Linenthal's Preserving Memory

It’s not easy to make a lieux de memoire. While Linenthal does not use Nora’s precise language, his account of the creation of the Holocaust Museum illustrates the perils and complexities of memory and memory-making.

Linenthal presents an ethnographic, almost journalistic, description of the museum’s origins. While the focus falls on history, not theory, Linenthal’s account does rely on a metaphor of “boundary.” From the beginning, he writes, the making of the Holocaust Museum was a politically negotiated exercise in drawing boundaries: around the definition of the Holocaust as an event; around the victim groups that had a right to shape the museum; around the museum’s physical form; and, critically, around the story, exhibits and artifacts ultimately offered to the public as definitive.

The highly charged nature of the topic made the process extraordinarily complicated. Jewish leaders regarded Holocaust memory as sacred (though terrible), and they insisted on its essentially Jewish character. Nonetheless, the demands of other victim groups and the norms of American pluralism - felt especially strongly because of the museum's location near the National Mall - forced compromises.

The story suggests a number of theoretical questions and practical points. On the most practical level, Linenthal’s account implies that any study of a memorial must look below the surface and into the dynamics behind its implicit “boundaries.” For the Holocaust Museum, this involved not just competing interest groups, but also the expectations of visitors and engagement with the particularly American memory enshrined on the National Mall.

On the level of theory, it offers a point of entry into Nora. Certainly, Elie Wiesel’s reservations about representing the un-representable suggest that he might agree that a lieux de memoire about the Holocaust can never contain its memory. Yet the contentious nature of the negotiations may also reveal problems with the very idea of memory. Could “memory,” in Nora’s sense, ever function in a pluralist environment? Different groups have different sacred memories, and they may be at odds. Democracy values compromise – but can groups compromise on sacred memory without desecrating it? Also, should memory trump historical truth and nuance? The Holocaust Museum presented the American failure to bomb Auschwitz as a clear moral failure, whereas scholarship on the issue is much more nuanced. Was that appropriate?