detained on suspicion of having organised or taken part in the genocide. Trials started in late 1996, but faced with the huge number of cases to hear, the government also decided to use the ‘Gacaca’ system of community justice, where accused faces accuser and the community decides guilt and punishment.

Ten years on, the government has also approved the construction of a new memorial centre in the capital, Kigali. From a distance it looks like a terrace with a garden and a long granite wall. Close to, one sees thousands of names engraved on the wall, stained glass windows and another level that is effectively buried underground. Such a memorial depicting recent historical events is fraught with problems. As one commentator pointed out:

‘Make it too vivid and survivors who visit could be upset or even traumatised. Veil too much and you sanitise what happened. Accuse too harshly and you undermine the peaceful but fragile co-existence prevailing in Rwanda since Tutsi rebels ousted the extremist Hutu regime that orchestrated the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days. Trickiest of all is whether to mention the Tutsi reprisals during and after the genocide, since the former rebels are now the government’ (Carroll, 2004).

Beneath the polished black terrazzo lie coffins stacked five high in eight concrete graves and containing the remains of up to 50 people each. Thousands of people lie there. A black granite wall lines the terrazo displaying the names of 20,000 victims. Steps lead down from the terrazzo to engraved reliefs depicting aspects of life in Rwanda. The first zone, ‘Before Genocide’, is a dimly lit passageway with images from 1894 to 1994. The second zone, ‘Warnings’, suggests how the genocide could (not might) have been avoided if the international community had responded in time.

The third zone, ‘Genocide’, is undoubtedly the most frightening. Photos and film clips show a small part of what happened, much of which will remain unknown and unknowable for all time. A fourth zone is called ‘Responses’, focusing on the heroism of those who hid fugitives and resisted death squads, followed by ‘Aftermath’ — its name changed from ‘Reconciliation’ because survivors said that today’s peaceful co-existence should not be mistaken for forgiving and forgetting.

New York: Ground Zero
Two years after 9/11 shocked and bewildered the USA, great controversy still surrounds the construction of a memorial at Ground Zero, the former site of New York’s World Trade Centre. Technically, the celebrated architect Daniel Libeskind won a public competition for the project. He proposed a monumental Freedom Tower, 1,776 feet high (an allusion to the 1776 War of Independence); a sunken Memorial Garden, removed from street-level bustle and, therefore, conducive to contemplation’; two cultural centres; retail outlets and a railway station to rival Grand Central. A proposed Heroes’ Walk would trace fire-fighters’ paths as they raced into the Twin Towers, and a Wedge of Light — a triangular plaza whose shape would be defined by the angles of the sun between 8.46 am, the moment the first plane hit the first tower, and 10.28 am, when the second tower collapsed — would ensure that no shadow fell on the site between those times every September 11.

It will be some time before the project is completed (perhaps September 2008) at an estimated cost of US$1.5 billion. The Freedom Tower will be a hybrid of skyscraper and sky sculpture, a 70-storey office building topped by a latticework of cables and windmills punctuated by a splinter-like spike. The underground Memorial Centre is less controversial. It will occupy about 65,000 square feet, bordered by the voids marking the footprints of the fallen towers, part of a ‘Reflecting Absence’ memorial design by Michael Arad and Peter Walker. These pool-filled voids may be joined to the museum in some way. The Memorial Centre will include objects transmogrified in the crucible of 9/11: fire trucks with shredded ladders, buckled police cars and the last steel column removed from Ground Zero. There will undoubtedly be space for some of the thousands of personal items recovered from the wreckage — computer keyboards, briefcases, shoes — unintentionally echoing the long familiar piles of shoes at Auschwitz. This all raises complex questions.

The Freedom Tower itself will forever ask: Whose freedom? At what cost? It will both accuse the attackers and challenge those attacked, reminding, giving consolation to some, denying it to others. As Dominic Lutyens noted in an article in The Observer (22 June 2003): ‘It’s a hallmark of Libeskind’s work that he paradoxically juxtaposes light with darkness, transcendent hope with gritty reminders of tragedy, the acme of which is the Ground Zero scheme, with its light-filled tower and giant scar at its base.’ Physical scars can heal. The psychological scars of 9/11 are unlikely to heal unless profound and traumatic public debate takes place about what happened. Until then, Ground Zero will be a monument to bewilderment, a space where the need to come to terms with 9/11 and to commemorate its victims vie with the public theatres of guilt and remembrance.

Assaults on humanity
The memorials in Vienna, Kigali and New York are symbols of grave assaults on humanity that have seared the consciences of nations. They ask: How much should we remember? How much should we forget? How much should we forgive? How much should we continue to resent? To what extent can reconciliation take place? And perhaps the deepest question of all: What are the real conditions for peaceful coexistence on our fragile planet?

What links these and other public memorials, despite the profound controversy they have generated, is that they remind people of colossal errors of political and moral judgement. The Austrian people are reminded of their long history of anti-Semitism and their support for Nazism. The Rwandan people are reminded of their nation’s descent into barbarism and the need to pursue the long and painful process of reconciliation. The people of the USA are reminded of the terrible and fanatical consequences of political and economic policies that subjugate and impoverish.

At the same time, there are other questions. When do the victims of such tragedies become important enough to merit public memorials? Will memorials prevent further tragedies from taking place? (Judging by the history of ‘Never again!’ the answer must be no.) Do memorials contribute to motivations for revenge? Given the many fault lines that divide nations and civilisations today (religion, ethnicity, language, class, poverty, education, standards of living, etc.), do societies have the necessary conviction or moral maturity to keep alive the lessons of history through formal education, the mass media, etc.? If not, what is the value of remembering? What is the point of setting up monuments to the victims?

The memorials in Vienna, Kigali and New York are places of immeasurable sadness, but equally of immense hope. They remind us of the need to remember, but also of the need to move on. Their existence symbolises a national expiation that constantly asks ‘How do we prevent this from happening again?’

References

1. Becker, Jasper (2004). ‘The Big Lie’ in Index on Censorship, 2/04.
2. Carroll, Rory (2004). ‘In memory of murder’. The Guardian, 24 March.
3. Ferguson, Niall (1998). The Pity of War. London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press.
4. Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg. This reference is to London: Penguin, 1969.
5. Schama, Simon (1989). Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Philip Lee studied modern languages at the University of Warwick, Coventry, and conducting and piano at the Royal Academy of Music, London. He joined the staff of the World Association for Christian Communication in 1975, where he works on the Global Studies Programme and is co-editor of the international journal Media Development. Recent publications include Requiem: Here’s Another Fine Mass You’ve Gotten Me Into (2001); and Many Voices, One Vision: The Right to Communicate in Practice (ed.) (2004).